Root Causes of Juvenile Violence, Part 4: Toxic Society

Root Causes of Juvenile Violence, Part 4: Toxic Society
By John C. Thomas

Toxic Society

By the time the average child leaves elementary school, he or she has witnessed 8,000 murders and 100,000 other acts of violence on the television screen.¹⁷The average viewer witnesses 150 acts of violence, and about 15 murders every week.¹⁸

The second characteristic shared among violent juveniles that Garbarino finds is what he calls a "socially toxic environment."¹⁹ Much like living in a city that has high pollution levels damages one's physical health, living in a socially toxic environment damages one's psychological health. Garbarino says what makes the youth culture toxic is the increasing exposure that children have to vivid and explicit scenarios of death and destruction. He attributes the spread of violence to small towns and rural areas, at least in part, to the explicit and vivid imagery of scenes of horror on television, the movie screen and video games as well as the violent lyrics of certain popular music groups.

This socially toxic environment has been referred to by many as a "culture of death," a theme that permeates every facet of youth culture. A Washington Post article stated:

In what used to be the dark corners of our culture, there is prime-time cartoon with a neo-Nazi character, comics that traffic in bestiality, movies that leave teenagers gutted like game, fashion designers who peddle black leather masks and doomsday visions. It's all in the open now, mass-produced, widely available. Even celebrated. On countless PCs, killing is a sport. And there's Marilyn Manson, a popular singer who named himself after a mass murderer and proclaims he is the anti-Christ. Film, television, music, dress, technology, games: They've become one giant playground filled with accessible evil, darker than ever before.²⁰

Gene Edward Veith, Professor of Humanities and Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Concordia University, describes today's youth culture as "anti-culture," pointing out that the prime task of every society is socializing its children.²¹ He says the young members of society have to be taught its beliefs, customs and values so that they can take their place in that society as adults. While this is the primary task of the family, Veith says the larger society also has an interest in its children turning out right. The problem, according to Veith, is that the values being taught by the larger society to today's youth work against that socializing process:

"Today's mass-marketed youth culture is more of an anti-culture. It appeals to the anti-social, destructive, and self-destructive impulses that are bound up in the heart of a child. Today's popular music manufactured for the youth market generally scorns authority, lauds illicit sex, and lifts up pleasure as the only good. In many cases now, it goes even further, wallowing in overt evil. Our society seems blithely unaware that, in its refusal to enculturate children in a positive way, it is committing cultural suicide."²²

In his book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman argues that popular culture is literally training young people to kill in very much the same way that the military trains soldiers to kill.²³ Because most humans have an innate aversion to killing another human being, Grossman says that the military must desensitize soldiers to killing and help them "overcome" that built-in aversion.

According to Grossman, the training has worked very well. Before the military understood this principle, firing rates (the number of times a trigger was pulled per number of soldiers) in wars were as low as 15 to 20 percent (WWII). Once the military began to psychologically train soldiers and desensitize them to killing, the firing rate increased to 95 percent (Vietnam).

By exposing soldiers to constant images of violence and brutalization, young recruits soon "accept destruction, violence, and death as a way of life."²⁴ In the same way, today's youth are exposed to these same images, slowly desensitizing them to the horror. Eventually, the images become less shocking and more acceptable. Those exposed to the images become increasingly comfortable with them, so that the "built-in" aversion to them is broken down. That is step number one.

The second military method (rarely used in U.S. military training, but utilized by other countries) is what Grossman refers to as classical conditioning. Recruits are trained to associate killing with positive notions rather than negative. Through various techniques, acts of violence are associated with pleasure. Grossman says that there are a number of clear-cut examples of this being done by the media in our culture.

Our children watch vivid pictures of human suffering and death, and they learn to associate it with their favorite soft drink and candy bar, or their girlfriend's perfume … [laughing] happens all the time in movie theaters when there is bloody violence. The young people laugh and cheer and keep right on eating popcorn and drinking pop. We have raised a generation of barbarians who have learned to associate violence with pleasure, like the Romans cheering and snacking as the Christians were slaughtered in the Colosseum.²⁵

According to those students who survived the Columbine shooting, the killers were laughing and acting as if they were taking great pleasure in murdering innocent lives. The more we find out about the Columbine killers, the more we are learning about their immersion in violent movies, music and video games.²⁶ Their killing spree chillingly resembles the images they exposed themselves to on a regular basis, such as scenes from Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, the film Basketball Diaries and the video games "Doom" and "Duke Nukem."

The final phase of training to kill, according to Grossman, is operant conditioning. This is a very powerful procedure of stimulus-response, stimulus-response. This process assures that when soldiers are in a situation where their thinking is impaired, they will always react "out of habit," so to speak. Because of constant stimulus-response training, their actions can be done without thinking. The military (and law enforcement) use conditioned response training in order to make killing a conditioned response.

Whereas infantry training in World War II used bull's eye targets, now soldiers learn to fire at realistic, man-shaped silhouettes that pop into their field of view. That is the stimulus. The trainees have only a split second to engage the target. The conditioned response is to shoot the target, then it drops … later, when the soldiers are on the battlefield or a police officer is walking a beat and somebody pops up with a gun, they will shoot reflexively and shoot to kill. We know that 75 to 80 percent of the shooting on the modern battlefield is the result of this kind of stimulus-response training.²⁷

Grossman says that every time a child plays a point-and-shoot video game, he is learning the exact same conditioned reflex and motor skills. Point and shoot games that use humans as targets are wildly popular with young people. According to Mike Davila, editorial director of GameWeek magazine, "[the games] are incredibly violent, and they're the most popular games on PC right now … The object is to kill people - you see chunks of the body flying in different directions."²⁸

The training conducted by the military and law enforcement takes place within a controlled environment and in a context of strict moral discipline. Grossman's concern is that what kids are getting from the culture has no such context. The fact that the violence is so strongly associated with pleasure creates an extremely dangerous environment, a socially toxic one.

Hundreds of studies confirm Grossman's argument. There is more than ample evidence that links violence in the media to violent crime.²⁹ So much so that the American Psychological Association Commission on Violence and Youth has stated:

There is absolutely no doubt that higher levels of viewing violence on television are correlated with increased acceptance of aggressive attitudes and increased aggressive behavior. Three major national studies - the Surgeon General's Commission report (1972), the National Institute of Mental Health Ten Year Follow-up (1982), and the report of the American Psychological Association's Committee on Media and Society (1992) - reviewed hundreds of studies to arrive at the irrefutable conclusion that viewing violence increases violence.³⁰

Violence is glamorized in music, television, film, literature and video games. Virtually everywhere a young person turns, he encounters a culture that embraces violence.³¹ This toxic culture serves to desensitize kids to the brutality of violent behavior. The same principles used by the military to increase the firing rate in war from 15 percent to 95 percent are pervasive throughout youth culture. As the toxic environment, or so-called "war zone" of the "inner city" moves into every segment of society via the media, there should be no surprise that the juvenile violence that once seemed predominantly an inner city problem, has made its way to rural America.

Juvenile Violence

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: Spiritual Emptiness

Part 3: Family Instability

Part 4: Toxic Society

Endnotes

¹⁷A. Huston, Big World, Small Screen: The Role of Television in American Society, (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press), 1992.

¹⁸George Gerbner, "Television Violence: The Art of Asking the Wrong Question," The World and I, July, pp. 385-397.

¹⁹Garbarino, p. 100.

²⁰Kevin Merida and Richard Leiby, "When Death Imitates Art," Washington Post, April 22, 1999, p. C01.

²¹Gene Edward Veith, "The Youth Anti-Culture," World, May 8, 1999.

²²Ibid.

²³Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, (New York: Little, Brown and Company), 1995.

²⁴Grossman, "Trained to Kill," Christianity Today, 42(9), August 10, 1998, p. 31.

²⁵Ibid.

²⁶Imse, "Killers Double Life Fooled Many."

²⁷Grossman, "Trained to Kill."

²⁸Merida and Leiby.

²⁹See Ronald Reno, "Before Our Very Eyes: What TV Sex and Violence Are Doing To Us," A Matter of Facts Report, Focus on the Family, 1995.

³⁰American Psychological Association report: "Violence and Youth: Psychology's Response (Volume I: Summary Report of the American Psychological Association Commission on Violence and Youth.), 1993.

³¹See Bob Waliszewski, "Bringing Out the Worst In Us: The Frightening Truth About Violence, the Media and Our Youth," Focus on the Family, 1995.

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