Heads in sand over television violence

By Geoff Bridgman

Television violence is no longer news. Even with the American high school massacres, and President Clinton's concern about the impact of media violence, there has been hardly a ripple about the issue in New Zealand.

Yet we should be concerned. Most of the television we watch comes from the United States. Most of those programmes rated on free-to-air American TV as presenting violence in an excessive, gratuitous or glamorising way are shown in New Zealand. While we have not had any school massacres, we are world leaders in some key areas relating to violence: youth suicide, bullying in schools, and levels of imprisonment.

Television executives will argue that we are okay, because the last Media Watch survey, done in 1995, showed that we had the lowest level of TV violence in more than 13 years of surveys. There have been no surveys since because the Broadcasting Standards Authority has failed to support further work in this area.

The overwhelming consensus of researchers is that television violence does have a significant impact on the behaviour of children, particularly boys, and that the effects of watching are long term. Analysis of the data by American organisations involved in the health and welfare of children has led many of them to condemn television violence. These include the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the American Paediatric Association, the National Parent Teacher Association and the National Institute of Mental Health.

Evidence of how tolerant New Zealand has become towards violence in the past decade is in the lack of public outcry about the staged wrestling programmes WWF Wrestling and WCW Nitro. In the late 80s WWF was taken off our screens because of a public outcry against it.

One Friday last month, TV4 had three hours (8.30 pm to 11.30 pm) of WWF Wrestling in which wrestlers hit each other with chairs and ladders and much of the "fighting" went on outside the ring and included people having their heads slammed into walls. Wrestlers who did not want to fight were cornered and beaten up; wrestlers the ground were kicked and stomped on the body and the face; at least two referees were knocked "unconscious" and lay in the ring for several minutes without anybody trying to help them.

A wrestler was knocked out by having a rag full of ether shoved in his face; kicks and blows to the crotch are seen as fair and fun; sexy women gloat over the dirty fighting, sometimes join in themselves and sometimes get intentionally hit; and all the commentary encourages us to believe in and enjoy the violence.

WCW Nitro, which runs late on Saturday on TV2 for an hour, is similar and from time uses a three-hour "superbrawl" format. These programmes are rated AO but, in the case of WWF Wrestling, are shown at a time when all but the youngest children could be watching. Israeli research has shown that children imitate WWF Wrestling with violent consequences that rise above the levels of "normal" school violence.

Recently, the Broadcasting Standards Authority while upholding a complaint that a WCW Nitro programme breached the standards of good taste and demeaned women, denied that the standards on violence had been transgressed.

That is to say that it did not see evidence of: violence "designed for gratuitous use to achieve heightened impact or shock value," violence having "combinations of violence and sexuality designed to titillate," the portrayal of anti-social behaviour "in a way that glamorises the activities" or any cumulative effect of violent incidents that "give the impression of excessive violence."

As long as a programme, in the words of the authority, is about "choreographed thuggery," levels, acts and consequences of violence that would be unacceptable in drama are tolerated.

With the increasing choice of channels, we no longer care about violence that does not directly affect us. We just turn it off. This is supposed to be the measure of our sophistication. The fact that choice means that some children and adolescents will choose to watch wall-to-wall violence does not worry us. Yet as late as 1997 a BSA survey showed that 90 per cent of New Zealanders believed that R18 material had a bad effect on children, and 77 per cent say that it causes violence. In the United States on cable and satellite pay TV there were 165 different horror movies screening last month, most several times. All the major American studies show that pay TV is much more violent than free-to-air TV.

The people who worry least are men (10 per cent of New Zealand men say that watching violence has a bad effect on them, compared to 30 per cent of women). Yet TV violence is most damaging to boys - two studies, one in the US and one in Finland, have confirmed that the level of violence watched by pre-teen boys is one of the best predictors of criminal behaviour as adults.

In the US much of the quality research into TV violence is funded by the networks, some of which have also been leading advocates for improved programme-rating systems, better parent education and the development of V-chips that will prevent the screening of violent programmes.

New Zealand channels seem stuck in denial.

* Dr Geoff Bridgman is director of mental health research and development and senior lecturer in community studies at Auckland's Unitec.