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"Trained
to Kill"
Role
Models
In
the military, you are immediately confronted with a role
model: your drill sergeant. He personifies violence and
aggression. Along with military heroes, these violent role
models have always been used to influence young, impressionable
minds.
Today the media are providing our children with role models.
This can be seen not just in the lawless sociopaths in movies
and TV shows but in the media-inspired, copycat aspects
of the Jonesboro murders. This is the part of these juvenile
crimes that the TV networks would much rather not talk about.
Research in the 1970s demonstrated the existence of "cluster
suicides" in which the local TV reporting of teen suicides
directly caused numerous copycat suicides of impressionable
teenagers. Somewhere in every population there are potentially
suicidal kids who will say to themselves, "Well, I'll show
all those people who have been mean to me. I know how to
get my picture on TV, too." Because of this research, television
stations today generally do not cover suicides. But when
the pictures of teenage killers appear on TV, the effect
is the same: Somewhere there is a potentially violent little
boy who says to himself, "Well, I'll show all those people
who have been mean to me. I know how to get my picture on
TV too."
Thus
we get copycat, cluster murders that work their way across
America like a virus spread by the six o'clock news. No
matter what someone has done, if you put his picture on
TV, you have made him a celebrity, and someone, somewhere,
will emulate him.
The lineage of the Jonesboro shootings began at Pearl, Mississippi,
fewer than six months before. In Pearl, a 16-year-old boy
was accused of killing his mother and then going to his
school and shooting nine students, two of whom died, including
his ex-girlfriend. Two months later, this virus spread to
Paducah, Kentucky, where a 14-year-old boy was arrested
for killing three students and wounding five others.
A very important step in the spread of this copycat crime
virus occurred in Stamps, Arkansas, 15 days after Pearl
and just a little over 90 days before Jonesboro. In Stamps,
a 14-year-old boy, who was angry at his schoolmates, hid
in the woods and fired at children as they came out of school.
Sound familiar? Only two children were injured in this crime,
so most of the world didn't hear about it; but it got great
regional coverage on TV, and two little boys in Jonesboro,
Arkansas, probably did hear about it.
And
then there was Springfield, Oregon, and so many others.
Is this a reasonable price to pay for the TV networks' "right"
to turn juvenile defendants into celebrities and role models
by playing up their pictures on TV?
Our society needs to be informed about these crimes, but
when the images of the young killers are broadcast on television,
they become role models. The average preschooler in America
watches 27 hours of television a week. The average child
gets more one-on-one communication from TV than from all
her parents and teachers combined. The ultimate achievement
for our children is to get their picture on TV. The solution
is simple, and it comes straight out of the suicidology
literature: The media have every right and responsibility
to tell the story, but they have no right to glorify the
killers by presenting their images on TV.
Reality
Check: Sixty percent of men on TV are involved in violence;
11 percent are killers. Unlike actual rates, in the media
the majority of homicide victims are women (Gerbner 1994).
In a Canadian town in which TV was first introduced in 1973,
a 160 percent increase in aggression, hitting, shoving,
and biting was documented in first and second-grade students
after exposure, with no change in behavior in children in
two control communities (Centerwall 1992). Fifteen years
after the introduction of TV, homicides, rapes, and assaults
doubled in the United States (American Medical Association).
Twenty percent of suburban high schoolers endorse shooting
someone "who has stolen something from you" (Toch and Silver
1993). In the United States, approximately two million teenagers
carry knives, guns, clubs, or razors. As many as 135,000
take them to school (America by the Numbers). Americans
spend over $100 million on toy guns every year (What Counts:
The Complete Harper's Index © 1991).
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Read
a different article:
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Encyclopedia
of Violence, Peace, and Conflict, Volume 3, p.159
© 1999 by Academic Press. All rights of reproduction
in any form reserved.
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