Page 1005 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 28 March 1990
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
Joint Select Committee on Video Material. Of course, you could ask the question: what does film and video classification have to do with television violence? Professor Peter Sheehan, of the University of Queensland, took this up with the committee and made some valuable observations on that matter. He said:
I think the warning is that as the gap closes between how aggressive our society is and how much aggression the child sees, I think we have the risk of a long-term effect.
So Professor Sheehan obviously saw that as Australian society becomes more violent, children will increasingly begin to view screened violence as a reflection of their own real life situation. I think that is a very dangerous trend. In other words, we should be concerned about the realistic and believable nature of the violence being portrayed in films and videos. In particular, we must consider the possibility that this violence may be increasingly viewed as a depiction of the real world, something that viewers can identify with or can draw upon in their own behaviour.
The Joint Select Committee on Video Material did not only look at the evidence of academics, but also drew on some first-hand evidence from people who deal every day with children. For example, they took evidence from some teachers who had supplied their views on the effect of violence on young children. In particular, Ms Sonia Ryan, who taught on Tasmania's west coast for six years, noticed a phenomenon amongst boys in her grade 5 class where, in her observation, some boys after watching R-rated videos became obsessed with violence and began to treat the girls as objects.
Similarly, Ms Ryan observed that some children exposed to video violence had difficulty in separating their dreams from the videos they watched which caused great anxiety and confusion. She also believed that violent videos directly influenced the behaviour patterns of the children who watched them in her class. We have the evidence from people like Ms Ryan and from other teachers quoted in that report that there is an observable effect, particularly on children, of violence in videos. The censor himself, of course, thinks that violence is becoming more popular and, indeed, more frequent. He has given it as his personal impression that violence has become a more popular commodity in films and videos, and that the technology and quality has improved in horror and war films and that they are much more impressive now.
This Joint Select Committee report was finished in 1988, some couple of years ago now, and I think there has been an observable trend of increasing violence, increasing sophistication and increasing believability in videos and films. Therefore, whatever is quoted in those reports I think could be even more so now. The results of a public
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .