What’s so Entertaining about Violence?

Posted November 18th, 2009 by Amy Cross

Last night I saw a movie that started out with the rape and murder of a woman and her child. I wish I had been warned—why can’t there be a RAPE-FREE or RF rating on movies, along with PG14, R and X?

Earlier this month, the Parents Television Council released a report saying that depictions of violence against women increased 120% in the past five years. I don’t find that hard to believe.

Whenever I flip on the TV, it seems like some woman is either screaming or lying in a pool of blood as sleuthy types try to discover what happened exactly. I can tell you what happened. It’s the same old, same old: rape, maybe torture, and most often murder.

Mind you, the report stated that just 5% of TV violence was directed toward women—where in the real world it’s much closer to parity according to Justice Department statistics. (In 2008, there were 21.3 violent acts toward men per 1,000 people, vs. 17.3 for women). Actually, this is one area I don’t care about parity. Except I would like to see an equal number of male rape scenes—if men were subjected to watching sexual violence of their gender more often, the writers/directors/producers might not use it so often. The only one I can recall was in Pulp Fiction.

What’s upsetting to me as a mother, is that according to The Parents’ Television Council study, acts of violence toward teen girls increased 400% over the study’s five year period. Our culture always prefers younger women—even if they’re going to be killed. Prettier prey, if you will. I don’t like my age group being the victim in these dramas, and I certainly don’t want my daughter’s peers to be starring as the comely corpses. Maybe before she gets to the age of watching TV dramas, I’ll cut the cord to the TV as my father did to my siblings’ and my astonishment.

Apparently, there’s also been an increase of 81% in depiction of domestic violence on TV. Now some people say that helps highlight the awareness of the problem, which is very real. Yet I wonder, doesn’t it make it kind of normative?

Whether entertainment violence breeds actual violence, is a controversy, I can’t solve. I just I wonder about a culture that wants to tell such stories and watch them to relax and unwind. Certainly, the great dramas of culture also include violence and I know bloody shows have been around as long as the gladiators, but what’s different about cultural violence now is that it happens all day long what with SVU, CSI here and CSI there, Law & Order endless reruns, etc. According to Watching America written back in 1991, TV people have been murdered at a rate 1,000 times higher than real world people since the mid-50s. Other studies claim kids see thousands of murders before they’re 18.

My kids just watch Discovery Channel, thank goodness, where animals just kill other animals sometimes for food—not so they can figure out who did it.