The Hindu : Violence, a major draw for children

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Mar 31, 2002

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Violence, a major draw for children

By Anita Joshua

NEW DELHI MARCH 30. That the `televised' terrorist strikes of September 11 pushed up viewership for news programmes is no secret.

But, what has set alarm bells ringing among media monitors is the seemingly insatiable appetite that children have developed for violence and suspense following the reel-like collapse of the World Trade Centre and the equally televised "war against terror".

Though there has always been an overdose of violence on Indian television — particularly with blood and gore being a staple diet of almost every movie coming out of Bollywood — the fascination for violence among children has grown manifold over the past year; thereby allowing horror shows, thrillers and reality shows to stage a comeback.

According to a recent study conducted by the Centre For Advocacy and Research (CFAR) with the support of UNESCO and UNICEF in Delhi, Lucknow, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad, there has been a resurgence of horror and suspense television serials towards the end of 2001.

Conducted over the past year, the study is aimed at providing civil society with relevant evidence to formulate a response, given the television industry's refusal to accept the problem of media violence.

While horror and suspense serials have got a fresh lease of life post-September 11, the top-of-the-chart family dramas — as per the CFAR study — have never been free of violence; the only difference being that it is woven into situations in the soaps and is not the `in-your-face' kind of violence that is gaining in currency these days.

So all-pervasive has violence become that the study found compulsive viewing common among children.

While the violence on reel was causing some children to have nightmares, the CFAR study found many of them doing their own reality checks through forensic shows on Discovery and newspaper stories on similar crimes to verify the story-line.

No doubt, this kind of response to violence is well-informed and conversant with forensic matters, the world of crime and law enforcement, but the study revealed that children were losing their childhood in the process of "living and thinking beyond their years".

Stating that the media was duplicating reality in a manner that makes it difficult for the child to differentiate the real from the reel, the study shows how the detailed and extensive depiction of family conflicts, fictional crimes and horror had given rise to a "deep, personal and active involvement with the TV serials they watch in a way that was not true earlier".

In fact, it is the intrigue and suspense that is available in considerable measure in family dramas — primarily meant for adults — that have made them particularly popular with children.

"In terms of drama, there is the sudden discovery that the family is an equally volatile site with the dramatic elements of intrigue, suspense and planning."

With violence becoming such a major part of both reel and real life, the fear today is not just of children becoming violent and resorting to it for conflict resolution, but of them becoming passive to violence and seeing it as a pervasive feature of social interaction.

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