Free Savage Spawn by Jonathan Kellerman

have four children, three of whom are old enough to have viewed many popular violent movies, including numerous horror films. My eldest daughter, in particular, displayed an early attraction to motion pictures full of images I found disgusting and shocking. My wife and I were reluctant to let her watch these bloody flicks, but my daughter insisted they wouldn’t harm her. Since she’d always been a delightful girl, we relented . . . and watched for problems. None followed. My eldest daughter passed through the splatter-flick phase and moved on to new fare. Never did she exhibit a trace of violence or antisocial behavior as a consequence of what she saw. Never did I observe
any
side effect of viewing, and this shrink dad was
looking
for symptoms. Years later, my eldest daughter remains an honor student and one of the sweetest, least violent people I’ve ever met.
    My son and my second daughter never developed any idiosyncratic interest in violent films, but simply by being teenagers in contemporary America, they too were exposed to violence and gore at a level much more explicit than what I grew up with.
    I recall viewing the classic Hitchcock film
Psycho
in my late teens and leaving the theater absolutely petrified. At its initial release,
Psycho
was considered a revolutionary film primarily because it ratcheted screen violence up several notches. Adults were terrified by the images Hitchcock purveyed, especially the famous shower stabbing scene. Some viewers were even reported to have experienced heart attacks.
    When my three oldest watched
Psycho
—as
early
adolescents—the film barely raised their eyebrows, so mild did they find it compared to
Nightmare on Elm Street
,
Friday the 13th
,
Halloween
, and others.
    Personal anecdotes are not scientific. But the absolute lack of effect upon my progeny of violent media images remains in stark contrast to all the warnings promulgated by would-be media-blamers. Yes, desensitization definitely occurred in my kids—lowering their anxiety about screen violence but not real-life violence—and I suspect the same is true of tens of millions of other kids, because while nearly all American children watch violent movies and TV, only a very minute percentage becomes criminal.
    This is not to say media violence is harmless. To the extent that gory junk attracts high-risk youngsters, it’s anything but. Is it possible that an already psychopathic boy with a head full of violent impulses that have festered since early childhood, sitting around the house sucking on a joint or sniffing glue while he watches
Scream
, can be spurred to imitate what he sees on the screen? Absolutely.
    The same is true of printed violence—serial killers often collect violent pornography and true-crime magazines in order to heighten sexual arousal. But for these psychopaths, print images are used to stimulate associations between sexuality and violence that are already well developed. The overwhelming majority of people who read pornography and true-crime magazines are not serial killers, nor do they become serial killers because of what they encounter between the covers of
Shocking Detective
.
    Given no bloody books, no Freddy Krueger on video, no thrash metal or gangsta rap, would Billy Rotten of bullying, cat-mutilating proclivities have picked up a knife and stabbed his mother anyway? No way to know for sure, but I’d bet yes. And the likelihood of Billy’s engaging in serious violence somewhere along the line would remain extremely high no matter what he read or viewed, because the variables that strongly influence violent behavior are likely to be a lot more personal than those elicited by wielding the remote control.
    Even granting that media violence affects some kids negatively, what can be done to fix the problem?
    The best solution is obviously to have parents exercise good judgment and restrict access to nasty material in the case of a child who shows