Free Savage Spawn by Jonathan Kellerman Page A

tendencies toward violence. But failure to limit TV is way at the bottom of the list of parental inadequacies experienced by high-risk kids.
    We are certainly unlikely to put in place the large-scale solution that might partially handle the problem—widespread censorship foisted upon 99.9 percent of the population in order to shield a tiny minority—because that type of group punishment is antagonistic to our democratic norms, not to mention unconstitutional. And I emphasize
partially
, because any kind of blanket prohibition of violent films and shows will inevitably result in a black market of forbidden images, with those we are trying to shield most likely to get their hands on illegal goods.
    A thorough and well-thought-out review of media violence and children summed it up wisely: “Aggression as a problem solving behavior is learned early in life, is usually learned well, and is resistant to change. Individual variation in the level of aggressive behavior and violence in children, adolescents and adults depends on many interacting factors of which media influences are likely to be less important than constitutional, parental, educational and other environmental influences. Contributing factors include being the victims of violence and bullying and witnessing violence perpetrated against others, especially at home. The emphasis on establishing whether television violence and actual violence are related has resulted in the neglect of these other, more important influences on the development of aggressive behaviors” (45).
    Nevertheless, railing against the media is likely to continue as the knee-jerk response to child criminality because it is the type of facile, glib “explanation” that is perfectly in sync with today’s short-attention-span journalism, and because it offends no constituency other than a small group of network executives and moguls. Using the media as a whipping boy is also extremely attractive to that most superficial and insincere group of “experts”—politicians—because it lends itself to sound bites and generates funding for the scores of do-nothing legislative commissions that pass for problem-solving units in a bureaucracy.
    Though essentially a dead-end topic, media violence is likely to endure as a fruitful source of research grants for social scientists, producing much more heat than light about the causes and fixes of criminal violence.

VIII
    The Biology of Being Bad
    During our discussion of environmental factors, biology has crept in often, because, as noted, the distinction between nature and nurture is artificial. Nevertheless, a number of studies do exist that have attempted to isolate organic variables, and they deserve attention.
    Biological explanations for psychopathic (and all types of deviant) behavior are frightening, because biological determinism seems to fly in the face of concepts such as free will and social rehabilitation, and it raises the terrifying specter of the immutable “bad seed.”
    More important, serious abuses of biological determinism have been frequent and nightmarish, leading to such repellent outrages as eugenics—the pseudoscience of “cleansing” the human race through selective breeding, developed by the brilliant but misguided (and sterile) nineteenth-century British mathematician Francis Galton—and its philosophical offspring: forced sterilization, euthanasia, and genocide. Genetic dominance of intelligence and other traits has long been a pet cause of xenophobes and racists. The Nazi Holocaust had its roots in eugenics theory.
    Another risk when evaluating biological research is the intellectual seductiveness of apparently hard science. It is easy to overvalue studies crammed with chemical compounds, graphs, and equations because they appear to offer authoritative, relatively clear-cut answers to complex questions, especially when compared to the fuzzy conundrums produced by social