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The rationale and methodology of this monitoring project are based on the belief that not all violence is created equal. While parents, critics and others complain about the problem of violence on television, it is not the mere presence of violence that is the problem. If violence alone was taken to be the problem and V-Chips or other methods did away with violent scenes or programs, viewers might never see a historical drama like Roots or such outstanding theatrical films as Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Forrest Gump and Schindler's List. In many instances, the use of violence may be critical to a story that actually sends an anti-violence message. Some important stories, such as Shakespeare's Hamlet, a history of World War II or a biography of Abraham Lincoln, would be impossible to convey accurately without the use of violence.
For centuries, violence has been an important element of storytelling and violent themes have been found in the Bible, The Iliad and The Odyssey, fairy tales, theater, literature, film and, of course, television. Descriptions of violence from the Bible were (and are) important to the teaching of lessons and the establishment of a moral code. The lessons of brotherly love and responsibility are learned from the story of Cain and Abel. Early fairy tales were filled with violence and gruesomeness designed to frighten children into behaving and to teach them right from wrong. It was only when fairy tales were portrayed on the big screen by Walt Disney and others that the violence inherent in the stories was substantially sanitized.
The issue is not the mere presence of violence but the nature of the violence and the context in which it occurs. Context is key to the determination of whether or not the use of violence is appropriate. If parents could preview all television, film and literature for their children, we do not believe they would remove all violence regardless of its surrounding context. Parents know that violence can be instructive in teaching their children important lessons about life. What parents would do if they could preview all content for their children is remove or modify the inappropriate or improper uses of violence. Examples of these are applications of violence which glorify the act or teach that violence is always the way to resolve conflict. Our discussions with parents indicate that they know violence is a part of storytelling, but that there are appropriate and inappropriate ways of depicting violence. For example, the consequences of violence should be shown and those using violence inappropriately should be punished. We would also note that when violence is used realistically, it is probably more desirable to accurately portray the consequences than to sanitize the violence in a manner designed to make it acceptable.
Over the years, scientific research has focused both on the quality and quantity of violence on television. For example, the most important and prominent scholar to investigate this issue, George Gerbner, whose work stretches back into the 1960s, conducted extensive quantitative and qualitative analyses of violence on television. Most attention, however, was focused on the quantitative aspect of the content analyses of Gerbner, including his mechanism to determine whether the amount of violence was increasing or decreasing. Although many television executives felt the issue was still unclear, most researchers felt that Gerbner's work firmly established that there was a problem with the amount of violence on television.
Some of the early quantitative research that counted acts was limited in its ability to examine the context of television violence. The same is true of the numerical counts often favored by public interest groups. (Numerical counts generate big headlines but we believe they do not fully address the issue of television violence.) That work required elaborate and exact definitions of violence to determine whether the act was counted or not. It was necessary to decide if verbal violence should be counted or whether comedic violence such as cartoons (what Gerbner calls "happy violence") would be registered. A precise definition determined whether the particular scene would be counted. Everything had to be neatly included or excluded so that the final analysis of the amount of violence would conform to the definition of violence.
No matter how well the definitions were drawn, there would be those who felt that some important aspect of the problem should or should not have been included. Almost everyone has his or her own definition of violence and they have often attempted to validate or invalidate quantitative research based on how much the scholar's definition resembled their own. Children's animation is a good example of this phenomenon. Consider a cartoon in which a character is hit over the head with a two-by-four, a funny sound effect is heard, the character shakes his head and merrily continues on his way. Many people consider this the worst type of violence because it is unrealistic, there are no consequences and it might encourage children to imitate it precisely because it shows no consequences. Others feel they watched these cartoons growing up and obviously did not imitate them because they knew they were not "real." Scholars have had to decide whether to count this type of violence and they usually have included it. Anyone who feels this is silly would reject the entire definition and might ignore the conclusions of the research. The same is true with slapstick humor. Sports programming provides yet another example. Many feel that violent sports such as football or hockey make violence an acceptable or even desirable part of American life. Whether to count unrealistic cartoon violence, slapstick humor or sports within a definition of violence is a difficult decision.
Looking at violence within a contextual framework makes these definitional distinctions far less critical. There is less need for a precise definition because the focus is not on inclusion or exclusion in a count. We avoid the problems associated with narrow definitions by defining violence broadly. We put our focus not on establishing a correct, narrow definition of violence, but rather on distinguishing between violence that raises issues of concern and that which does not. Our broad definition includes sports violence, cartoon violence, slapstick violence--anything that involves physical harm of any sort, intentional or unintentional, self-inflicted or inflicted by someone or something else. We even included verbal threats of physical violence, although these were of secondary importance. Verbal phrases such as a teenager exclaiming, "If I don't get home by midnight, my dad'll kill me," were rarely dealt with--unless the teenager's father was a homicidal maniac.
Our broad definition might yield high numbers of scenes of violence on a given show. However, this of and by itself is not important since our focus is on whether the violence raises concerns within the context of the show. For example, it is possible that a situation comedy such as Home Improvement or Murphy Brown might yield several scenes of "violence." But the nature of the violence and the context in which it occurs might lead us to conclude that none of these scenes was inappropriate.
In sum, all violence, in our view, is not created equal. The focus of the project is not on counting the number of acts of violence but on the contextual analysis of each of these acts. We examine acts of violence and the context in which they occur to distinguish between uses of violence which raise concern and those acts which, because of their nature and the context in which they occur, do not, in our view, raise similar concerns.
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