This article originally appeared in the January-February 1997 Children's Advocate newsmagazine, published by Action Alliance for Children.

Report from the Classroom:
Teaching about Media Violence

By Jean Tepperman

"How many of you watch violence on TV?" Rachel Levin asks a group of about 50 middle-school students. Six or seven hands go up. "Do you watch the news? MTV? Movies? Sports? Now, how many of you watch violence on TV?" A few more hands.

Levin then shows a video clip -- a montage of violent scenes ranging from slapstick (Home Alone) to riots to sports events. "How many of you watch violence on TV?" All hands go up.

"Kids don't necessarily share our assumptions," says Levin, co-author of the Beyond Blame curriculum, who has been teaching media-violence awareness to students from middle school to college. "They often start out saying they don't watch a lot of violence. Or they say, 'Sure it's violence, but we know it's all fake, and we know the difference between right and wrong, so it doesn't affect us.' Some also see our criticism of media violence as just another adult put-down of their culture." Most young people she's taught, though, agree that media violence is harmful for younger kids.

Young people are insulted by simplistic assumptions about how media violence affects them, says Levin. They say they're not so gullible or morally weak that TV violence will make them violent. "What about scary scenes?" Levin asks. "Can you think of a scene that was so scary you really felt scared, even though you knew it was fake?" Most can. "So it does affect us, doesn't it?"

Vivian Chavez, media researcher at UC Berkeley, has another example of media's effects. "Images of youth violence in the media," she says, "affect how society treats young people." Youth are quick to agree that these images encourage negative attitudes toward themselve

"The most important thing," Levin concludes, "is to work with students to critically analyze the messages of media violence without taking a 'protectionist' point of view," or making assumptions about the students themselves. "They see images and make their own sense of them," Levin says. "We may not be paying enough attention to finding out what sense they make of what they're seeing."

Young people attending the "Establishing Peace" conference made a similar point. One video clip shown at the conference presented an example of a boy simply refusing to get involved in a fight. "That's not realistic at all!" the young people declared. At another point in the conference, Erica Young from American High School in Fremont said "when we talk to teachers they don't seem to hear us. It's like our voices are so low they can't be heard. They think they have to teach us instead of us teaching them." The solution, Young said, is for "students, parents, and teachers to come together and talk."

"If you want to do a program relevant to kids," Chavez advises, "listen to the kids, and involve young people in every step of the planning process."