Is a Violent Hero Still a Hero?

The media-based world is being swallowed up by a whirlpool of left jabs and sucker punches and very few people are even noticing it. By the time the average person is 18, they will have viewed 200 000 acts of violence on television alone. This could simply be put down as another aspect of the media, if most of this violence wasn’t purposefully presented in a glamourous and entertaining manner. This then begs the obvious question of how all this random violence affects these young viewers.

The main consequences from an overexposure to violence in the media and on television specifically, is that children will become desensitised to violence and are likely to become more aggressive in the real world.

Children younger than eight years cannot discriminate between fantasy and reality, so they are even more vulnerable to learning the attitudes and behaviour portrayed by entertainment media. Once a child has been desensitised to graphic violence in a show or movie, they will become more tolerant of it in reality and will eventually start to imitate the behavioural model they have seen so many times before. Children who view shows in which violence is very realistic, frequently repeated or left unpunished, are more likely to imitate what they see.

Indeed, a number of studies in the ‘90s showed that people who are repeatedly exposed to media violence tend to be less disturbed when they witness real world violence, and have less sympathy for its victims. This is perpetuated by American media, in particular, portraying heroes using violence as a justified means of resolving conflict and prevailing over others. Instead of being appalled by gratuitous violence, desensitized children now think of it as an appropriate means of solving problems and achieving goals.

The problem is that heroes are often shown using violence and suffering no consequences or moral judgement because of it. In recent years, television, movies, and music videos have also normalised the carrying of weapons and glamourised their use as a source of personal power.

Because most children spend more time during the day using various media than on any other activity, with the exception of sleeping, media have greater access and time to shape their attitudes and actions than parents or teachers do, replacing them as the primary sources of information about the world and how one should behave in it. The solution then is not necessarily to simply slap stricter ratings on all forms of the media, but instead, to emphasise media education, at home and in school – to promote critical thinking in relation to all information and images children receive through the media. Children educated to analyse media content learn to recognise the contradiction between their taste for violence on television and their rejection of it in real life. 

Once they have been educated about the differences between their own reality and the violent images shown by the media, children should effectively be able to decide for themselves whether a violent hero can still be their hero.

Violence has proved to be a useful and attractive marketing tool for the media and so will never be phased out or stopped completely, but with a bit of simple education, viewers can avoid being blindsided by it.