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Television and Crime

Robbers run out of a bank shooting and killing everybody in sight. Switch the channel and you'll see a murderer raising his knife while a crying woman (1 passive previously provoke policy predict protest prohibited pleads for her life. Another channel shows bloody scenes of war. On television screens all over the world young children sit and watch shocking acts of beating and killing again and again every day. Recently, people have started to wonder about the damage this might do. Some parents worry that watching TV might change their children from (2 MCQ #2 passive previously provoke policy predict protest prohibited pleads watchers to active participants in crime. It is easy to imagine that seeing a murder on TV might (3 passive previously provoke policy predict protest prohibited pleads a weak or confused person to commit a real murder. To answer the question about a possible connection between TV crime and real crime, psychologists studied a community in Africa before and after the introduction of television. As you might expect, there was more crime after the arrival of television than there had been (4 passive previously provoke policy predict protest prohibited pleads .The researchers concluded that as many as 10,000 murders a year in the US may be due to the influence of TV.

So how can we stop children from seeing things they shouldn't see? One answer for parents is to tell their children they are not allowed to watch certain programs. Cartoons are OK but anything with killing in it is (5 passive previously provoke policy predict protest prohibited pleads . This (6 passive previously provoke policy predict protest prohibited pleads is good in theory but difficult in practice. Not all parents have time to police their children's viewing habits constantly. And sometimes it is difficult to (7 passive previously provoke policy predict protest prohibited pleads what will happen in a show. A story may begin quite peacefully and later turn into a terrible tale of blood and death once everyone's attention has been caught. You can imagine the cries of (8 passive previously provoke policy predict protest prohibited pleads when you insist on changing the channel!

A new technological solution to the problem is a device called the V-chip. It allows parents to block out unsuitable programs by making the images unclear. A new law in the United States requires that all TVs produced after 1998 contain V-chips. But is technology the answer? Instead, maybe we should watch what our children watch more carefully.

--from the Toronto Globe & Mail, March 1996