123 School Work

Argument against Irving Kristols Sex Violence and Videotape

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  [1] Irving Kristol, in an essay titled "Sex, Violence, and Videotape", discusses sex and violence in the media and popular culture and its effect on society. He opens his essay with a brief summary of a British report on violent videos and their effect on children. The report was signed by liberal psychologists and pediatricians and suggests that violent media negatively affects children and it's society's duty to protect children from this "child abuse" (611). A member of Parliament introduced legislation limiting the availability of "video nasties", which angered the movie industry. Censorship was the movie industry's main argument. Kristol goes on to the argument that a relationship between TV violence and aggressive behavior in the young is unproven. On one hand social science cannot give clear-cut explanations to these things and there are too many factors that affect the behavior of the young, but on the other hand there is enough circumstantial evidence that it should be proof enough to "ordinary" people. The next few paragraphs discuss the circumstantial evidence. When television was introduced to rural Canada and when English television came to South Africa violent crime, especially in the young, increased dramatically. When televsion was introduced to America after World War II, the homicide rate among white males rose...