This can’t be helping.
Bad Girls Go Wild – Newsweek Society – MSNBC.com — Sick role models? Christian fundamentalism? Hollywood imagery? Wasteful War? Emasculated American Male? Here is a report that indicates something in the society has changed. Why now? This is not a good sign whatever is causing it. And the bigger questions are how bad can it get and what can we do about it?
When police arrived on the scene of a fatal stabbing last week in Brooklyn, N.Y., they were stunned by what they saw. The victim, an 11-year-old girl, lay crumpled on the floor, the front of her “Dora the Explorer” T shirt bloodied. The weapon, a steak knife, was in the kitchen sink. And the perpetrator, visibly upset and clinging to her mother, police say, was a little girl in a ponytail, only 9 years old. A few days later, she stood in white socks and shiny black dress shoes before a judge, listening as her lawyer entered a plea of not guilty.
The tragic event, which took place after the girls came to blows over a pink rubber ball, was a sad reminder that children can possess the same brutal instincts as adults. But for experts on youth crime, the killing was another instance of what they view as a burgeoning national crisis: the significant rise in violent behavior among girls. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, the number of girls 10 to 17 arrested for aggravated assault has doubled over the last 20 years. The number of boys arrested for weapons possession rose 22 percent between 1983 and 2003, while the number of girls increased by a whopping 125 percent. Today, one in three juveniles arrested for violent crimes is female.
Have you witnessed teenage girls driving, lately? They think they can’t die.
It’s easy. First, violent video games. Second, evolution taught in schools. And lastly, the welfare state.
The story was sad. Kill Bill was violent. Not seeing the causal relationship. Don’t even know if those girls saw the movie.
Stepping from the media influence arguments, I look to the statistics and wonder. Will we see an increase in husband abuse in generations to come?
The entertainment media is the cause, despite what the article claims. Children are subjected to violence from the time they start watching cartoons. The only cartoon channel that offers non-violent programming is Noggin. Everything else has characters that hit each other or behave horribly. The violent imagery just increases as they get older with TV, movies and video games. It continues to amaze me that so many people cannot figure this out. Why are we so blind to this simple fact?
Did we have senseless violence like this before the television era? Certainly, but not nearly as much as we do now. This is a recent phenomenon. Take a look at the increase in the level of violence in the entertainment media and compare it to the increase of violence in society over the past few decades. I’d be willing to bet that the figures will dovetail nicely.
The ultimate fault lies with parents. They need to do a lot better job of screening what their kids are watching. Right now they plop Junior in front of 3-6 hours of violent television every day, then they question why their kids are violent. If it’s not television, then it is violent video games. Parents like to deny the impact of these two technologies but the evidence is indisputable.
And John, what the heck does Christian fundamentalism have to do with it? Why not Muslims or some other group? That was a senseless jab at Christians. In fact, a recent study showed that the best-behaved kids are Mormon children. Next down from them were conservative Protestants. I live in a town full of such people and violence of any kind is almost unheard of. I’d like to see the figures on how many children who regularly attend church are involved in these violent acts. I’m sure the number would be quite small.
RFB
All I did was list certain societal changes over the past few years and cited a few as possibilities. There was no jab at anything, just a query. And many new Christian rightists are into violent spankings. This sort of advocacy was not as open a decade ago.
I do not know what the Mormons have to do with it..no changes there and they are community oriented and would easily have good numbers.
Are only Christian rightists into spankings? In my exeperience spanking is a tradition employed widely reagardless of religious affiliation. I know plenty of agnostics and atheists who are not opposed to spanking. In addition, spankings were widely employed a decade ago. People didn’t have to advocate it, they just did it. The difference was that parents didn’t get arrested for it like they do today.
In case you didn’t know, most people consider Mormons to be Christian rightists and fundamentalists. Even though they do have their own brand of Christianity.
Perhaps all these movies with fantasies of women warriors. Xena, Tomb Raider, Kill Bill, GI Jane, etc. It might help if they took the women soldiers out of Iraq.
Kill Bill Vol 1 rocks! At least it’s more credible to see a kick ass girl than to see a skinny n’ pasty white guy kicking asses (see the American ninja movies where the ninjas think that eyebutting his knukles is a good idea.)
When the Christian right / fundamentalists quote the bible saying, “spare the rod and spoil the child”, they are advocating child abuse. Their minds are usually more closed to other, scholarly research. Not all Christians are closed minded, or are all non-Christians open minded.
As for your comment about parents being arrested for spanking a child, please quote a case. When parents whip children with objects causing injuries then that is abuse and quite rightly the parents should be arrested. There is a huge difference between a spanking with an open hand and beating a child.
John you should be ashamed, dragging out the “Hollywood Imagery” line, that has been proven wrong over and over again for too many years. First your correct about Christians rightists then you turn around and sound like one.