Conventional wisdom would have us believe that all violence in stories, games, movies, or novels is harmful to a peaceful society. Thus, many advocate that children not be allowed to play with toy guns or swords. They decry battle scenes and fights. But fights are necessary. It is only in and through conflict that we see the passions of heroes - what they care about, what makes them angry, what they are willing to fight for.
Jones points out that "[w]e don't usually ask whether game shows predispose our children to greed, or whether love songs increase the likelihood of getting stuck in bad relationships" (19). But when aggression is the topic, then anything that possesses a modicum of violence is blamed for promoting criminal behavior. But it is not just violence that excites violence. "Many forces have been shown to contribute to aggression: religious fervor, patriotic fervor, sports rivalry, romantic rivalry, hot summer nights. Entertainment has inspired some people to violence, but so have the Bible, the Constitution, the Beatles, books about Hitler, and obsessions with TV actresses. We don't usually condemn those influences as harmful, because we understand them better, we understand why people hke them and the benefits most of us draw from them. What's lacking is an understanding of aggressive fantasies and the entertainment that speaks to them" (19).
Our predisposition to condemn without seeking to understand fuels our desire to believe studies that "prove" violent programs and games lead to actual violence. But we rarely consider how these studies are rigged. For example, many of the studies that suggest that children are more violent after watching violent shows fail to recognize the unique situation the tests place the children in. The children are in a foreign environment with other children and adults they don't know. They are forced to watch shows they don't choose to watch and then must interact with one another. This is guaranteed to provoke more aggression. They are used to watching what they choose to watch in a comfortable environment.
Also, many studies do not distinguish between gratuitious violence and action. If all action is violence, then we are all in trouble.
In contrast to conventional wisdom, Jones argues that violent programming helps children deal with the powerlessness they feel in life. Being able to view things brings them a sense of control and equips them to deal with real conflict and trouble. Without this outlet they most likely will act out violence in the real world. Jones proves that the most violent periods of recent history have been when violent media is at an ebb. "Cartoons, comies, video games, cartoony live-action like Power Rangers are all about exagerrations of emotions and situations to make them clearer and more powerful to children. These are some of the essential functions of play. It 'explodes' tensions through emotional arousal and make-beheve aggression. It provides correctives, happy endings, that help children to believe that what frightens them can be overcome. It helps them navigate their concerns through structures and rules that they can learn and predict and so feel they've mastered. It allows them to manipulate troubling ideas until those ideas become familiar and lose their power. Entertainment performs those same functions when young people build it into their fantasies or work it into their social lives or play with it as a video game" (101).
We, the adults, must recognize the power and importance of fantasy. "This is the essence of helping children make sense of violent entertainment, toys, and games: differentiating between what they mean to the children and what they mean to us. We have to let them have fantasy as fantasy, while teaching them about reality. We also have to see our own fantasies as fantasies, our own fears simply as fears, and distinguish them clearly from the reality of our children's relationship with violence" (117).
We should not forget that our current views on violence are relatively recent and, in the face of reality, rather naive. "We have internalized our abhorrence of violence to such an extent that it often feels like second nature, and we forget how new these views are to human history. Until the twentieth century, no large cultural mainstream had ever called into question the basic rightness of capital punishment, corporeal punishment for children. the settling of disputes with fists, or warfare. No culture had ever fostered a popular belief that violence might be banished through education, child rearing, science, or other human efforts. We've entered new ground. We've set ourselves the heroic mission of creating a nonviolent world, but we don't know what one looks like. We're left with as many questions as answers, and among the most vexing is this: What is the place of imaginary violence in a world that denounces violence in reality?" (130-131)
The most powerful influence in our children's world is our model as a parent - including how we react to our children's choices: "Expressing anger or anxiety about a child's entertainment won't make her like the entertainment less—but it will model anger and anxiety for her" (186).
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