Sir,
I went to the cinema the other day to see the latest remake of King Kong. The film was rated 12 Cert, which I presume means that the minimum age of a viewer must be at least 12! This, however, did not seem to prevent a majority of the seats from being filled with under 12-year-olds!
The film, which has a few romantic scenes used as a pause between the continual flow of extreme violence where most of the human actors are either crushed or consumed by computer generated monsters, is hardly what I would consider bedtime viewing for any child. But then again, Ant1 was showing some Greek soap opera which had a gang rape of a young woman at around 7.30 in the evening, followed shortly with the familiar “horror movie music” which announced the latest update on the hunt for the “Dragon of Nicosia”.
What kind of a society are we when we cannot understand how the trivialisation of violence only helps make it that more acceptable. This is not just the responsibility of the cinema owner to enforce the certification, or the parents who buy the tickets, or the broadcaster who chooses to show gang rape at the time when most kids are having their TV dinners. The responsibility is collective, and no one can “pass the buck”.
Exposing children to images of violence has a much more profound and long lasting effect on their impressionable minds, whether this is on the TV, the cinema or our own homes.
Or is our society doing this on purpose? Maybe our society is trying to cultivate violence, fear and hatred, through the deliberate exposure of our children to it every day, thus making it easier to justify its use and our own failings in social responsibility.
Maybe that’s why our educational system modifies events in order to portray murderers as “heroes” and death as “glory”. Maybe that’s why we are “bombarded” with images of it all the time. After all, we have all been traumatised by invasion and occupation, so why not continue the cycle?
After all, it’s much easier to “pass the buck” rather than take responsibility for our own actions, even if it comes and bites us in the backside.
Name and address supplied
