Parents 'too desensitised to judge appropriate films for children'
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Version 0 of 1. Parents become desensitised over time when viewing movies featuring adult content such as sex and violence, according to a new US study.Researchers for the Annenberg Public Policy Centre found that viewers watching a series of bloodthirsty or erotic scenes from films such as Casino Royale, Collateral, 8 Mile and Die Hard were less able to gauge their suitability for children as time went by. “The rise of violence and gun violence in PG-13 movies means that lots of kids are able to go into movie theatres and see explicit violence,” said Dan Romer, the policy centre’s associate director and lead author of the study lead. “We wanted to find out why parents didn’t show more concern. Why was this happening without pushback?”Research, conducted online in January, showed scenes from six movies with similar levels of sex and violence to parents of children aged six to 18. The study found that viewers of the first scene felt an appropriate age would be, on average, 16.9 for violent content and 17.2 for sexualised content. But by the time they had watched the sixth scene, respondents’ perception of the appropriate age had dropped to 13.9 for violent content and 14 for sexualised content. Study authors suggested the desensitisation phenomenon could also affect other frequent film viewers, such as those who decide the age appropriate level of movies. This would help explain the longterm “ratings creep” phenomenon which has seen censors on both sides of the Atlantic relax ratings over the past 40 years so that movies handed an R or 15 in the 1970s might now be seen as tame PG-13 or 12A affairs. In a study last year, the policy centre found that films rated PG-13 now contain more gun violence than those rated R in the US and that gun violence in PG-13 films has tripled since 1985. “We were most surprised by how clear and dramatic the decline was to showing that kind of content to young people and the willingness to let their own children to see it,” said Romer. “Our entire culture may be undergoing desensitisation to violent movies with consequences that remain unknown.” The findings, which follow research conducted with 1,000 respondents, will be published in the new November issue of Pediatrics magazine and were first reported by Deadline. |