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Influence Of Televised Aggression And Pornography On The Social Adjustment Of Adolescents In Secondary Schools
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CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
Background to the Problem
The
introduction of the mass media into the everyday lives of children and
the increase of televised violence have brought about rapid changes on
their social orientation both in school and at home. It is not
surprising that speculations about violent behaviour have been prevalent
in the society since motion pictures showing violent acts were first
distributed with the advent of the television in the early 1950s.
Violence surrounds us not only in real life but also in our entertainment as films and movies.
With
improved technology, television, both in its news reports and
entertainment provides a steady show of violence e.g. riots, wars,
terrorism, raids, rapes, etc, which has affected all parts of our daily
lives especially adolescents in our school system.
Stein and Fredrick
(1999) described television as a dominating, powerful drug on the minds
of children, as a conveyor of cultural values, attitudes and beliefs as
it serves as an agent of socialization along side with the family,
school and peer groups. Yet, television has not received much attention
in terms of research as other agents of socialization especially in the
developing countries such as Nigeria, hence the reason for this study.
The
research on the influence of televised violence on the social
orientation of adolescents in secondary schools has been a great concern
in the minds of educationists since the television is a powerful tool
that is capable of affecting the behaviour of the youths. The effects of
television violent programme on the lives of our youths and even the
adults cannot be over-emphasized. More often than not, it has a negative
impact on the behaviour of the adolescents due to weird and violent
programmes that are shown on television. For example, when one tunes on
the television, what one sees are violent programmes like wrestling,
violent movies, rituals in terms of home videos or films and other
extremely vicious and horrible acts which affect the minds and
behaviours of the viewers especially the youths, even the adult members
of the society. These violent programmes have affected the social
orientation of the adolescents so much that they have emulated what they
view on television and this has caused them to be maladjusted in their
general behaviour.
Many youths today have become bullies, aggressive
fellows, fighters, armed robbers, heady, obstinate, corrupt and vicious
as a result of what they have viewed on violent television programmes,
films, internet etc. Many children have formed the habit of opening to
corrupt or pornographic sites on the internet and glue themselves to
these immoral pictures, taking in every inch of what they see and
arousing otherwise dormant sexual instincts. This has caused many of our
youths to turn to promiscuous and harlotic lives. Rapes and sexual
harassment, seductive display of body parts, indecent dressing abound
every where in our nation and these have affected the good norms of our
society.
The nation’s television stations are not helping matters
because they are in the habit of showing programmes in which people are
shot, stabbed, beaten up, poisoned, rapped, robbed, harassed etc. They
also show cartoons in which animals or animated characters inflict
injuries on one another in many ways.
Television has been criticized
for showing foreign films which propagate the culture of immorality,
thus brutalizing the highly impressionable minds of our children. It has
been argued that local films do not have anything to offer other than
showing violence, ritual killings, notorious acts and murder as rightly
reported by Amata (Guardian, Saturday, December 16, 2000).
Some of
the evils in our society these days are perpetrated by the adolescents
who have watched one bad film or violent television programme or the
other. Today, youths engage in immoral, wicked, and aggressive acts
because they are constantly exposed to television programmes that affect
the behaviour of the individual negatively. Children in the urban
cities are the most affected because of the diverse social problems in
the cities and their exposure to television viewing, internet browsing
where they unhibitedly watch all kinds of pornographic films, listen to
the radio and have access to different junk newspapers and obscene
magazines and other aspects of the media that sway the mind and
influence the psyche of the budding individual child negatively. In the
rural areas, though the world is said to be a global village, these
things are not readily available and rampart. No wonder, there are
aggressive children these days mostly in the urban cities than in the
rural areas and in the olden days when television aggressive programmes
were not rampant as they are today.
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ABSRACT - [ Total Page(s): 1 ]This study investigated the influence of televised aggression and pornography on adolescents in secondary schools in Agege Local Government Area of Lagos State.A sample of 120 students randomly selected from 4 senior secondary school children in public schools were used. They were made up of 60 boys and 60 girls.A well constructed instrument, a questionnaire was used to elicit responses from the subjects.Four hypotheses were formulated and tested at 0.05 level of significance using one-way ANOVA ... Continue reading---
