Dr. James Garbarino, in his book, Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them, reports that violent juveniles share a "socially toxic environment" in common.³ Much like living in a city that has high pollution levels damages one's physical health, living in a socially toxic environment damages one's psychological health.

Garbarino says what makes the youth culture toxic is the increasing exposure that children have to vivid and explicit scenarios of death and destruction. He attributes the spread of violence to small towns and rural areas, at least in part, to the explicit and vivid imagery of scenes of horror on television, the movie screen and video games as well as the violent lyrics of certain popular music groups.

In his book, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman argues that popular culture is literally training young people to kill in very much the same way that the military trains soldiers to kill.⁴

Because most humans have an innate aversion to killing another human being, Grossman says that the military must desensitize soldiers to killing and help them "overcome" that built-in aversion.

Military Training

1. Desensitization By exposing soldiers to constant images of violence and brutalization, young recruits soon "accept destruction, violence, and death as a way of life."⁵
2. Classical Conditioning Recruits are trained to associate killing with positive notions rather than negative. Through various techniques, acts of violence are associated with pleasure.
   (rarely used in U.S. military training, but utilized by other countries)
3. Operant Conditioning is a very powerful procedure of stimulus-response, stimulus-response. This process assures that when soldiers are in a situation where their thinking is impaired, they will always react "out of habit," so to speak. Because of constant stimulus-response training, their actions can be done without thinking.

Whereas infantry training in World War II used bull's eye targets, now soldiers learn to fire at realistic, man-shaped silhouettes that pop into their field of view. That is the stimulus. The trainees have only a split second to engage the target. The conditioned response is to shoot the target, then it drops . . . later, when the soldiers are on the battlefield or a police officer is walking a beat and somebody pops up with a gun, they will shoot reflexively and shoot to kill.

We know that 75 to 80 percent of the shooting on the modern battlefield is the result of this kind of stimulus-response training.⁶

Cultural training of youth in America

1. Desensitization Today's youth are exposed to these same images, slowly desensitizing them to the horror. Eventually, the images become less shocking and more acceptable. Those exposed to the images become increasingly comfortable with them, so that the "built-in" aversion to them is broken down.
2. Our children watch vivid pictures of human suffering and death, and they learn to associate it with their favorite soft drink and candy bar, or their girlfriend's perfume . . . [laughing] happens all the time in movie theaters when there is bloody violence.

   The young people laugh and cheer and keep right on eating popcorn and drinking pop. We have raised a generation of barbarians who have learned to associate violence with pleasure, like the Romans cheering and snacking as the Christians were slaughtered in the Colosseum.⁷

3. Every time a child plays a point-and-shoot video game, he is learning the exact same conditioned reflex and motor skills. Point and shoot games that use humans as targets are wildly popular with young people

   According to Mike Davila, editorial director of GameWeek magazine, "[the games] are incredibly violent, and they're the most popular games on PC right now . . . The object is to kill people — you see chunks of the body flying in different directions."⁸

The training conducted by the military and law enforcement takes place within a controlled environment and in a context of strict moral discipline. Grossman's concern is that what kids are getting from the culture has no such context. The fact that the violence is so strongly associated with pleasure creates an extremely dangerous environment, a socially toxic one.

Violence is glamorized in music, television, film, literature and video games. Virtually everywhere a young person turns, he encounters a culture that embraces violence.⁹ This toxic culture serves to desensitize kids to the brutality of violent behavior. The same principles used by the military to increase the firing rate in war from 15 percent to 95 percent are pervasive throughout youth culture. As the toxic environment, or so-called "war zone" of the "inner city" moves into every segment of society via the media, there should be no surprise that the juvenile violence that once seemed predominantly an inner city problem, has made its way to rural America.

-John C. Thomas

Endnotes:
¹A. Huston, Big World, Small Screen: The Role of Television in American Society, (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press), 1992.
²George Gerbner, "Television Violence: The Art of Asking the Wrong Question," The World and I, July, pp. 385-397.
³ Dr. James Garbarino, Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them, (New York: The Free Press), 1999. p. 100.
⁴Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, (New York: Little, Brown and Company), 1995.
⁵Grossman, "Trained to Kill," Christianity Today, 42(9), August 10, 1998, p. 31.
⁶Ibid.
⁷Ibid.
⁸Kevin Merida and Richard Leiby, "When Death Imitates Art," Washington Post, April 22, 1999, p. C01.
⁹See Bob Waliszewski, "Bringing Out the Worst In Us: The Frightening Truth About Violence, the Media and Our Youth," Focus on the Family, 1995.

Adapted from "The Root Causes of Juvenile Violence."
Copyright © 1999 Focus on the Family.
All rights reserved. International copyright secured.