The Games Aren't To Blame

Sociologist Karen Sternheimer asks why juvenile homicide arrest rates have fallen by 77% in the ten years since the release of Doom.

In the latest issue of Contexts, a magazine published by the American Sociological Association, Sociologist and author Karen Sternheimer writes in detail regarding society's tendency to link video games and teenage violence. She points out that the act of crusading against questionable sources of immorality is nothing new to the history of media, as past parent groups have attempted to link crime with such popular pastimes as automobiles, radio, movies, rock music, and comic books. She calls the targets of these moral crusaders "contemporary folk devils", which are used as a scapegoat to explain the inexplicable:

"In 2000 the FBI issued a report on school rampage shootings, finding that their rarity prohibits the construction of a useful profile of a 'typical' shooter. In the absence of a simple explanation, the public symbolically linked these rare and complex events to the shooters' alleged interest in video games, finding in them a catchall explanation for what seemed unexplainable -- the white, middle-class school shooter."

Quoting statistics from the National Center for Juvenile Justice, she notes that African-American youths are involved in juvenile crimes twice as often as whites. Yet, considering that black youths play video games just as much, if not more than their white counterparts, she wonders why most of the crimes attributed to violent video games are more often perpetrated by white teenagers with middle-class upbringings:

"The video game explanation constructs the white, middle-class shooters as victims of the power of video games, rather than fully culpable criminals. When boys from 'good' neighborhoods are violent, they seem to be harbingers of a 'new breed' of youth, created by video games rather than by their social circumstances. [...] African-American boys, apparently, are simply dangerous."

In essence, Sternheimer accuses the media, politicians, and activist groups of being too quick to establish video games as a primary cause for violence without investigating other possible explanations, such as rejection, depression, and feelings of alienation at school. She claims that, since 1997, there have been 199 newspaper articles that have linked video games as a possible cause for the school shootings in Paducah, Springfield, and Littleton. Yet, while only a few of those stories reported the role of psychological factors in these violent crimes, they would almost always take a backseat to video games as a probable cause.

Sternheimer also accuses the media of not taking a genuinely scientific approach to the analysis of these school shootings, based on the expert sources they tend to quote. Of the 199 articles, 17 of them quote David Grossman, a former army lieutenant turned anti-video game crusader who is often described as a professor of "killology". Another article was written by none other than Jack Thompson for the Denver Post. And out of all the articles, only seven asked for the opinions of sociologists.

Sternheimer ends with a reference to a previously stated fact, which declares that juvenile homicide arrests have fallen 77% in the last ten years, despite the rising development of increasingly mature games:

"[C]ritics continue to target video games, as their graphics and plot capabilities grow more complex and at times more disturbing. Meanwhile, youth crime rates continue to decline. If we want to understand why young people, particularly in middle-class or otherwise stable environments, become homicidal, we need to look beyond the games they play. While all forms of media merit critical analysis, so do the supposedly 'good' neighborhoods and families that occasionally produce young killers."