Bourne Stupidity

It's Friday night and I just returned from the 7:15 showing of a newly released movie. I sat next to a 5 year old boy who was there with his mother and father to see the R rated movie, "Bourne Ultimatum", nearly two hours of intense and constant violence and murder.

Hasn't there been enough studies about the effect of these images on the little, open minds of children? What decisions was he making while eating his popcorn and watching men shooting each other? It makes me wonder what people are thinking.


Whether or not exposure to media violence causes increased levels of aggression and violence in young people is the perennial question of media effects research. Some experts, like University of Michigan professor L. Rowell Huesmann, argue that fifty years of evidence show "that exposure to media violence causes children to behave more aggressively and affects them as adults years later." Others, like Jonathan Freedman of the University of Toronto, maintain that "the scientific evidence simply does not show that watching violence either produces violence in people, or desensitizes them to it."

From Media Awareness Network