With those immortal words, Dirty Harry Callahan confronts a scumbag with a gun of some size (“Freeze, cop! Now, left hand, pull out your gun … My, that’s a big one!”). It is a movie classic. It makes you grin with a deep sense of sympathetic satisfaction.
Why? It’s horribly violent, is it not? Would you let your kids see ol’ Clint deliver sweet extra-judicial justice through the barrel of a .44? If not, why not?
I can’t help thinking that we used to handle violent behaviour in children far more elegantly than we appear to do today. In the old days, violence was simply punished, often with moderate violence. Usually, it just became a non-issue.
Today, we have zero-tolerance school policies. Kids are suspended for even talking about violence, or drawing stick figures with guns. We have films rated inappropriate for children not only because of sex, nudity and bloody extremes, but also for common violence, language and all manner of prejudice.
We’re extending the repressive psychology of taboos. Did it work for sex? Wasn’t the free-love generation exactly the kids who grew up when prudes and censors were all over the media industry? And with our conservative nanny approach to violence in the media, do we have any less violence among children today? Do we have less bullying?
I don’t know, but I can’t remember any school stabbings or shootings when I was young. These days, they’re regular tabloid fare.
Ever thought that violence may, in fact, be quite normal? When do you react violently and hit the keyboard? When you’re frustrated and have exhausted rational options of dealing with a problem, not so? Wouldn’t the same logic go for violence in children? Wouldn’t they succumb to violent outbursts when they’re unable to deal rationally with problems? Yet we keep getting told that violence in the media — films, computer games, news bulletins — is what causes violent behaviour; that it somehow teaches children that violence is OK. This simply doesn’t make sense to me.
What makes far more sense to me is research described in Scientific American, which suggests what most parents probably know already, but some no doubt will not admit about their little angels: violent behaviour in children is perfectly normal. It is to be expected, as a natural expression of frustration when they struggle to communicate, or are unable to affect their circumstances through rational action. Proclivity to aggression varies not by what kids see on television, but by their genetic make-up, early development and social skills.
Moralistic and over-protective policies, whether imposed by parents on their children, teachers on their pupils, or governments on their citizens, not only constitute a dangerous infraction against individual liberty, but they’re probably counter-productive too.
When they told me I was too young to see Year of the Dragon, they should have known they’d only provoke a violent reaction.
(Hat tip: Jonathan Davis.)
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