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<title> Violence on television: a necessary evil? </title>
Television today gives children all over the world the opportunity to see different kind of programmes from different parts of the world. Unfortunately a lot of these programmes contain some kind of violence. Violence on television can be divided into two types. The first type is informative violence as in news that are covering terrorist attacks, wars that are fought in some part of the world and terrible accidents. The second type is entertaining violence as in movies that show us fictive violence for our pleasure. As parents we won't let any harm come to our children and we want to shield them from all types of violence. If we are not prepared to lock our children away in a room and throw away the key, it is quite impossible to shield them from the harsh reality that we all live in. Is it then possible to somehow filter away all this violence on television? Perhaps it is and maybe the V-chip is the way to do it, but we should stop and consider if we really want to do that. Maybe we should come to the conclusion that some form of knowledge regarding the violence shown on television is actually necessary for our children to get a true picture of the world they are living in. The question we more correctly should be asking ourselves is perhaps "At what age are children capable of handling the truth"? All children are unique and they develop in different ways and at different pace. Today's standards in rating films etc. do not consider that two fifteen-year-olds might have developed in different ways psychologically. An example that shows this is a news article about a 18-year-old in USA that was watching an episode of "Beavis and Butthead" where Beavis threw a bowling ball off a bridge. This kid apparently thought that this was fun and wanted to try it. He took a bowling ball and threw it off a bridge down on a motorway, killing a 3-months old baby in the backseat of a passing car. You might think that a 18-year-old should know better, especially he should know the difference between a cartoon and real life. The only people that really can say what is and what is not appropriate for their children to watch at some given age are the parents, but they can't always keep track of what their youngsters are watching and as I said before parents tend to overprotect their young ones. What would happen to a child that has overprotective parents and ends up with little or no knowledge about what is going on outside their safe environment? It would have to learn the hard way and he/she would not be prepared on all the bad things that could happen. In some ways the informative violence that is presented on television is educational. It teaches us not to trust strangers, not to go out alone in the dark, it helps us to develop values of what is right and wrong, It even teaches us about violent moments in history that "changed the world" and that we should learn from other peoples mistakes. For example: it is said that Neo-nazis in Sweden don't believe that the death camps, as Auschwitz, ever existed. Now people are trying to educate young children in schools about the horrors that took place in those camps by showing them films and giving them books about these events. In this case, you might say that this type of informative "violence" is necessary evil, just to keep the history from repeating itself. As I see it there is no easy way out of this. Every solution, so far, to lock out violence on television have presented some drawbacks. Now that we might regard informative violence to some extent as necessary evil it is up to us adults to determine what solution is less painful for everyone and see to it that our children benefit from whatever solution we choose.
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