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<title> The V chip - only useful on one kind of violence? </title>
Today it seems like most people have some sort of opinion about children watching television and whether we think it is good or bad, or educational or not, I think we all can agree on that the amount of violence received by many of the programs is much too high. To prevent young viewers from being affected by this type of unnecessary violence the so-called V chip will soon be launched. This computer chip, which is to be installed in the television set, will block out all unwanted programs and will therefore also help parents to control the TV-habits of their children. So, what programs will be rated as violent and is it really possible to give violence a number? In her article "locking out violence" Ginia Bellafante brings up this question. She says that the V chip would for instance not be able to tell the difference between films like Terminator 2, which is totally based on violence and Schindler's list, which also is a very frightful film, although in a completely different way, and would for this reason probably not be rated as violent as Terminator 2. 

First of all I would like to try to define violence which in my opinion can be many different things. Most people only see the physical side of violence and therefore associate it with weapons, blood and a violent use of language. Violence can also be of an other kind, namely; psychological. This sort of violence come in many forms, for instance when people are being threatened, ignored or put down. Psychological violence is usually much harder to recognize since there normally are no visible signs of abuse. People who are being subjected to this kind of violence are likely to have inner wounds, such as a low self-esteem, instead. To me violence can also be seen from a third point of view and by this I mean a disturbed, or violated, picture of our society. Many television programs today, mostly soap operas and talkshows, give a very distorted view of what life truly is about. Especially children are affected by this since several talkshows indicate that it is fully normal to have sex at the age of twelve, preferably with your best friend's boyfriend and that there is nothing wrong with lying and taking advantage of each other. 

What can we do to delete unnecessary violence? According to people in favour of the V chip this is not a difficult task, simply install the computer chip and you no longer have a problem. This might work very well and it will certainly block out films such as Terminator and Alien, but what about important and educational programs like the news? Our world is not always as peaceful and pleasant as we would like it to be and with wars going on in many countries it would be very hard to put a number on every single feature of the program.

It would also be interesting to know how sports would be graded. Young viewers, especially boys, love to watch sports programs like boxing and wrestling and many of these children have idols among the sportsmen. Entertainment of this kind will give the wrong impression of how much you actually can hit a person without seriously injuring him or her. In Sweden these shows are not as common as they are in the US and I can only relate to how I, at the age of fifteen, reacted when I saw wrestling for the first time. Not until I had watched the show a couple of times I realized that these people were acting and I can only imagine how even younger children react to this sort of entertainment.

Finally I would like to point out that violence does not only occur on TV but also in real life and it is not always possible to protect children from being exposed to it. They encounter violence in places like the playground, at school and also at home and what in my opinion is more important than the V chip is that the parents, instead of just blocking unwanted programs out without an explanation, try to explain to their children why people sometimes behave a certain way
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