Marketing Violence: The Special Toll on Young Children of Color

Journal of Negro Education, The, Fall 2003 by Levin, Diane E, Carlsson-Paige, Nancy

Ever since the regulation of children's television in the 1980s, marketing violence to children through the media has become increasingly prevalent. The violent programs themselves, as well as the toys, video games, and other products linked to them, glorify violence, undermine play, and portray racial stereotypes. While these practices harm all young children, they present a special risk for children of color because of how racial messages are linked to violence in the shows. This situation is especially worrisome for young children of color who are disproportionately represented among low-income children, consume more hours of media per day, and have many other risk factors undermining their healthy development.

Young children growing up today spend an enormous amount of time consuming media. Two- to seven-year-olds now average over three hours a day of "screen time" on such activities as watching TV and playing video games (Rideout, Foehr, Roberts, & Brodie, 1999). And when they are not sitting in front of a screen, children are often engaged in play with toys linked to the media (Carlsson-Paige & Levin, 1990). Over the last 20 years, children have increasingly become a consumer group to be marketed to through the media. Children see an average of 20,000 advertisements per year (Strasburger & Donnerstein, 1999). Beyond just advertisements, they are exposed to television shows, video and computer games, Hollywood movies, the Internet, and media-linked toys that market single themes through media cross-feeding and effectively become advertisements for each other (McChesney, 1999; Seabrook, 1997). This kind of marketing has successfully created a childhood media culture that touches almost all aspects of children's lives. While there are many reasons why this form of marketing can be harmful to children, the fact that violence has become a central focus of this marketing creates a special problem.

Much of the concern about how violence in entertainment media is affecting children can be traced back to the deregulation of children's television in 1984 by the Federal Communications Commission. With deregulation, it became legal to sell toys and other products linked to specific TV programs for the first time. As a result, the toy and television industries quickly joined together to develop toy-linked TV shows. Within one year of deregulation, 9 of the 10 best-selling toys were connected to TV shows (Carlsson-Paige & Levin, 1990).

Deregulation opened the door for mass marketing to children. In a climate with little government regulation, media corporations consolidated, making marketing to children, especially through the cross-feeding of single themes, an appealing practice to those looking for profits. An environment in which children were deluged with violent media images grew; these images rapidly became central in the culture of childhood and were almost impossible to avoid. As the rest of this article will assert, the violent media culture ever since that time has had far-reaching, harmful effects on children, families, and society (Cantor, 1998; Carlsson-Paige & Levin, 1990; Levin & Linn, 2004).

MARKETING VIOLENCE TO CHILDREN

Both the quantity and quality of violence children see on the screen has increased dramatically since the deregulation of children's television. After deregulation, violent media became a powerful vehicle for marketing products to children. One violent TV program after another, linked to whole lines of toys and other products, swept through children's popular culture-Masters of the Universe, GI Joe, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers, and most recently professional wrestling. The number of acts of violence steadily increased in the most popular children's shows-for instance, each Power Rangers episode averages about 100 acts of violence, twice as many acts as in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which was the previously most successful show (Lisosky, 1995). It is now estimated that by the end of elementary school, the average child will have seen 8,000 murders and 100,000 other acts of violence on the TV screen (American Academy of Pediatrics, 1999).

Beyond television, there is also an increasing amount of violence in other media children consume. About 90% of children now live in homes that own or rent video game systems (Song & Anderson, 2001). A 2001 Children Now survey of the content of video games found that over 80% of the games examined contained violence. Well over 50% of video games on the market are violent and the violence is increasingly graphic and realistic. Because video games not only show violence, but also engage the players in perpetrating violent acts, the negative impact of video games on children can be greater than the impact of merely viewing violent TV programs or movies on the screen (Cesarone, 1994; Grossman & deGaetano, 1999). In addition, children are increasingly involved with computers and the Internet. Over two-thirds of U.S. children have computers at home (Woodward & Gridina, 2000), a large proportion of which provide access to the Internet and all the violence it contains.