“For far too long, violence - especially that occurring
among families, friends and acquaintances - has been tolerated as
an inevitable part of human existence. But for a little more than
two decades, the U.S. public-health movement has been engaged in
various efforts to address violence as a preventable problem.”
“The biggest gains from arguing that violence in the United
States is a preventable public-health problem have been in greater
awareness and understanding of the complexity of the problem and
potential solutions. This, in turn, has led to a decline in violence
in some cities, especially among youths. Most remarkable is the
acceptance and endorsement of prevention as a possibility and a
goal. Now, with the World Health Organization report, we can expect
similar gains globally.”
“In Tanzania, an estimated 500 elderly women accused of
witchcraft – often connected with an event like crop failure
– were murdered every year, it said.” [Quoted from WHO
report on violence]
The report has a host of other odd facts.
humans
killing humans
From a useful but slack
background item,
not recommended to unsophisticated readers.
“[...] the recipient of modern military conditioning is statistically
no more likely to engage in violent crime than a nonveteran of the
same age. The key safeguard in this process appears to be the deeply
ingrained discipline that the combat soldier internalizes with his
military training. However, with the advent of interactive "point-and-shoot"
arcade and video games, there is significant concern that society
is aping military conditioning, but without the vital safeguard
of discipline [...]”
—
“One major modern revelation in the field of military psychology
is the observation that such resistance to killing one's own species
is also a key factor in human combat. Brig. Gen. S. L. A. Marshall
first observed this during his work as an official U.S. Army historian
in the Pacific and European theaters of operations in World War
II. Based on his post-combat interviews, Marshall concluded in his
book Men Against Fire (1946, 1978) that only 15 to 20 percent of
the individual riflemen in World War II fired their own weapons
at an exposed enemy soldier. Key weapons, such as flame-throwers,
were usually fired. Crew-served weapons, such as machine guns, almost
always were fired. And action would increase greatlyif a nearby leader demanded that the soldier
fire. But when left on their own, the great majority
of individual combatants appear to have been unable or unwilling
to kill.”
“Another example of kids getting permission to proceed occurred
at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Two high school
students were given an assignment to shoot a video, so they taped
themselves wearing black trench coats as they walked through their
school with toy guns pretending to shoot fellow students. Afterwards,
they turned the video in for a grade and, you guessed it, the teacher
gave them a good one. Afterwards, she wondered if there could be
a problem, as thoughts of places like Pearl, Paducah, Jonesboro,
and Springfield floated about in her mind. So she informed the principal,
but still no action was taken, other than to give the boys a good
grade. Shortly thereafter, the boys committed the largest school
massacre in American history -- and the school had given them permission
to proceed.”
The child can read this (for instance, a
positive review or mark) as permission to proceed.
“Now, you need three
things to kill: You need the weapon, the skill,
and the will to kill. The video games provide two
out of three. They give the skill and the will to
kill. The weapons have been there for a long, long
time. During World War I, and prior to World War
I, and throughout the years after World War I, and
throughout World War II, high-capacity 9 mm pistols
were everywhere in Germany. We had literally hundreds
of thousands, if not millions, of young soldiers,
walking through Germany with military quality weapons,
and high-capacity 9 mm pistols. The first real,
double-stacked, high-capacity 9 mm pistol was probably
the German Mauser, to this very day a highly-respected
gun. It is well over 100 years old. The Luger is
close to 100 years old, and there were hundreds
of thousands of them in World War I. The weapons
have been there for a long, long time....”
“The new factor, is that the violent video
games are giving the boys the skill and the will
to kill; even as we reduce the number of weapons,
the ability to use the weapons has gone up. If a
criminal wants drugs, he'll get drugs, anywhere
in the world. Drugs are illegal, but if the criminal
wants drugs, he'll get them. If a criminal wants
guns, he'll get them. No matter how illegal you
make them, if a criminal wants them, he'll get them.
But, whether or not the teenager has the desire
to use drugs—if drugs have been glamorized,
and he's been taught that it is the right thing
to do—it's the media and the violent video
games, that are far more important in this equation.
If there is a new factor occurring, [it's that]
we're greatly reducing the supply of guns. And yet,
the incidence of these kinds of brutal murders—that
has never happened before in human history, never
before in human history.”
—
“ [...] Simply by educating children about
the health impact of violent video games and violent
television, there was a 40% reduction in violence
in this test score, because the majority of the
children voluntarily turned it off. When their elementary
school teachers tell them about this, the children
believe it, they know it, and they take action.”
“Motorists who seem to turn off their brain when switching
on their car's satellite navigation system have had a number of
spectacular crashes in the past year - but occasionally they're
right to blame the machine.
“Drivers obeying directions given by a sultry satnav voice
have crashed into rivers, construction sites and roadside toilets
in Germany, and had similar accidents in Britain.directions given
by a sultry satnav voice have crashed into rivers, construction
sites and roadside toilets in Germany, and had similar accidents
in Britain.”
—
“In southern England a 29-year-old woman survived unscathed
after misreading her satnav and driving the wrong way on a motorway
near Portsmouth at nearly 120km per hour, according to a local newspaper.
“When stopped after 22km of dodging oncoming traffic, she
told police she had only followed the satnav orders.”
Stanley Milgram, a Yale University psychologist,
developed an experiment to try and answer the question, “Could
it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were
just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?”.
The experiment was to measure the willingness of someone to obey instructions,
given by an authority figure, to act in conflict with their own conscience.
The experiment participant, appointed as a ‘teacher’,
was instructed/ordered by a ‘scientist’ to punish a ‘learner’
in another room if the ‘learner’ made an error in ‘learning’
words. The punishment was an apparent electric shock.
“In the basic experimental designs two people come to a psychology
laboratory to take part in a study of memory and learning. One of
them is designated a "teacher" and the other a "learner." The experimenter
explains that the study is concerned with the effects of punishment
on learning. The learner is conducted into a room, seated in a kind
of miniature electric chair, his arms are strapped to prevent excessive
movement, and an electrode is attached to his wrist. He is told
that he will be read lists of simple word pairs, and that he will
then be tested on his ability to remember the second word of a pair
when he hears the first one again. whenever he makes an error, he
will receive electric shocks of increasing intensity.”
—
“Before the experiments, I sought predictions about the outcome
from various kinds of people -- psychiatrists, college sophomores,
middle-class adults, graduate students and faculty in the behavioral
sciences. With remarkable similarity, they predicted that virtually
all the subjects would refuse to obey the experimenter. The psychiatrist,
specifically, predicted that most subjects would not go beyond 150
volts, when the victim makes his first explicit demand to be freed.
They expected that only 4 percent would reach 300 volts, and that
only a pathological fringe of about one in a thousand would administer
the highest shock on the board.
“These predictions were unequivocally wrong. Of the forty
subjects in the first experiment, twenty-five obeyed the orders
of the experimenter to the end, punishing the victim until they
reached the most potent shock available on the.generator. After
450 volts were administered three times, the experimenter called
a halt to the session. Many obedient subjects then heaved sighs
of relief, mopped their brows, rubbed their fingers over their eyes,
or nervously fumbled cigarettes. Others displayed only minimal signs
of tension from beginning to end.”
“Slater's volunteers did a similar experiment, but in an
immersive virtual environment where they interacted with a virtual
woman. This counters some of the ethical protests that have prevented
Milgram's experiment from being repeated because the volunteers
knew they would be interacting with a virtual woman and so, unlike
Milgram's guinea-pigs, knew that nobody was being hurt.”
—
“The group from whom the virtual woman was hidden delivered
shocks up to the maximum voltage, like many of those in Milgram's
experiment. Those who could see her were more likely to stop before
reaching this limit.
“Almost half of those who could see the woman said afterwards
that they had considered withdrawing from the study, and several
actually did. "Of course, consciously everybody knows nothing is
happening," says Slater. "But some parts of the person's perceptual
system just takes it as real. Some part of the brain doesn't know
about virtual reality." ”
