Hypersexualized and Violent Media

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sex, drugs and violence from television shows, movies and other entertainment media. About 10% of teens acknowledge that they have learned more about acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) from these media sources than from parents, school personnel, clergy, or friends.”

Hypersexualized and violent media robs youth of their innocence by planting inappropriate ideas. It shows them a world that is inappropriate for their age group leading them to want to experiment and try these things out for themselves, such as handling guns or other weapons, and experimenting with their sexuality and sexual orientation. There are certain activities that children should not be taking part in that are shown in violent and sexual media.

Two 12 year old girls, Anisa Weirer and Morgan Geiser from Wisconsin stabbed their friend, Peyton Leutner, 19 times because they wanted to impress a fictitious internet character named Slender Man. One of the girls suggested they be proxies for Slender Man. The girls were very clear to police that they intended to kill Leutner as a sacrifice to Slender Man. They said they "committed the crime out of their devotion to a character they found on the internet, slender man". He is the thing that we fear but we don’t actually encounter, he’s the thing we check under our bed for. The girls say he watches over them, reads their minds, and teleports them to him. Two 12 year old girls stabbing their friend nearly to death is unimaginable.

Psychologist F. Kaeser says “This constant saturation of sexual and violent images, while highly effective in selling products, is confusing and scary to young children, who are incapable of understanding and processing their meaning. And as girls and boys see each other’s focus on sexiness and violence, they learn inaccurate lessons about themselves and their gender, and about relationships between females and males. In short, it gets in the way of them developing a healthy sexuality.” A child could have never had a homosexual thought in their life but they may hear it in a song or see it on television and think that it is acceptable to participate in these type of sexual activities because it is so widely accepted by society as normal.

This problem can easily be fixed by parents simply taking the time out to supervise their children when playing certain video games or watching television, monitoring the music they listen to, or adding parental control to their electronic devices. Ideally, parents should be the ones to teach their children about sex and violence but if it does not happen that way, they need to sit them down and talk with them so that they do not get it misconstrued.

Hypersexualized and violent media is more common in today’s society. This type of media ultimately leads to the corruption of children’s’ minds, behavior and innocence. It is the parents responsibility to try to curtail the amount of exposure their children have to such