MIND MOVES: Would you allow your children to ingest infected food? What parents would give a broken bottle to their baby, spoiled solids to their infants or knowingly provide contaminated fare for anyone?
Who would give sharp-edged toys to children or weaponry to teens for entertainment? It would surely be considered an outrage if it emerged children were thus callously exposed.
Imagine further. What family could condone children playing among the dumps, lifting the detritus of life, exploring deeper, more intensely into the noxious, the venomous, the deleterious to their physical safety and bodily health?
And would we encourage children to enter, unaccompanied, caves of unknown content, within which indescribable dangers might await? Would we allow them to wade in dangerous waters or to jump into nothingness on the word of others that they were safe? Would we listen to academic dispute about these dangers or deny our own common sense, our sense of what is right for our own child? Unlikely.
We are rightly concerned about what a child consumes and where our children play. We ensure that their physical environment is sheltered, sanitary and secure. Our protests are piercing when threats to that environment are disclosed. Any suggestion of health hazards and calls for immediate government action ensue. Parents do not want pollutants to compromise their children's health and safety.
Yet around us, as vaporous as air, as subtle as sabotage and as toxic as any threat to physical health, lies a mental world to which many, many children are exposed. And we are silent. Why?
The world of those interactive games which contain extreme gratuitous violence, gross sexual sadism, visible bloodshed, reward for cruelty, callousness and crime could hardly be described as a suitable mental playground for children. It is a dark enclave of carnage. It is a world of cold-blooded viciousness where enjoyment and entertainment depend upon the ability to deceive, destroy, mutilate and maim. Sex is given for money, taken violently, after which women, being disposable, are bludgeoned to death and left in a pool of blood. Reward is commensurate with capacity to kill. Success depends on excess of aggression. Points are scored for using and abusing and outmanoeuvring others.
This is the mental milieu many children inhabit. It is what shapes the circuitry of the child's brain and the cultural construction of their world. This is how we tell our daughters who they are and our sons how they may behave. This is the role model, the culture of disrespect, the trivialisation of violence in men and violence towards women, constructions of both that demean them.
Where is the protest? How come the tiniest trace of toxic waste alarms us while mental toxicity remains? Are psychological pollutants less lethal than physical contaminants? Where is the political will to address them? Where is the outrage that this is the ethical locale to which we expose the young? Unlike the local dump, there may be no noxious odour to warn us of danger but the consequences waft into clinical encounters with children as we witness the effects of their exposure to the effluent of our worst imaginings.
At periodic intervals the issue of violent video games emerges as one of social concern and dies a death as determined, instantaneous and "automatic" as any interactive 3D character can inflict. Soundbites reduce the complex to the absurd. Mixed messages ensure an information impasse. Industry representatives confuse with ratings that are as effective as their enforcement. Any child will tell you about that. Children can acquire any game they desire. The young are derisory about adult naivete and ineffectuality in this regard.
At intervals the adult world does become concerned. A child crime becomes linked to media, as influence, instigator, desensitiser or as the source from which the crime was probably designed. But because human behaviour is too complex to claim that, the debate is dismissed and the wider danger of these "games" subsides until the next alert.
Meanwhile, rapes mimicking media presentations are cited, statistics on child crime unearthed; warnings about desensitisation and the normalisation of violence by repetitive violent images reiterated. Studies linking increased physical arousal, aggressive emotions, decreased empathy, decreased prosocial helping behaviours, short-term observation and long-term forewarning are restated. But concerned clinicians are defined as moral maniacs, the fearful as fanatics, relevant research is relegated to the inconclusive category and parental protest subdued. The media moment passes. The "killographic" games continue. The industry returns to profit making. Society pays.
Recently another alarm bell sounded with the alteration in America by the Electronic Software Rating Board (ESBR) of the rating of Grand Theft Auto San Andreas to Adult Only or AO. This occurred on foot of the reported discovery that a user-made modification allowed owners of the PC version to unlock "hidden" adult scenes. There have been calls for a federal inquiry and recall of the game has already begun. What will we do here?
Marie Murray is Director of Psychology at St Vincent's Hospital, Fairview in Dublin.