For more than a decade, violent video games have been blamed for inspiring everything from aggressive thoughts to actual school shootings. But a leading police executive in New Zealand has a unique new theory:
Next-gen consoles are to blame.
As reported by the New Zealand Herald, Superintendent Bill Harrison, national manager of police youth services, said that recent increases in youth violence have coincided with the launch of the Xbox 360 in late 2005. The newspaper cited statistic showing a 25% jump in arrests of New Zealand youth for crimes of violence.
While Harrison attributed some of the increase to a police initiative targeting domestic violence, he speculated on the effect of violent games after watching his own son play an unspecified Xbox 360 game:
It was desensitising him to violence. It was shifting his norm about how he would deal with conflict.
You see these kids – their hands are wringing wet with sweat because their bodies are taking in what’s going on on the screen and they are acting it out.
Harrison called for a planned government study into youth violence to include the effects of violent video games. However, Auckland University psychologist Ian Lambie told the Herald that game violence had no effect on most youth:
There is a subset of the population that is far more likely to be affected. But we know that the problems are far more complex. It’s learning issues, it’s a whole range of other developmental problems.
