thin the two through four hours of watching television on a daily basis. Those numbers drastically increase by the time the child reaches the age of eighteen. At eighteen years old, the same child will have witnessed about 200,000 acts of violence and another 40,000 murders. Another shocking statistic is that fifteen percent of all television programs contain violent acts. That amounts to approximately 188 hours of violent programming on average. These statistics were provided the organizers of the Internet page www.mediaandthefamily.org. Another study done by the National Television Violence Study in 1996 showed that 70% of all violence acts on television went unsanctioned. This is an important statistic because showing how violence is punished and its consequences is the most effective way to suppress the likelihood of violent behavior. In another study done over a ten-year span by Dr. Susan Villani, another child psychologist shows the correlation between violence in the media and aggressive behavior. In her study, Dr. Villani conducted a ten-year review of music. She found a clear association between heavy metal and hard rock music (which usually have very dark and violent tones), and reckless behavior. She also found that those who choose heavy metal music as their preference had a much higher rate of suicidal thoughts. Dr. Villani then looked at music videos as a source of violent content. In her study, she found that 22% of music videos shown on MTV had violent acts as opposed to just 11% of the videos found on VH1. This means that MTV, whose primary audience is made up of teenagers and younger, witness more acts of violence than that of the average viewer of VH1, whose primary audience consists of adults ages 25 through 40. She also found that rap videos have the highest concentration of violence. It is again the younger audience that witnesses the violence since the majority of listeners of rap music are made up of younger pe...
