Last week my 11-year-old son awoke with horrendous nightmares. His body shook in fear. The evening before he’d watched a MA+ film at his friend’s house, one that involved gratuitous violence and murder.
His friend’s mother had allowed him full access to her adult Netflix account and, according to my son, may have left the house at the time. The boy’s parents were people one might describe as ‘Mullum hippies’. I’d seen them on occasion at Ecstatic Dance and group meditations. Had they forgotten the original hippie mindset of peace and non-violence, of beauty and flowers?
Sadly they aren’t the only ones whose actions seem incongruous with their hippie image. I know of mothers away on yoga retreats whose sons sit at home all day playing violent combat video games. Or dads adorned in prayer beads with pre-teen kids on TikTok till midnight.
Many local kids have their own phones nowadays before they even enter high school, with access to all sorts of gross online content. Of the top ten movies and TV series on all major streaming platforms at any one time, most contain highly distressing depictions of death, rape, torture, and murder. It is no coincidence that much of this content is produced in the US where audiences seem to have become thoroughly desensitised, requiring ever-more shocking images to keep them stimulated. A country with the highest violent crime rate in the world.
Allowing our children free range to explore the poisonous exports of the US film industry before they have the maturity to make sense of it is neglect, perhaps even abuse. Why do we so flippantly enable such vicarious trauma in those we love?
As a long-serving paramedic I know a thing or two about vicarious trauma. And for me, seeing tied-up, blood-splattered bodies on a top-rating crime show or a Hollywood movie is not so different to seeing it in real life. It’s often worse, I think, given how the modern cinematographer loves a slow pan over ligature marks.
Would I ever have invited my children for a ride on the ambulance to gawk at some mutilated dead bodies? Would a soldier take his kid into battle, to have a go of the gun? A rising mountain of research now supports the argument that viewing graphic content can have a cumulative negative effect on not just children, but adults too. A recent study by the University of Bradford in the UK has gone even further by making a connection between viewing violent TV shows or videos and exhibiting symptoms of all-out PTSD.
Yes, I know, parenting is exhausting work. Sometimes we just want to switch off and let the kids do what they want. But I’m compelled to ask, at what cost?
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
