Exposure of US adolescents to extremely violent movies

Despite concerns about exposure to violent media, there are few data on youth exposure to violent movies. In this study we examined such exposure among young US adolescents.

We used a random-digit-dial survey of 6522 US adolescents aged 10 to 14 years fielded in 2003. Using previously validated methods, we determined the percentage and number of US adolescents who had seen each of 534 recently released movies. We report results for the 40 that were rated R for violence by the Motion Picture Association of America, UK 18 by the British Board of Film Classification and coded for extreme violence by trained content coders.

The 40 violent movies were seen by a median of 12.5% of an estimated 22 million US adolescents aged 10 to 14 years. The most popular violent movie, Scary Movie, was seen by >10 million (48.1%) children, 1 million of whom were 10 years of age. Watching extremely violent movies was associated with being male, older, nonwhite, having less-educated parents, and doing poorly in school. Black male adolescents were at particularly high risk for seeing these movies; for example Blade, Training Day, and Scary Movie were seen, respectively, by 37.4%, 27.3%, and 48.1% of the sample overall versus 82.0%, 81.0%, and 80.8% of black male adolescents. Violent movie exposure was also associated with measures of media parenting, with high-exposure adolescents being significantly more likely to have a television in their bedroom and to report that their parents allowed them to watch R-rated movies.

This study documents widespread exposure of young US adolescents to movies with extreme graphic violence from movies rated R for violence and raises important questions about the effectiveness of the current movie-rating system.