The Byron Review
On the 6th September 2007 the British Prime Minister asked Dr. Tanya Bryon to:
conduct an independent review looking at the risks to children from exposure to potentially harmful or inappropriate material on the internet and in video games.
With the pages headed ‘Byron Review – Children and New Technology’ I had hopes that Doctor Byron might widen her remit and examin the unreformable medium as well as the reformable media.
Dr. Bryon states in her forward:
Hardly a day goes by without a news report about children being brutalised and abused in the real world or its virtual counterpart. Some make links between whathappens online or in a game, and what happens on the streets or at home.
True enough.
These headlines have contributed to the climate of anxiety that surrounds new technology and created a fiercely polarised debate in which panic and fear often drown out evidence.
True again. Unfortunately Dr. Byron fails to looking into which media is polarising this debate. For if she did she would be faced with fierce media concentration on one side, and a wealth of achedemic evidence on the other. As adequate highlighted in Dr. Aric Sigman’s ‘Remotely Controlled’ :
Just the arrival of television in a country or a community seems to be followed by an enormous surge in the rates of violence. A little-publicised major study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association has looked at the prevalence of murder, rape and grievous bodily harm, as they would any other disease such as AIDS or Sars that harm a population. It found that following the introduction of television in both the United States and Canada murder rates doubled, and concluded: ‘If, hypothetically, television technology had never been developed, there would today be 10,000 fewer homicides each year in the United States, 70,000 fewer rapes, and 700,000 fewer injurious assaults. Violent crime would be half of what it is.’ Across the United States, as different regions got their first television sets, there was a 10- to 15-year delay before violent crime suddenly escalated to double what it had been. The same was true in Canada. And five years on when televisions saturated the households of America’s less well-off ethnic minorities, the murder rates doubled there too. England and Wales were not immune either. About 15 years after television sets became the norm, murder rates doubled. This 10- to 15-year incubation period between the time television is introduced and when the rates of violence double is believed to be the period when the first television generation ‘comes of age’.
What is equally surprising to me is that when the author of the study reported these findings at a press conference of the American Medical Association, referring to this television-related violence as an ‘epidemic’, there was apparently not a single mention of him in the press the next day. The researcher’s prescription was uncompromising: Take the TV sets out of children’s bedrooms. It’s just parental abdication to let them have televisions of their own.’ Yet again, this has fallen on deaf ears. While a single copycat video game-related murder makes the news, this much bigger finding is entirely unknown by most well-informed people When you consider the headlines given to other health issues such as the contra-ceptive pill, AIDS or MMR, one becomes suspicious as to why this type of study doesn’t have similar prominence. Many people and broadcasters simply don’t want to hear or don’t believe the magnitude of this finding. And many newspapers and magazines are owned by or own the same television corporations who have good reason not to publicise negative studies about television. In fact, one study on this very conflict of interest says that ‘although the scientific evidence linking television and violence has grown considerably stronger over the past three decades, recent news reports imply that the scientific evidence is weaker than did earlier reports’.
A debate which she can not win.
Her Executive Summary highlights the following:
In relation to the internet we need a shared culture of responsibility with families, industry, government and others in the public and third sectors all playing their part to reduce the availability of potentially harmful material, restrict access to it by children and to increase children’s resilience.
It seems to have bypassed Dr. Bryon altogether that the removal of the medium would negate the need to ‘toughen up one’s child’ at all. What of those that don’t want a tough child? What of those that want a kind loving and care-free child ready to explore the wonder of life and the world?
Under Key Arguments and Recommendations she says:
There are also concerns about excessive use of these technologies by children at the expense of other activities and family interaction.
A good point unfortunatly unexplored or expanded upon.
The voices of children, young people and parents and the evidence of harm in relation to the internet and video games are discussed in detail… Overall I have found that a search for direct cause and effect in this area is often too simplistic.
Finishing with:
We need to take into account children’s individual strengths and vulnerabilities, because the factors that can discriminate a ‘beneficial’ from a ‘harmful’ experience online and in video games will often be individual factors in the child. The very same content can be useful to a child at a certain point in their life and development and may be equally damaging to another child.
Where Dr. Byron decides to take cover behind the well established scientific rock of ‘a balenced view’ with the rest of her job-protecting fraternity. Leaving the debate open for others more courageous to join the dots.
The report continues to recommend ‘awareness campaigns’, ‘e-safety’, ‘media literacy’ and ‘parent training’. Which is akin to getting an AIDS patient to live with his condition instead of curing it.
From here Dr. Bryon goes on to discuss video games.
The evidence on video games is discussed in Chapter 6. There are some possible negative effects of violent content in games, but these only become ‘harmful’ when children present other risk factors:
- There is some evidence of short term aggression from playing violent video games but no studies of whether this leads to long term effects.
- There is a correlation between playing violent games and aggressive behaviour, but this is not evidence that one causes the other.
I don’t know about you but if some one states that ‘There is a correlation’ and then states in the same sentence ‘but this is not evidence’ THAT is a contradiction. Dr. Sigman helps to clarify in this regard.
It’s true to say that there is a tradition that blames most new forms of media for society’s ills. Every popular art form – the novel, the circus, Punch and Judy shows, comic strips, movies and rock’n’ roll has been singled out for blame upon arrival. ‘One generation’s trash is the next generation’s art form,’ says Richard Rhodes, author of Why They Kill But just because those media were held accountable doesn’t mean that some of those accusations weren’t actually true. In 1950s London, teenagers for the first time tore up the cinema seats when Bill Haley and the Comets performed American rock’s’ roll. And certain black-and-white movies may well have caused antisocial behaviour. But that is an issue to do with the content of the medium. Television cannot be compared with any form of media that has come before. The sheer amount of time we watch, the biological effects of the new television technology and the nature of the things we see in such high concentration are unprecedented and incomparable to our previous use of novels, comic books and 78 rpm singles with a photo of Elvis on the sleeve.
That is the entire point. Television is qualitatively different to a book, a record or a comic strip.
…
Scientists have also looked at the number of hours people watch per day to see if this is related to violence. Columbia University professor Jeffrey Johnson and his colleagues have found that there is a powerful relationship, and the effect of television is not limited to violent programmes. Just an hour a day of any type of television programming watched by teenagers made a significant difference in how violent they ultimately became as adults. It seems that younger brains and minds in development are not merely influenced by what they do see on television – they are influenced by what they’re not doing. For example, unlike reading, television does not provide the cognitive stimulation that produces brain devel-opment and the intellectual and emotional benefits that arise from this (*). It is this seemingly benign factor that has been consistently overlooked.
Johnson tracked 707 families in upstate New York for 17 years, starring in 1975. When the children reached the age of between 22 to 24 years, the researchers correlated the number of hours of television they had viewed at the age of 14 with police and FBI records of violence and interviews. In 2002, Johnson published his findings in Science, reporting that children who watched one to three hours of television each day when they were 14 to 16 years old were 60 per cent more likely to be involved in assaults and fights as adults than those who watched less television. And those who watched three hours (less than the national average!) or more a day were five times more likely to behave violently and aggressively as adults. Remember, four hours per day is absolutely normal in most Western countries. In fact this is far less than the average teenager watches, especially if you include videos, DVDs and computer games. The study preempted and essentially dismissed the usual criticism that ‘These results have nothing to do with television – it has to do with lifestyle. People who watch more than three hours of television are different to those who watch less than an how:’ The effects of parental neglect, poverty, dangerous neigh-bourhoods, a history of psychiatric disorder and other independent risk factors for aggression were statistically eliminated. And the increase in aggression and violence asso-ciated with television viewing held true both for children who had previously displayed violent tendencies and those who had not shown earlier aggression.
Dr. Byron continues:
33. However, we need to approach unequivocal claims of direct causes with caution – there is a strong body of ethnographic research which argues that context and the characteristics of each child will mediate the effects of playing video games. This means considering the media effects evidence in light of what we know about child development. We can use this to hypothesise about potential risks to children from playing some games, for example:
- Arousal brought on by some games can generate stress-like symptoms in children.
- Games are more likely to affect perceptions and expectations of the real world amongst younger children because of their less developed ability to distinguish between fact and fiction (due to the immaturity of the frontal cortex).
- The interactive nature of games may also have a more profound effect than some other media, again especially amongst younger children (e.g. up to around 12 years old) who tend to use narratives to develop their values and ideas and who learn through ‘doing’.
The simple statement that each child’s context and characteristics mediate their use of video games is meant purely to beg the question ‘How are we to protect them from the media [that is video games] if all children are different?’
34. There are new risks presented in online gaming, many of which are similar to the potential risks to children of other internet use. These games offer new opportunities for social interaction between children and there are a number of potential benefits for children and young people from playing video games, including cognitive and educational gains and simply having fun. Interestingly the evidence to prove these benefits can be as contested as the evidence of negative effects.
There are no cognitive and education gains to be had from staring at a screen perfectly still (see above *). In her final sentence we once again we find Dr. Byron hiding behind sciences well established ‘balanced view’ screen. Again recommendations are made with words like ‘increase understanding’, ‘work together’, and the all but useless ‘classification system’. And just to quell and reservations parents my have…
Alongside this work I am also clear that we need to ensure we get the most out of video games for children’s learning and development, building on research into educational benefits. To this end I also recommend that:
- Government supports a dialogue between the games industry and the education sector to identify opportunities for the benefits of game-based learning to be evaluated in educational environments.
Don’t worry, games can be educational.
Further in the report the following statements can be found:
Very few people are genuinely addicted to video games but lots of time spent playing can result in missed opportunities for other forms of development and socialisation. – p.11
The majority of concerns raised about the risks to children and young people from video games centre primarily on two areas: content, especially violent material, and excessive use – p.17
Excessive use of video games was raised so strongly by respondents to my Call for Evidence, including by children and parents themselves, that I have looked at the research in this area to explore the findings about ‘addiction’ to video games (see Chapter 6). These concerns about the nature of children’s ‘media diet’ are a central issue for parents and will be a key part of their motivation for managing their children’s use of new technology. I recognise and support this – a balanced ‘media diet’ and range of play and other activities are important for development – but I also think we need to support parents to go beyond these concerns to think about and address wider issues of their children’s safety online andin gaming. – p.17
Video games are among the most popular leisure pursuits of children and young people. – p.19
While Dr. Byron states that a limited number of people are addicted to video games she also highlights the fact that is it one of the leading leisure pursuits among children. And even though it was ‘raised strongly’ by her ‘call for evidence’ she see no reason to examine it further. This is again highlighted in the following passage:
During the course of this review I have been struck by the degree of concern about risks to children from their use of the internet and video games. There is evidence to support many of the concerns that parents and others raise which is discussed in detail later in this report. But there are also two other key factors at play: a generational digital divide between parents and children and an ongoing debate in society and the research community about the effects of the media on society.
I am currently on page 22 of the 226 page final report. I do not hold out any hope that Dr. Byron has any genuine recommendations to remove the screen from our childrens lives or society.
