Terror strikes and celluloid ideas

This is not the first time that fears have been expressed about criminals or even terrorists getting their "inspiration" from crime and violence depicted in films and television. Warnings have often been issued to the effect that cinema and TV should be careful not to go into graphic details about how criminal acts are planned or carried out.

A group of 25 prominent British child psychologists concluded that there is a definite link between violence portrayed in video films and TV and aggression among youngsters.

Their report regrets that psychologists have so far underestimated the degree of brutalities and sustained sadism that film-makers are capable of inventing and willing to portray, let alone the special effects technology that supports such images.

According to a widely quoted study by Professor Centerwell of the University of Washington, the introduction of television in the US and Canada led to the doubling of the homicide rate in the sixties and seventies.

In one of the most shocking crimes in recent times, two eleven-year-old boys in Britain killed a two-year-old child. The murder was so brutal that Justice Morland who heard the case said, "I suspect that exposure to violent video films may in part be an explanation".

It has been estimated that a child in America is visually exposed to 33,000 murders and 200,000 acts of violence by the time he is 16. Apart from increasing aggressiveness in the short-term, such long-time exposure also leads to a desensitisation towards violence so that violence becomes more easily acceptable in the society.

The depiction in film and television programmes of murderous violence as well as the detailed planning and execution of criminal activities must be curbed to the minimum.