Video violence is creating a criminal society, say academics

Repeated presentation of video clips could affect children and oversensitive or depressed people to use violence against others or themselves, they told a seminar on the impact of violent video on Thai society, organised by the Thai Health Promotion Foundation.

The foundation's media watch group manager Tham Saicheu said the community had entered a time when crime and the Internet were converging and becoming easily accessible.

Video clips were a new cultural trend allowing people to produce and publish the content themselves.

The most searched for video clips on the Internet were pornographic,peeping tom,crime news,comedy and news clips.

Tham warned such crime and Internet convergence - including computer and IT advancement, social circles, a tendency to use negative words as searching tools, and crime - was leading to an "online criminal society". Young people were equipped with the ability to share information, but lacked maturity in using media, which could lead to social problems.

He urged controls on the repeated presentation of violent content which could change society by causing people to be too familiar with it, he warned.

Youth mental health expert, Dr Kamol Saengthongsrikamol from Bangkok Hospital, said that seeing violent images repeatedly affected small children and those who were oversensitive or suffering from depression. He said small children would respond with no regard to others' pain because they lacked maturity, while those suffering depression could act out the violence, such as killing or injuring themselves.

"The media has a job to present the facts but every time they show repeated images of violence, they stimulate people's mood for violence. The media should present such images moderately," Kamol said.

Thai Broadcast Journalists Association vicepresident Patchara Sarapimpa said the profession this year drafted guidelines for news presentation and complaints could be filed if there was a violation.

He said the association had tried to oversee a professional code within an appropriate frame. If the media didn't present news at all, society would have no standards of what was right and what was wrong.

A youth representative, Nareelak Pradabsil, said the violence factor often came from families in which parents beat each other in front of the kids until the act was regarded as normal, leading to a tendency for kids to use violence to solve their life problems too.