Interface vol.3 no.

se Botucatu 2007

The meaning of violence or the meaningless violence –

adolescents’ view on the media

Kathie Njaine

Researcher of the Latin-American Center for Studies on Violence and Health Jorge Careli; National

School of Public Health; Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (CLAVES/ENSP/FIOCRUZ)

<kathie@claves.fiocruz.br>

ABSTRACT

The present article is based on a qualitative study that aims to investigate the meanings attributed by

adolescents to the violence in the media, especially on television, and the ways in which this group

interacts with this media and appropriates its messages. The goal is to understand how the

phenomenon of violence, mediated by television, is interpreted, incorporated or disapproved by

adolescents in their everyday lives. Four focus groups with students from the seventh and eighth

grades in São Gonçalo were conducted, in two public schools (one state and one municipal) and two

private schools (one of middle-class and one of lower-class students), totalizing 33 adolescents. It

was concluded that one of the challenges for the field of public health is to improve its performance

in the prevention of violence, taking into account the relevance of the media in constructing a

discourse on violence. We call attention for the urgent need to understand the dimension and the

psychological and cultural impact of violence in the media on Brazilian children and adolescents,

once this phenomenon has been creating feeling of fear, anguish, and the seek for security. The

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positive aspect of the media as a potential partner in the education and promotion of children and

adolescents’ health is pointed out. The denaturalization of some notions of violence given by the

media, and the construction of spaces in the media for the youngsters to express themselves are

some ways for health promotion and violence prevention.

Key words: violence, media, adolescent, health

Introduction

This article has the goal of examining the meanings attributed by adolescents to the media

violence, especially on TV, investigating the ways in which this age group interacts with this means

and how they appropriate its messages. It basically attempts to investigate how the violence

phenomenon, mediated by television, impacts this age group, and how this mediation reconstructs

new meanings in the adolescents’ everyday lives. We consider, in the scope of this article,

adolescents’ perceptions about the faces of symbolic violence exerted by television, along

Bourdieu’s lines (1997). For this author,

Symbolic violence is violence wielded with tacit complicity between its victims and its
agents, insofar as both remain unconscious of submitting to or wielding it (Bourdieu,
1997, p.141).

One aspect of the symbolic performance of television, according to Bourdieu (1997), is in

the fact of this mean having an information monopoly, determining the relevance of some

information over other, and dramatizing some events, vulgarizing and spectacularizing them.

We also consider the adolescents’ perceptions on the representations of self-inflicted,

interpersonal and collective violence, a typology used in the World Report on Violence and Health

(Krug et al., 2002). Self-inflicted violence refers to suicidal behaviors and to acts of self-mutilation.

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Interpersonal violence refers to family violence (abuse against children, the elderly, and among

couples), and to community violence (juvenile violence, institutional violence, and violent acts such

as rape). Collective violence is exerted by people who identify themselves as members of a group

against another group or individuals, in order to achieve political, economic, or social goals. This

violence is expressed in many ways: armed conflicts, genocides, repression and other violations to

the human rights, terrorism, and organized violent crime.

The knowledge about this discourse on violence produced by television can provide

elements for the elaboration of measures to prevent violence in the fields of public health,

education, communication, and other areas that deal with adolescents.

Studies conducted in North American, European and Asian countries since the decade of

1960 attempt to show the adverse effects (direct and indirect) of television violence, especially on

children (Von Felitzen, 1999; Wartella et al., 1999). Regarding the adverse effects, a literature

review of over one hundred studies show that children and adolescents’ exposure to media violence

can: (a) generate anti-social and aggressive behaviors; (b) make the viewer insensitive to violence in

real life, and (c) increase the feeling of fear (Strasburger, 1999). Different from this functionalist

approach, there are other researches that privilege the cultural context and the processes of message

reception; they are particularly influenced by branches of symbolic interactionism, English and

Latin-American cultural studies. These theoretical branches consider the receptor as an active

subject in the communication process (Mattelart; Mattelart, 2000).

Reflecting upon the problem of violence in the media and the performance of public health

in the country, Njaine and Minayo (2004) recognize that the increasing presence of electronic media

in children and adolescents’ lives should be further investigated, focusing both on the relationship

established between this group and this media, and on the active potential of this media in the

prevention of violence and promotion oh health in this same group.

The communication scholar Vicente Romano García points to some aspects of the

interaction with the media:

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 These means entertainment can serve both to promote an escape from reality,

from obligation and responsibility, and to trigger a social encounter, the

temporal discharge of asocial tendencies; it can serve as subject of a

conversation, to relax, to relieve, to trigger emotions, to stimulate illusions, to

offer directions, to confirm everyday knowledge, and so forth. These are all

normal processes, often therapeutic ones. With two limitations: 1) that the

mediatic messages only perform this function temporarily, in a transitory

fashion; and 2) that all excessive mediatic consumption is dangerous and

possibly present adverse effects, that is, that the use of these means can also be

‘dysfunctional’ to the individual. (García , 2002, p.18)

Much of these effects interferes in the individuals’ socialization process, and occurs in a

subliminal way (Ferrés, 1998). This perspective results in investments in new studies on the media

effects, which are often "latent, implicit in the ways how distortions in messages production reflect

themselves in the recipients’ cognitive patrimony” (Wolf, 2001). The information “massacre”,

according to Levinsky (1998), through images and sounds, can often interfere in a negative way in a

child’s psychic apparel, letting him/her passive, dependent, irritable, intolerant, and with language

problems, especially when an adult is not around. For this author, the violence content in the media

does not reflect itself only in the physical action against the body.

(The violence) is in the excessive excitement that reaches the psychic apparel, coming

from the external world or from the pulsional life and threatening the individual

psychic capacity to select, elaborate, and discriminate. (Levinsky, 1998, p.157)

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 These interferences also affect the ways in which adolescents live their subjectivity and

their identification processes, restructuring their interactional spaces, and producing new meanings

for the social reality (Colonnese, 1998; Spink, et al, 2002).

Violence against children and adolescents in Brazil – brief overview

From the public health perspective, considering children and adolescents as the population

between 0 and 19 years-old, and the deaths for external causes as the most serious expression of

social violence, Souza and Mello Jorge (2004) present an epidemiologic overview of this

phenomenon that targets this age group. According to the authors, from every ten children and

adolescents who die in the main capitals of the country, seven of them die from violent causes or

accidents. In 2000, male children and youngsters represented 84,1% of all deaths, and their female

counterpart represented 15,9%. In terms of their profile, these victims are usually from low level of

schooling, live in the outskirts of big cities, belong to the most impoverished groups, are black or

have black heritage. The main cause of death are transit and transportation accidents (38,8%) and

homicides (24,6%), which represent together more than half of the general mortality (63,5%) of

children and youngsters. Between the ages of zero and four years-old, domestic accidents are the

main responsible for mortality, revealing the hidden face of family violence, expressed in the form

of negligence from the parents or from those responsible for children’s care. Between the ages of

five and nine years-old, transit accidents are the main responsible for children’s deaths. However, in

adolescence the cruelest side of violence expresses itself in the homicides. Among the potential

factors that trigger violence against children and adolescents, Souza and Mello Jorge (2004) points

to the use of alcohol and other drugs, and the use of fire guns. These expressions of violence, in real

life or in fiction, are presented in the communication means in a decontextualized way, detached

from their causes and consequences.

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Methodoly

This is a qualitative study that has its interpretive basis in the methodological referential of

in-depth hermeneutics (Thompson, 1995), emphasizing the process of comprehension and

interpretation of the symbolic forms of violence, mediated by television and interpreted by

adolescents.

In order to approach the adolescents, we adopted the focus group technique, which seeks to

contemplate the opinions, values and perceptions of a certain group that shares similar identification

features (Krueger, 1994). The aim is to understand the meanings attributed by adolescents to the

violence presented in the media. For such, an interview protocol was designed, containing questions

related to the habit of watching TV, to their preferred TV shows, to their opinions about the images

of youngsters portrayed on TV, to the consumption relationships, to the family mediation, and

specific questions about the meanings attributes to the violence featured in the media.

Four focus groups were conducted with students from the seventh and eighth grades in São

Gonçalo, Rio de Janeiro. The study was conducted in two public schools (a state one located in a

neighborhood where frequent violent events occur, and a municipal one located in a safe

neighborhood in the same city), and two private schools (one of middle-class students, and the other

a religious school that serves students from a lower economic status). The field work was conducted

in April 2003, covering a total of 33 students (17 boys and 16 girls), ages between 12 and 14. Three

groups were composed by four boys and four girls, and one group was composed by five boys and

four girls. Students in one public school had a delay in relation to the grade they should be taking;

they had ages from 15 and 17. The groups were conducted by a researcher and an assistant, and

took approximately one hour and a half each.

A pre-test was conducted with students from a private school, ages 12 and 13. The

adolescents’ participation in the focus group occurred after them signing an informed consent,

according to the resolution number 196/96 from the National Council of Health. The research was

approved by the Ethics Committee in Research, under the report number 08/03.

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 The analysis of the qualitative data was conducted after the transcription of the interviews,

fluctuant reading, and categorization of the themes.

Results and discussions

In the relationship established between adolescents in São Gonçalo and the television, a

fictional show and a news program were pointed as the youngsters’ preferred shows. The preference

for the soap opera “Malhação” from Rede Globo (the main Brazilian TV station), a production

especially targeting the adolescent audience, supports the results of a research conducted with 1.220

youngsters in the city of Rio de Janeiro (Minayo et al., 1999), demonstrating the catalyzing effect of

this show on youngsters’ lives. In terms of the ways in which risky situations are approached in this

program, the students in São Gonçalo support the opinion of students in Rio de Janeiro, who

believed that the soap opera treats in a superficial way themes such as drugs and adolescent

pregnancy. Another complaint was that many of the fictional situations do not correspond to real

life, since the experiences with drugs or adolescent pregnancy are much more complicated and

conflicting. Despite the criticism about this soap opera, adolescents claim to like the show because

it is entertaining and much of the plots are similar to aspects of their lives.

The non-fictional show, Jornal Nacional, also from Rede Globo, was mentioned as the most

seen by the youngsters. In the interviewed students’ understanding, this news program helps

youngsters “to react to some life problems” (seventh grade student/ public school), such as violence

and unemployment, and “it is a way to protect ourselves from things” (eighth grade student/ public

school). This news program is seen as helping them to prevent risks such as violence and diseases.

The featuring of certain problems that constitute risks to life and health are constantly repeated

through the use of images and news. The youngsters’ opinions indicate how the media can

reorganize the recipients’ everyday lives and their physical-temporal space, through the circulation

of certain concepts, such as riskiness. Spink et al. (2002) attested the growth of a riskiness language

in the press in the 90s, especially in the economy, sports, and public security sections. The concept

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of risk is also directly applied to refer to situations of danger to people’s life and health. Frequently,

this concept is used in the perspective of blaming and holding the individual accountable for his/her

health and safety. This way of appropriating the concept of risk figures in the interviewees’

discourse, and indicates a way of apprehending the meaning of violence, mediated by television and

decontextualized from the field of public health. This concept of risk is related to the individual’s

responsibility for his/her feeling of fear and insecurity, not indicating how these risks can be

prevented from the perspective of social institutions and public policies.

In terms of the way television interferes in adolescents’ daily lives, two relevant aspects can

be understood from the discourse of students in São Gonçalo. First, the adolescents perceive the

media as constructing distorted images from adolescence, represented in the fictional programs

through the supremacy of white boys and girls, who have life styles very different from most of the

Brazilian population. In the symbolic sphere, this form of exclusion is almost invisible, if it was not

for the ways in which it negatively affects the process of social identity construction of children and

adolescents. In relation to the electronic media, the adolescents (particularly those from lower

economic status) observe that their image portrayed on television is often associated to delinquent

acts. In sum, the adolescents in São Gonçalo perceive that television, when representing violence

involving youngsters, makes a radical distinction between the upper and lower economic statuses of

the population, when the adolescents are both victims and perpetrators of violence. The students

illustrate this perception with a real case of an upper-class young woman from São Paulo, accused

of brutally killing her parents. This case was treated by the media, in general, as an act committed

by a psychologically ill person. Despite the theories that do attribute hideous crimes to serious

pathologies, for the adolescents in São Gonçalo if the crime had been committed by a poor

youngster, the event would had bee attributed, by the media, to the youngster poverty situation. This

discrimination face, naturalized by some entertaining and news programs, is perceived by the

youngsters in this way:

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 (...) the youngster who does the right thing and who is featured on television is not the
youngster who we see in our daily lives. Sometimes the boy has a dyed hair, is a nice
person and the television does not show it. The youngster who is on television is a
white boy, wearing polo shirt, with blue eyes (...).
(...) sometimes there is a group having fun, not doing anything wrong, then the police
says ‘look at the druggies’´. Then [the television] says that it is a gangster ".
(seventh grade students/public school)

Another form of media interference, verified in the adolescents’ discourse, occurs in the

social behavior, particularly in the media stimulation to consumption, in the fashion, and in the

personal style. Canclini (1999), investigating the relationship between consumption and citizenship,

affirms that identities today are defined by the ways to consume, materially or symbolically, in

terms of what one has or has the potential to acquire. Half of the students believe that because of the

consumption impulse, the media is able to stimulate delinquent behaviors of some adolescents who

wish to obtain material goods, most of the times inaccessible to them. The behavior of imitating

violent attitudes from the media (more frequently seen among small children exposed to real life

violence), was also mentioned by one public school female student as a form of influence from

television. This student claimed that her four years-old nephew was watching a violent movie while

witnessing the police chasing a man who had tried to hide in his house. The child’s reaction was to

say that he wanted to be a “gangster” to “kill everyone”. The constant exposure to violence in real

life and in fiction impacts children and adolescents’ lives in a negative way, generating intolerance

and other feelings. In these cases, the presence of an adult is fundamental in order to help the

youngsters to make sense of live events (Levinsky, 1998). Part of the students do not believe that

television has the power to influence adolescents, although they agree that there are some

distortions in the ways the media portrays the phenomenon of violence. Programs about police

cases, such as Linha Direta and the auditory program Ratinho cause contradictory reactions in the

interviewed adolescents. With discourses that support justice and truth, these programs at times

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have a messianic character “because they help people” (seventh grade student /public school) and

show “some cases that are real (...) the aggression, the killing” (eighth grade student/public

school), and some other times cause repulse among the youngsters, because of the

spectacularization of violence and exploration of human suffering.

The media discourse about the phenomenon of violence produces a diffuse feeling in most

adolescents. While they criticize the fictional and the news programs for the banalized way they

treat the question of violence, the adolescents try to use this information to create mechanisms to

defend against violence. The feelings of fear propagated by the media create destabilizing effects in

the ways adolescents organize their daily routines. Some adolescents claim that they panic to watch

the repeated images of criminals on television, and avoid certain places associated to the occurrence

of violent events. However, they do not reflect upon the most serious forms of family and

institutional violence, indicating a lack of knowledge about their rights. We found that in their life

context, there is a lack of dialogue, which is fundamental in the school and family spaces.

Communication as a human action essential to interaction is almost entirely replaced by the

mediatic discourse, which constructs images of violence decontextualized and with no possible

solutions.

Most of the youngsters interviewed recognize that the parents’ omission and the lack of an

affective communication can impact children. They understand that the family conviviality is

important to control the programs children watch and to trigger conversations among parents and

adolescents. Rappaport et al. (2002) affirm that in family circles that privilege dialogue in conflict

resolutions, and where there is an affective exchange between parents and children, the child is less

impacted by the television contents. According to Orozco (1993), among the elements intervening

in the relationship between television and audience, the family is the most important. As attested by

the opinion of a female youngster in the research:

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 (...) the television can influence (...) but I have my father’s advices, so I am not
influenced, at least I think I am not too influenced, because I see one thing there and
another thing at home (eighth grade student/private school).

Violent scenes in fiction, when featured in an explicative context, have the power to

transmit to youngsters a model that should not be followed. Some students consider that certain

behaviors of characters on television, however, trigger conflicts at home. This research verified that

many values transmitted by the media clash with moral family values. For instance, the time to

return home at night, which is determined by the parents, is questioned by many adolescents who

watch a higher permissiveness for characters the same age on television.

Few students report not having the habit of watching television or not caring for the

television programs, valuing most the conviviality with family and friends. Only one student from

the public school claims that the media exerts no influence in his behavior: “if the television

influenced someone, I would be the biggest gangster in the world!”. This youngster claims to fill his

time with music, conversing with his father and friends, and he claims to have no interest in

television programs.

The violence in adolescetns lives: the reality dimension

The violence experienced and witnessed by many adolescents in São Gonçalo surpasses

fiction and facts. The majority of adolescents interviewed had suffered or witnessed some form of

violence in the family, school, or community. It is the case of a male youngster who had seen a

friend being killed: “a friend I had (...) was done in front of me. The father had no conditions (...)

he wanted to have a car, a motorcycle, these things that he saw on the soap operas” (eighth grade

student/private school).

Many situations of conflicts in the family, school and in the neighborhood were reported

during the focus groups, revealing an intricate network of violence, in which the real and the

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symbolic dimensions feed each other. Some interviewees revealed to be treated in a differentiated

way by their parents, especially when their potential is compared to some preferred sibling.

Disaffection with family members, particularly with stepfathers and stepmothers, are also

mentioned as causing conflicts: “I have a stepfather, but I don’t get along with him, I hate him”

(seventh grade female student/public school).

An epidemiological study in 2002, with 1.714 school youngsters from São Gonçalo/RJ,

investigated the relationship between self-esteem and violence among adolescents between the ages

of 11 and 19. This study verified that 55,4% of the interviewees had suffered some kind of ill-

treatment during childhood and adolescence, perpetrated by their parents of by significant people

around them. The research found a correlation between the violence experienced by this group in

the family and the violence experience in school and in the community (Assis; Avanci, 2004).

Some adolescents in the present study claimed to suffer verbal aggression from teachers, as

in the case of a teacher from a private school who use to call his students “dumb” in the classroom.

The community violence also impacts directly and indirectly the daily lives of adolescents,

especially those living close to areas where the drug trafficking acts. For some youngsters, death

represents the most tragic consequence of violence and, at times, they do not recognize or minimize

the impact on non-lethal violent events, emphasizing the need to increase consciousness about the

consequences left by these events.

In terms of the playful relationship youngsters can establish with more creative and

informative cultural products on television, in relation to risky situations, the majority of

adolescents are overly critic, as claimed by one student:

The television is not informing to alert youngsters, the elderly, and children. It is
exchanging information for money, because everything on TV nowadays is about the
audience, it is nothing more than the audience (eighth grade student/public school).

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 Students from a public school located in a violent area of the city, and who are delayed in

school, claim that there are no programs on television that sincerely speak to youngsters. They

attribute this to the fact that these programs are not economically advantageous to the media. They

contrast the lack of interaction and identification with the media to their experiences in the focus

groups, where they could freely express themselves about several issues of interest for youngsters.

One most critical minority understands that in television messages “in both good and bad

(messages) there is some information that help you to converse (...) you have to be conscious that

one thing is bad and the other is good. You have to know how to separate things” (eighth grade

student/private school).

Few students think that we should not overvalue the violent content in these genres, because

fiction is a product of the authors’ creativity. But they consider important that television show more

of the “the real life”, because “people’s everyday lives are not a movie (...) if the guy cut someone’s

head off, the head would be there on the floor, bleeding” (eighth grade student/public school).

Conclusions

Adolescents’ opinions about themselves are not amorphous or without criticism. They are

able to deconstruct the hegemonic image portrayed by television, and show that their identity is not

exclusively determined by this image. In other words, they do not completely interiorize the

negative image that, in their opinion, some medias and society in general create about youth,

particularly, black poor youth.

Some adolescents emphasize the risky situations to which they are exposed, either because

of them living in areas dominated by drug trafficking or because of their relationship with people

involved in crime. However, the majority claims to resist to drug trafficking corruption and

seduction. In contrast to this expressed adolescent resilience, television labels most youngsters

living in these areas as “marginal” or “potential marginal”. This negative representation of

youngsters in the media supports, at least, two forms of victimization: a) the truculence of some

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policemen when approaching youngsters in general, and particularly youngsters living in the

outskirts or in slums, judging them for their appearance in order to justify violence against this

group; b) the prejudiced and unkind treatment given by many services (public and private) and by

society, in general, particularly to groups from lower economic levels..

This is one of the most serious forms of symbolic violence, as claimed by Bourdieu (1997).

In addition to this somehow invisible violence, the spectacularization of other forms of violence is

also disapproved by girls and boys in the study. None of the adolescents approve the television

sensationalism, but recognize in a more contextualized approach a way to learn and reflect upon the

phenomenon of violence. This is the case of the social marketing seen is some TV soap operas,

which has been treating the theme of family violence, for instance, in the context of health and

prevention. Despite the contradictions in the mediatic production in terms of its public obligation to

inform, television constitutes an important source of information to adolescents, who end up

learning the sense of risk of violence transmitted mainly (or exclusively) by this mean. In the

absence of preventive policies, we understand the privileged place occupied by television in

adolescents’ daily lives.

Why do adolescents, even criticizing some forms of representations of violence in the

media, seek on television a way to protect themselves against the risky situations, such as violence?

One possible explanation is in the fact that the media occupies this mediation space, considering

that it should and can speak about all themes, because everything counts as "information" and all

information is of public interest. Another explanation refers to the omission of the social institutions

responsible to protect children and adolescents, and to these institutions’ ignorance about the media

hegemonic discourse on violence, and its socialization role.

As stated by Canclini (1999), when dealing with the relationship between the lower

economic classes and the communication means, "the audience appeals to the radio and television

in order to get what the social institutions do not provide: services, justice, amends, or simply

attention" (1999, p.50).

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 One of the challenges for the area of public health in amplifying its field of action in the

prevention of violence is to understand these questions. There is, for instance, an urgent need to

know the dimension and the psychological impact of mediatic violence on Brazilian children and

adolescents, once it has been generating feelings of fear, anguish and insecurity. In a positive way,

the media should be seen as a fundamental partner in this group’s education and promotion of

health, as pointed by Njaine and Vivarta (2005). Relevant projects in education for the media are in

course in the country, and they confirm the pro-active potential of diverse medias.

The denaturalization of some notions of violence given by the media, and the construction

of collective and democratic spaces for the youngsters to express themselves and to position

themselves in the world are some ways to qualify these interactions and to strengthen citizenship.

Agradecimentos especiais a Joviana Quintes Avanci que contribui para a realização dos

grupos focais.

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Translated by Mariana Barcinski

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