Video Games and Juvenile Delinquency (Essay Sample)

Video Games and Juvenile Delinquency
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There has been increased public concern on the correlation of playing violent video games and juvenile delinquency. Recently conducted research has shown that majority of perpetrators of shootings and other violent crimes are adept players of violent video games. The American Association of Psychologists affirms of an association of violent video game use and increase in aggressive behavior and antisocial behavior. However, the report was quick to point out that there is insufficient evidence that such acts of aggression can result in delinquency ("APA Review Confirms Link Between Playing Violent Video Games and Aggression", 2016). This paper examines theories and experiment that attempts to demonstrate causality between violent video games and youth delinquency.
One of the theories is the general aggression model (GAM). This theory senses that some situations may trigger aggression-related memory and increases the likelihood of violence and other delinquency related acts. Anderson and Dill claims that exposure to violent video games may trigger aggression behavior through cognitive cueing effects (Anderson, Gentile, & Buckley, 2007). Video games that involve violent crime may provide strong memories that may induce a juvenile to commit a crime if a similar situation exists in real life. Moreover, it may lead to a person creating a situation that is similar to the video game. For example, Chris Harper-Mercer murdered 10 people before committing suicide in Umpqua campus. Prior to the murders, he had hinted that he would do it in one of the online gaming site he frequented. The inciting response he got indicate that obsessed violent video game users desire to see real life violence incidents and treat their effects as trivial as they were a score in a game.
The GAM theory is complemented by the Bandura's Social Learning theory. This theory claims that the youth learn social behavior through the process of observing the behavior of others. Replication of the Bandura's experiment shows that aggression leading to violence and possibly crime may be learned through violent video games especially in young children (Griffiths, 1999). In addition, this theory demonstrates how the video games influence both the sexes differently.
However, there is a large amount of evidence that indicate that use of violent video games lead to a decline in youth delinquency. In the book Grand Theft Childhood, the authors demonstrate that youth delinquency reduced from 1994 to 2003 though there was an increase in the number of youths who played video games and the violence content in the game (Kutner & Olson, 2008). They claim of a laboratory experiment demonstrating that playing video games lead to increased aggression, but aggression does not always result in violence or delinquency. This is akin to the findings of the authors of Violent Video Game Effects on Children and Adolescents (Anderson, Gentile, & Buckley, 2007). They dispute long-term aggression influence of violent video games leading to delinquency claiming that laboratory findings should not be interpolated into real life situations where other factors might come to play.
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