In a typical week, there are nearly 400 episodes of violence that are considered high risk for teens. Most violence on television remains sanitized. Violence is typically shown with little or no harm to the victim. In fact, more than half of the violent incidents on television depict no physical injury or pain to the victim. Media violence can cultivate fearful or pessimistic attitudes in children about the nontelevision world.
Media violence can desensitize children to realworld and fantasy violence.
Each year, most children spend about 1500 hours in front of the TV and 900 hours in the classroom. By the time children complete elementary school, the average child will witness more than 100,000 acts of violence on TV, including 8,000 murders. These numbers double to 200,000 acts of violence and 16,000 murders by the time they graduate from high school. The average child sees more that 20,000 commercials each year. By age 21, the average viewer will have seen 1 million TV commercials.