Hurting others "for the buzz"

THERE may be nothing to eat but cornflakes; no books, few clothes, absent or indifferent parents and little stimulation - but the home is fully equipped to receive state of the art satellite TV. Such homes have a strange kind of "squalor" which is difficult to describe unless you have actually seen it, says Noel Howard of the Irish Association of Careworkers.

Living in a video world with an international menu of pornography and violence at their disposal, certain vulnerable children are having greater and greater difficulty distinguishing reality from fiction. This isn't mere opinion: it is fact, based on research by Dr Nuala Healy and Marie Murray at St Joseph's Adolescent Services in St Vincent's Hospital, Dublin.

Their study of Irish first year pupils found that 41.8 per cent are watching TV to escape from the real world, and that 37.9 per cent are watching to block out pain. Their study of 1,000 12 to 17 year olds, found that more than two thirds (70.9 per cent) had seen 18 cert sexually explicit videos and that half (49.8 per cent) believed that what they were seeing on video was "true to life". "So what if the material is of a violent nature and the sexuality they see is coercive and violent?" asks Ms Murray. "And what if they also believe that it is all true to life and that the appropriate means of behaviour is through violence? And what if they believe that it is true, as they see on TV, that life is cheap and that women are commodities? How does that translate into what they believe about the real world?"

It doesn't take much imagination to work out the consequences that such a detached and perverse view of sex and violence could lead to more and more disturbed young men who rape, hurt, torture and even kill women and children.

Dr Healy and Ms Murray believe that the violent and sexually exploitative imagery of TV and video is helping to create a generation of remorseless young criminals. The children are modelling their behaviour on the physically and sexually violent role models they see on TV. School is the stage on which a lot of this is acted out - but, with only one psychologist per 50,000 pupils in primary schools, the schools are unable to cope.

Add to that rampant drug abuse, with 12 year olds committing crimes to support drug habits, broken families and the economic anger of impoverished kids who don't understand why they cannot have everything they see on TV - and you have a recipe for social unrest which makes the riot in the Dublin suburb of Gallanstown look entirely predictable.

Low intellectual skills are another common characteristic of these youngsters and, combined with the inability to distinguish reality, these factors are creating children who destroy and hurt other people because they enjoy the stimulation. TV encourages them to objectify crime victims, so that they have absolutely no awareness of bow their actions affect other people.

Interviewing and observing some of these young people, Dr Healy and Ms Murray have been baffled and disturbed by their glazed expression and their lack of conscience. These are children who, when you ask them why they do the things they do like drug taking, handbag snatches, smash and grab and joyriding, just stare at the floor and say, "for the buzz".

The argument that poverty alone ha& created this situation cannot be sustained by the evidence, they believe. "These children are not necessarily economically deprived, they are emotionally deprived," says Ms Murray.

But is it always possible to teach such children to make a connection between their impulses and others' feelings? Dr Murray and Ms Healy believe that this is our only chance. They have learned through the cognitive educational assessment of these youngsters that they have a "vulnerability in the language area".

Like MTV's Beavis and Butthead, they do not understand the consequences of their actions. Their emotional vocabulary is so poor that they objectify other people, as the violent sexual imagery of the TV programmes they see encourages them to do.

"If you do not have the words to put on your feelings, you are more likely to act out your emotions," says Ms Murray. It is as though a short circuit in the brain prevents them from making any connection between the visceral and the logical train of events which could occur if they followed their emotional impulses.

THE selfishness of these children is quite stunning. When a boy tells Ms Murray or Dr Healy that he beat up an elderly woman or stole a car "for the buzz", they try to probe deeper. Eventually they hear the children saying. "I'm the only one who can take care of me and I'm going to do it in any way possible," says Ms Murray. "We're seeing children who are angry and vengeful. The way they think is `nobody understands me so why should I care?'"

Dr Healy and Ms Murray are convinced that tackling the roots of criminality involves teaching these children and teenagers how to feel empathy for their victims. But the task is daunting because these children have no emotional vocabulary, How can you offer "therapy" to children who are so emotionally illiterate that they do not have the language to engage in therapy?

Ms Murray and Dr Healy are developing "tele therapy", a TV based means of stimulating these young people into learning to articulate their feelings. This is the sort of programme which the Government needs to fund generously if it is serious about tackling crime.

At Oberstown Boys Centre in Lusk, Co Dublin, staff also see an Litter lack of moral sense and of empathy for others' feelings as the major problem for the boys in their care. The centre's director, Michael O'Connor, also believes that video violence is helping to create violent youth, hand in hand with economic deprivation.

"There are pockets of people in the community who have never worked and are never going to work who are using video to escape from reality. The kids are bored and the parents happy to have their kids absorbed," he says.

The Murray/Healy study found that one third of 12 to 17 year olds said that they would get ideas on how to commit crime from videos and Mr O'Connor has no doubt that this is the case.

"Video violence is a huge factor," he says. "The kids emulitte what they see in videos. The more violence they are exposed to, the more violently they behave."

EIGHTY FIVE per cent of the 30 boys at Oberstown are being punished for car stealing and joyriding, although more and more are coming in as a result of smashing car windows and taking handbags. At nearby Trinity House there are yet more detained teenagers, among them sex offenders, "life takers" and rapists.

"These boys are very egotistic," says Ms Wall. "Their only concern is how things affect them. They have not much feeling for their victims. Our challenge is to raise their awareness of the consequences of their actions. The whole focus of our work here is to help them develop a sense of morality and of taking responsibility for their actions."

There are, however, about five per cent of the population who are sociopaths, which means that they are congenitally incapable of ever learning how their actions affect others. This group which includes sexual offenders have a disastrously low success rate in therapy. Along with attempting to rescue morally the majority of young offenders by teaching them the difference of right from wrong, we need to think more about protecting society from those who will never learn this lesson.

"There's a small proportion of people who should be confined, who will never change no matter what is done," says Dr Healy. "That has to be faced. Work with sexual abusers and those who commit violent rapes is unsupportable. As soon as they get out they do it again."