CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY There is a great concern about the incidence of violent behavior among children and adolescents. This complex and troubling issues needs to be carefully understood by parents, teachers and other adults. Children as young as preschoolers can show violent behavior. Parents and adults who witness the behavior maybe concerned, however, they often hope that the child will grow out of it. Violent behavior in a child at any age always needs to be taken seriously. It should be no be quickly dismissed as just a phase they are going through. Adolescent access to and consume a variety of these different media forms, many of which have high level of violent content. Most home have television sets and next to sleeping, watching the television (TV) is the frequent activity of adolescent. Lomonaco, Kim, and Ottaviano (2010) assert that the average child in the United States spends four hours a day watching the television. The situation in Nigeria is not very different most children, between 5 and 20 years of age, spend over 6 hours a day using entertainment media (television, commercial and self recorded videos, movies, video games, print, radio, recorded music, computers and the internet(Roberts, Foctir and Rideout, 2005). In recent times, watching Nigeria movies, (Africa Magic) most of which have a high violent content, has become a popular pastime of many youths. The implication n of this is that by the time the average child is 18 years old, he/she would have witnessed many act of violence, including murders. Beresin (2009) found that up to 20 acts of violence per hour occur in adolescent programmes. The high level of violent content of the media forms correlate with youth violence. Internet website showing violence; (killing, shooting, fighting, etc) correlate with about 50% increase in reports of seriously violent behavior (Lomonaco et al, 2010). The result of the violent media programmes and desensitization to violent video games (Caragey, Cray and Bushman, 2007). TV sets are commonly present in bedrooms. The effect of having a TV set in a child’s bedroom is that it increases their TV viewing time. It may also imply that parent will be less likely to monitor the content of what is watched, and might not be able to set consistent for media use. Also, such children might participate in fewer alternative activities, like reading, sports and games. Violence is often considerable, even in programmes which are not advertized as violent. Overall, weapons appear on prime time TV on an average of about nine times each hour. Adolescent shows are programmmes are more likely to juxtapose violence with humor, and are less likely to show the long term consequence of violence. While violence is not the human race, it is an increasing problem in modern society. With greater access to firearms and explosives, the scope and efficiency of violent behavior has serious consequences. We need to look at the recent school shootings and the escalating rate of youth homicides among urban adolescents to appreciate the extent of this ominous trend. While the cause of youth violence are multi factorial and include such variable as poverty, family psychopathology, child abuse, exposure to domestic and community violence, substance abuse and other psychiatric disorders, the research literature is quite compelling that adolescent exposure to media violence plays an important role in the etiology of violent behavior. While it is difficult to determine which children who have experienced violence are at greatest risk, there appears to be a strong correlation between violence and aggressive behavior within vulnerable at risk segments of youth