Violence in Society: Who's to Blame — Media or Human Nature?

Violence seems to be on the increase in our world today. One can hardly listen to news without violence reports here and there; both physically and on social media, via video games, there are touches of violence that we see more often these days. You still watch movies, and it's violence everywhere, and this raises a concern if all these factors are the reasons why violence is getting worse in our real world nowadays, and how can this growing problem be curbed?

The first thing that came into my mind after reading through the prompt description was those world wars some decades ago, which took away the lives of many humans; the civil war also happened in my country over little agreement that later caused massacres, bloody nations, and other crises. Were there war movies back then? Were there social media or video games back then? Those people who initiated wars then obviously didn't watch it from the movie or get inspiration from video games. Let's just agree that violence is part of humans.

There is always disagreement, and people will choose to act violently instead of finding strategies or ways to resolve conflicts. My brother, who resides in the northern part of Nigeria, sent me videos of the killings that happened over there. The herdsmen who entered people's houses dragged them out and cut off their heads. What is the problem? The answer is something irrelevant, something that has no head, yet they prefer to go violent. Recently also, my brother's wife lost her cousin in the hands of the kidnappers who refused to be given money but chose to kill the innocent man. Go to the universities and see how cultists act violently. Just a little disagreement: you will be hearing one sad news after another, and it's been like this for many years and is still going. There are physical fights that happen constantly in certain environments, and these are violent behaviors.

You see, the stories of violent behaviors in our world have been going on for decades, from then till today. It's unfortunate that it kept increasing from one country to another; there are always cases of violence in our society.

Talking about movies and a possible inspiration from there, a lot of action movies display loads of violent scenes, and many people find it entertaining and tag the movies without such actions, like carrying a gun, as boring movies. Obviously, watching those kinds of movies is not going to turn all viewers into serial killers or violent humans, but does that mean that violent media has no effect at all on anyone? Maybe not to a large extent to adults who understand that it's just a mere movie; they can choose to mimic the actors or choose to behave responsibly. It's actually their choice because they understand that it's a mere movie, but it's a concern to young children at their very early ages when they cannot even distinguish between a mere movie and when things are actually real. Such early exposure becomes a risk factor to their lives. What they feed their minds with matters a lot.

In summary, it's in the nature of humans to be violent, and why I can't blame movies or video games or social media for being the cause of the violence we are experiencing today, it will be better if both adults and children place limits on how we expose our minds to such violent acts so it doesn't impact our minds negatively to some extent.

All images are from canva.