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Ever wonder why your parents let you play outside and maybe even walk to piano lessons, but now those things seem incredibly scary? The answer could be "CSI."
Well, not just "CSI," but the fact is: when we watch scary shows like it, and "Law & Order," and "The Mentalist" and "Bones" and -- take your pick -- we know they're fiction, but our brains get cluttered with their pictures and plots nonetheless. That's because the shows feel ultra-real, down to the last maggot.
So a researcher at the Mayo Clinic, psychiatrist Timothy Lineberry, decided to see how real they really are. He did a simple study: He compared the violent crimes on "CSI" and "CSI: Miami" to the actual violent crimes committed at the same time in the real world. And guess what?
He found gaps big enough to drive a morgue dolly through.
First of all, in real life, alcohol and drugs are often a factor in crime. People get high, they get crazy, they hurt each other. True fact -- boring plot point. So usually, that's not what's on "CSI." (It's usually not on the nightly news, either.)
The second big discrepancy? Race. On TV, Lineberry found, the victim is likely to be white. Even though in real life, minorities are overrepresented as crime victims.
But the gap that probably has made us most terrified about letting our kids leave the house is this: On TV, the perp is usually a stranger. In real life, most victims know their murderers, and, when it comes to child abuse, the vast majority of kids know their abusers.
On TV, though, it's a girl getting dragged from the playground one day, a boy getting tracked down by a nut on Facebook the next, and pretty soon it starts seeming like the world is full of mean people. There's even a name for that feeling: Mean World Syndrome.
Mean World Syndrome is the social science term for the way scary, violent media convinces viewers that the world is more dangerous than it actually is. And, according to George Gerber, the researcher who coined the phrase (but is, alas, dead -- of nonviolent causes): The more TV we watch, the more scary and unforgiving we believe the world to be.
About 43,000,000 people watch "CSI" annually. So maybe it's not surprising that in a recent Gallup Poll, 74 percent of Americans said that they think crime is increasing. That's even though, in 2009, crime in America dropped to a levels not seen since the 1960s, according to FBI data. Hard to believe but we are enjoying a 30-year drop in crime!
Believing in the Mean World instead of the real world is what's prompting us to keep our kids locked inside. We want them to be safe.
The great news that we'll never see on "CSI" (or CNN, or the local news), is that our kids are pretty safe. They are at least as safe as we were, back when our parents let us play outside and walk to piano lessons.
Let's let 'em out.
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ReaderComments (Page 1 of 1)
4-28-2010 @ 2:16PM
Wendy Sue Swanson, MD said...Yes, let's let 'em out! Now just to calm down about it and trust that we live in a safe place with nice people...
Thanks for the post, I loved it. No more CSI-CNN-Homocide-The Wire for me.
Wendy Sue
Reply
4-28-2010 @ 3:28PM
brooklynshoebabe said...Dear Lenore,
You don't know how much your blogs/articles/tweets have been helping me ease the anxiety I've had since becoming a mom 5 years ago. I was raised by my grandmother who was extremely overprotective. My brother and I were not allowed to play outside ever. My grandmother didn't let us know our phone number for fear of us giving it to strangers. She walked us to school until we were 13-years-old. We weren't allowed to have keys to our apartment on the off chance we would cut school and come home. Needless to say, our childhood was very stifling. I did grow up in a poor neighborhood during the NYC's crack 80s though.
So alot of my grandma's paranoia trickled down to me, and the "world has changed for the worst" has also kept me afraid even though I'm raising my girls in a neighborhood 100 times better in the one I grew up with!
I stopped watching the news 6 years ago because of all the violent crime reports. I am a huge L&O fan, but I also stopped watching SVU when I had children. Cluttered my mind with too much fear. Only thing I can do is teach my child to be safe ( don't get in cars with strangers, look both ways before crossing, don't touch stray dogs), and pray that the lessons stick.
Reply
4-28-2010 @ 5:41PM
tatebk said...Lenore, I posted something about this recently on another writing of yours. :) I know it can affect me, but it's really short lived. Last night, in the middle of a particularly gruesome episode of Criminal Minds, I had to walk the dog. While out, in the dark, I heard footsteps behind me and consciously did not react or feel fear, but when the guy came around on one side rather quickly, I did jump, much to my own surprise.
Instead of yelling at him or getting otherwise upset, I laughed at my own ability to be manipulated.
You know what shows like SVU have taught me? Prostitution is dangerous. Who knew? :) Besides that, I'm sure I'll be walking my dog again tonight in the dark. I don't have any children of my own yet, though, so maybe extreme fear from those shows are increased once you have offspring.
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4-30-2010 @ 2:10PM
drummeyd said...In the 70s and 80s, for my grandmother it was The National Enquirer. They were already covering stories of abductions (alien and otherwise) along with other threats. My grandmother would not let me take dancing lessons because she was afraid I would be snatched. When my mom and I lived in a duplex, she was sure that the neighbor's son (about 25 at the time) would break down the door between our two apartments to rape me. The paranoia is not new, it's just become an epidemic.
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5-17-2010 @ 5:02AM
Father Time said...I miss the old days when crime drama meant organized crime like the Godfather. They were great stories and didn't inspire fear.
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5-17-2010 @ 5:02AM
Father Time said...Actually I take that back, I don't miss the old days I just wish crime shows were more like say the Sopranos instead of 5 different spin offs of Law and Order. I bet you anything crime shows would not inspire as much fear if the criminal was the main protagonist (since you got to try to make the protagonist relatable unless it's a comedy)
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9-08-2010 @ 2:50PM
Fitz said...I don't think we can put the blame on CSI type shows. I'd say they are more a product of the paranoid atmosphere, rather than the cause of it.
I'd put most of the blame on the TV News cycle. For the past 30 years they've gotten more & more tabloid, more & more enamored with the most lurid details of the worse crimes imaginable. Is it any wonder that our popular culture is now saturated with shows about heroes who solve these "once in a career" type crimes on a weekly basis? Is it any wonder that we think these things are happening all over the place?
I'm 30 years old; so I was born and raised during the end of "white flight" & the move toward the suburbs. I was raised with authority figures constantly talking about "stranger danger," "satanic ritual abuse." In those days how many day cares were shut down and their workers prosecuted because of BS Satanic Ritual Abuse allegations? But now I'm watching my contemporaries start to have kids and talk about how things are so much more dangerous than when we were kids. In the 1980s.
Perhaps I could buy that when children of the 1950s were having kids in the 1980s lamenting how the US go so much more dangerous. But seriously children of the era of crack-cocaine & stranger danger talking about how much worse things have gotten?
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