Memory: The Effects of Violence on Children

  I did a project and presentation on violence and memory in children. The Prezi I made was (quite brilliantly, if you ask me) Harry Potter themed, which held the attention of my classmates much more than anything I could have said about my topic...ever. Not to say the topic was boring; in fact, it was rather fascinating to learn how much young children can actually remember. This project was important to me because it was the first time I was allowed to explore my interests in education. I must say that the actual delivery of the script was not terribly smooth because I was told at the last minute that I had a lot less time than I originally thought! However, my professor seemed impressed with my final project, so that was good. Here is a basic script for my presentation, containing my findings (and relating some of it to Harry Potter), some pictures of parts of my Prezi, and my works cited page.

Final Script

I was really interested in our discussion on what each of us remembers of 9/11. For some people, it was very personal, so they remember a lot, but for others, our lives weren’t terribly affected by the event, so we don’t remember much. Because of this, I became really interested in how children remember traumatic events.

For my project, I studied how children remember violence based on these questions.

The first question: What do I mean by “violence” in this project?

By everyday violence, I mean comic book or stage fights, professional wrestling, scripted name-calling, superheroes, things like that. By “aggressive” actions or children, I mean kids who are prone to bullying others or fighting. I took traumatic violence to mean violent acts like severe physical, mental, or sexual abuse, crimes like kidnappings or shootings, and deaths. Also, in one study I looked at, the researchers conducted experiments based on “positive” and “negative” events. The “negative” events the children recounted were events that were stressful or frightening, like a bad injury or witnessing violence. The Harry Potter series happens to have excellent examples of almost every kind of violence I am talking about.

So, where do we see violence in everyday life? There was an experiment conducted in which kids’ levels of aggressiveness were measured before and after watching the show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. It turned out that the kids were more violent after watching the show, which is a major twist in the whole violent-media-makes-kids-more-violent stand. The conclusions were that the tv-watching itself could have been what made the kids more violent or because the kid was being told to watch the show when he’d rather be doing something else. However, the main message in a comic book or song or anything comes out best when incorporated with violence because that is what the child is going to remember. If you think about it, a kid is going to be more inclined to want to protect the planet when there are evil aliens attacking than when the ice caps are melting. In Harry Potter, we understand the true character of many of the characters when they are under the pressure of a violent situation. I, for one, finally saw how brave Neville is when he brings Harry, Ron, and Hermione into Hogwarts covered in scars and again when he slays the final horcrux. Children use play to work through day-to-day scenarios and use what’s called “fantasies of combat,” or combative play, to feel stronger and to understand more about real violent situations. However, when a traumatic event makes its way into the child’s play, the play may become repetitive and unproductive (called “captured”) as the child tries to find a meaningful reason for the traumatic event.

Now for my main question: what do kids remember?

Many studies determined that children over the age of 2 have vivid and detailed memories of traumatic events such as, as found from one study, emergency surgeries. In this case, Harry was too young to remember much about the day his parents died without using magic to access parts of his brain or to see it from others’ perspectives.

An interesting part of a study in which kids were asked to recount positive and negative events was that the kids talked a lot more about their feelings and emotions when remembering a traumatic event than when remembering a positive one. Kids with higher language skills were even better at this. You might remember this scene from the movie. Snape is a teenager and is being bullied. For most of the scene, the camera is trained on Snape so the audience can see his fear and his thinking through the situation, which is what was important to Snape to show the others.

These kids were also more able to remember more about traumatic events, although the kids were generally very good at remembering positive events, too. The traumatic events were narrated much more coherently than for positive events. Another interesting thing was that there was almost no difference, in these studies, between how much a kid could remember about an event recently and an event a while ago.

In July 1976, a school bus was pulled over by two men. The men ordered the driver and kids into a van, which was transported several states away. Then the kids and driver were forced underground into a buried truck. After 16 hours underground, the hostages escaped and made their ways home. There were some studies done on the victims of this kidnapping. Most of the children said the scariest times were when they were being moved from bus to van or van to underground because they had no idea what would happen. Three or four years later when the kids were interviewed again, many said they had seen warning signs before the event, which psychiatrist Lenore Terr says was the kids’ way of trying to answer “Why me?” and make sense of a situation that made no sense at all.

Before a child learns to speak, he or she usually remembers things like a series of snapshots without a linear sequence. As adults, we occasionally go back to this way of remembering when the linear thinking is completely shocked out of us.

The transition to linear memory happens as the child is raised with consistency and predictability. A kid raised without this or with violence in the house may not move into linear memory.

How do children’s memories work?

Much of the way a child remembers an event has to do with both the violent and normal environment in which he lives. It’s based on the nature of the violence, the child’s ability to understand what happened, the child’s ability to cope, and how protective and supportive their normal environment is.

The ability to have a “verbal” memory of an event comes around age 3 and develops with language skills. Trauma can damage what is called the hippocampus in the brain, which can cause children’s memories of the event to become fragmented and incoherent.

In very young kids, short-term memory is better than long-term memory, but young kids can often give better narrative memories if given a cue of some sort, like asking them to tell a certain family story.

What are the effects of violence on children?

Hearing about or witnessing violence can be just as harmful to the child as being the victim. Problems that can result include physical health and safety, psychological adjustment, social relations, academic achievement, skewed views of the world and of themselves, changed ideas about the purpose of life and their expectations for future happiness, and affected moral development.

Also, kids who have experienced violence are more likely to become violent than other kids and often start becoming violent earlier. However, the main study I looked at found no differences between the level of violence a kid was exposed to and behavioral problems.

In conclusion, I have found that kids can remember violent or traumatic events much more clearly than they can positive ones and that kids use play to sort through possible and actual problems in their lives.

 

Works Cited

Craig, Susan. "The Educational Needs of Children Living with Violence ." Phi Delta Kappan. 74.1 (1992): 67. Print.

Fivush, R., Hazzard, A., McDermott Sales, J., Sarfati, D. and Brown, T. (2003), Creating coherence out of chaos? Children's narratives of emotionally positive and negative events. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 17: 1–19. doi: 10.1002/acp.854

Garbarino, J. (2001), An ecological perspective on the effects of violence on children. Journal of Community Psychology, 29: 361. doi: 10.1002/jcop.1022

Groves, Betsy. Children Who See Too Much, Lessons From The Child Witness To Violence Project. Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 2002. Print.

Jones, Gerard. Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence. New York City: Basic Books, 2002. Print.

Kracke, Kristen. "Children's Exposure to Violence: The Safe Start Initiative." OJJDP. (2000): 76. Web. 24 Nov. 2011. <http://clem.mscd.edu/~neesii/PowerPoint/safestart.pdf>.

MacGowan, Douglas. "The Chowchilla Kidnapping." truTV: Not Reality. Actuality. n.d. n. page. Web. 24 Nov. 2011. <http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/gangsters_outlaws/outlaws/chowchilla_kidnap/index.html>.

Margolin, Gayla , and Elana Gordis. "The Effects of Family and Community Violence on Children." Annual Review of Psychology. 51.1 (2000): 445-479. Print.