Sex, Violence and Soap

I was reading one of those salacious stories about a sexual abuse trial that British newspapers so love to print - with the excuse that they are providing a public service by giving us all the horrible details for people to salivate over - when it struck me how deeply flawed its central premise was.  In order to act as clickbait (Hell, it got me reading), the story's title and opening paragraph highlighted how the guilty party had been inspired by an old EastEnders episode to shag his underage step-daughter.  Now, I naturally assumed that the soap story line in question was the one from some years ago when it was revealed that Bianca's ex-husband had been sexually exploiting and abusing their then teenaged step-daughter, Witney.  I mean, you can see that a causal link might be postulated, no matter how spurious. But no, it turned out that they were referring to an even older plot where Grant Mitchell shagged his mother-in-law, (she was, as I recall, pretty hot and he was quite a bit older than his wife, Tiffany).  Call me naive, but I'm not quite sure how watching a soap episode where someone has an affair with his wife's older (obviously) mother could really be argued to have been inspiration for a perv shagging his younger step-daughter.  I strongly suspect that he had always wanted to shag her and probably had a thing for underage girls and suddenly saw an opportunity.

It highlights the problems in trying to establish causal links between what people see on screen and their actual behaviour in real life.  Establishing that viewers really are influenced, to the point of copying behaviours, by what they see is extremely difficult.  As seen in the story I referred to, getting a near match between the screen activity and the real activity is pretty much impossible.  While  don't doubt that there are those who will use having watched something on TV or online as a justification for their misdemeanours, in most cases, I can't help but suspect that they were going to do it anyway and that, at worst, watching something similar merely helped reinforce their determination to do it.  If the footage they had seen hadn't existed, they still would have acted on their urges sooner or later.  Not that the lack of any actual link has ever stopped the media from trying to create one.  I recall many, many years ago, when Halloween had its first TV outing in the UK, there was a murder in Southampton, where a knife was used - the press immediately jumped on the fact that it apparently happened at the same time the film was showing on ITV.  Except, if the lazy journalists involved had bothered checking the local TV listings, they would have known that Southampton was in the Southern TV area and they had opted out of debuting the film that night, instead showing it a few days later.  But why let the facts stand in the way of a bit of sensationalism, eh?

Of course, one of the arguments made by those behind the whole 'video nasties' moral panic was that they were motivated by a desire to protect children from seeing graphic depictions of sex and violence on then unrated videos.  While there is some merit in this argument - children are vulnerable and susceptible to suggestion - the subsequent rating by the BBFC of videos effectively addressed the problem by putting the ball firmly back where it belonged - with parents whose responsibility it surely always had been to protect their children from such material by restricting their viewing of it.  By rating videos, they no longer had the excuse of ignorance - "Honestly officer, I didn't know it was that kind of video".  The other argument with regard to exposure to sex and violence on screen is that it can serve to norrmalise it and desensitise some viewers.  Which is a perfectly legitimate argument.  There is no denying that depictions of violence have become not just more graphic, but more realistic.  (Back in the day, the gore you got in most of those so called 'video nasties' - especially the Italian zombie and cannibal pictures - might well have been graphic, but it was in no way realistic, more likely to elicit laughs than repulsion).  Likewise, the boundaries of the sort of sex you see on screen have been pushed back, very possibly creating highly unrealistic expectations in viewers.  (Again, back in the day, the sort of smut I used to see as a young guy was invariably of the 'sex comedy' variety, which, correctly, depicted most participants as gormless, fumbling amateurs and gave the distinct impression that the height of sexual ecstasy involved grappling with a girl-next-door type in the back bedroom of a suburban semi on a wet weekday afternoon).  To get back to the original point, I really don't think that the average soap opera episode can be put on a par with a 'video nasty' (although some of them can be pretty nasty in other ways) for influencing viewers into committing acts of extreme sexual abuse and violence.