“Behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something”.  

So, today I had the opportunity to watch the new Avengers movie, the movie that everyone has either seen or is talking about.  No secrets will be told here, but it was the usual group of hunky guys, end of the world, good versus evil kind of thing.  It was an amazing array of super powers, weapons and violence.  Characters were shot, stabbed, blown up, beheaded, burned, thrown from cliffs, crushed and turned to dust. Oh sure, there were little dabs of blood on their foreheads and on their cheeks, but nothing graphic.  Which I guess is what makes the violence alright.

Since the movie came out, kids, both boys and girls have been playing Avengers.   After all, there is one particularly memorable scene where all the women work together as a team to beat the bad guy – very awe inspiring for a young girl.  You might say, well this is just how young children play.  Sure, I played “Batman” with friends, you know, the 1966 version, and army men with my younger brother and shot at him with those smelly cap guns, but I never tried to actually hurt HIM.  I believe there are kids today who honestly don’t know the difference between real and pretend violence.  That’s because violence is violence.

At one point during the movie, which is very entertaining by the way and seems to go much faster than its three hours would dictate, I found myself tearing up.  Not because the movie was so moving, but because for one section of the movie, the combination of visual violence, sound and music almost became like physical blows to me.  It was too much.  I knew it wasn’t real and yet it was even too much for me as an adult. It concerns me even more in thinking that kids have maybe become numb to the violence. Before someone categorizes me as some kind of overly sensitive woman, I will let you know that two of my favorite shows right now are Killing Eve and Blacklist, neither of which would I ever allow a child to see.

In the last few weeks, there has been a lot in the news about violence, especially as it relates to schools.  Everything from school shootings to students committing suicide to Florida legislation giving teachers the right to have guns in the classroom.  Caring adults everywhere are questioning gun laws, school security and trying to find solutions.  Teachers are leaving the profession, one the reasons being that practicing hiding children from an active shooter was not something that was taught in their methods classes.  Nobody seems to have any answers.

So, let’s go back to this movie.  Three hours of nothing but violence in a theater where half the people in the audience were children.  Like kids pretending to be the Avengers and imitating the action they’ve seen.  Perhaps some of the same kids who play violent video games where they actually get to be the person who kills.  Did you know that someone is trying to make a video game where you get to be the shooter in a school?   Who in their right mind would think this was ok?  And yet, if this happens, there will be kids playing this, again perhaps not completely understanding that death is final.  This is where the danger is.

My question is, to all the caring adults in the world, the ones who are rightfully concerned about violence in schools, why is any violence for children condoned?  Violence is violence whether it’s real or depicted on a screen.  Don’t be fooled into thinking kids are more mature than they are – child development research will tel you differently.  Perhaps it would be better to be safe than sorry and not allow kids to be exposed to more violence than they already are.

It just makes me wonder, of the more than 2 billion dollars spent to see this movie, how much of it was to buy tickets for children?  How does that multiply into number of hours of violence shown to how many children?  I don’t mean for this to sound like a remake of 1970’s parents being afraid of their kids listening to evil heavy metal music, after all, these are nothing but comic book stories, right? But if there’s even a small chance that watching violence will affect how kids think and/or develop, shouldn’t we take a closer look?  After all, violence is violence is violence.