Does it matter now the damage is done.
This is a question I’ve been asking myself lately, with all the trauma and tragedy in the world what can we, as individuals do to make it a better place to live?
I believe that investing in our youth as future leaders is a good long-term strategy, but why are parents, carers, guardians, even teachers, the ones we point fingers of blame at when things go wrong. Aren’t we all responsible as a society for upholding its fabric?
Take the current situation with social media and youth crime as an example.
Did anyone think about the potential impacts of peer-to-peer influence, shared on a digital platform internationally, or the harm 24hr access to a FOMO and bullying culture could do? As a society we collectively enabled generations of children with positive and negative results.
It’s true that as parents and guardians we are responsible for protecting our children on the front-line, but if you don’t know about the threat or see it there’s not much you can do. Politicians have now taken steps to ban access to social media and in Queensland punish youth crime with adult time.
Whilst we wait to see what happens in relation to social media for those under 16, juveniles as young as 10 will face adult sentencing for serious assault, murder, and break-ins. Many experts warn that harsher penalties won’t necessarily deter young offenders and could exacerbate the situation further.
Everyone will have an opinion, but how many of us will try to go deeper and investigate the reasons we find ourselves at this junction. What could lead to this crisis, are the two issues connected?
For decades our children have been exposed at an early age to many forms of inappropriate digital content, before social media – from worldwide web access to video games, some of which were originally designed in US combat training, to overcome an innate psychological resistance to killing post WW2.
Historical documents reveal the implementation of combat psychology labelled ‘killology’ (a term coined by scholar David Grossman) in training US soldiers for war in Vietnam. In his graduate theses 2016 “Combat Psychology: Learning to Kill in the U.S. Military, 1947-2012”, Patrick McKinnie of Winthrop University cites a chapter of “The Science of Creating Killers: Human Reluctance to Take a Life Can be Reversed Through Training in the Method Known as Killology”:
‘The potential psychological consequences of the use of drone and video game technology to train America’s military is not yet entirely understood. However, the lethal results achieved by the use of this emergent technology for combat is indisputable.’
Food for thought given that combat technology like Full Spectrum Warrior, was later made commercially available, with an intention to entice the next generation of America’s Army both released in 2004.
It’s a subject that as a parent I faced with teenage children, fortunately as a sole parent with limited financial resources, we had no access to the internet, nor were they granted access to X-box or violent PlayStation games.
Those options aren’t available to parents today – internet access is required for student learning and trying to keep children from gaming technology is even more difficult.
We’ll be exploring some of these topics in 2025 as What We Teach Our Children goes global.
