Our video culture.

Editor's Note: The horrific murder of a two-year-old boy, James Bulger, by two boys in Liverpool has led to considerable debate, especially after their conviction at the end of last year, about the growth of violence in British society and particularly the effect of |video nasties' on young people. David Alton, Liberal Democrat MP for Liverpool, Mossley Hill, has been leading a campaign to restrict the distribution of horror videos among children.

IN the aftermath of the James Bulger verdicts, Dr. Susan Bailey, Britain's only forensic psychiatrist for adolescents, confirmed that in one study of 40 murderers aged between five and 18, a quarter were found to have been influenced by violence and pornograpby on the screen. Meanwhile, the Home Secretary, Michael Howard, and his advisers were sticking to their hackneyed line that there is no proven correlation between real-life violence and that which is broadcast.

Earlier in the year I tabled a Commons Motion -- backed by more than 100 MPs -- calling for action against video and television violence. During Prime Minister's Question Time on the day before the Bulger verdicts, I had urged John Major to tackle television violence and the easy availability of brutal and horrific videos. I told him that an American pre-school child will have seen an average of 20,000 murders, broadcast on television, by the age of five and that the same culture of violence is being created in the United Kingdom. In the aftermath of the verdicts, and supported by MPs from all parties, I tabled a Commons Motion, supported by 40 MPs, drawing attention to the work of Elliot Aranson who, in The Social Animal, convincingly argues that children copy the aggressive behaviour of adults. My motion also calls for gratuitously violent material to be banned.

The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology says that there are video recorders in 68 per cent of British homes and that |material classified as "15" or "18" is routinely seen by younger audiences, whether due to failures at the retail outlet, lack of parental control, or evasion of rules' (for example, by televisions in younger people's bedrooms). The office goes on to say that 'studies show that the threshold of tolerated violence is raised in groups who have watched violent films'. The Royal College of Psychiatrists has also pointed to media violence as one area where tighter controls could help protect vulnerable children.

Videos which contain graphic and highly explicit scenes of violence are easily available. I strongly believe that this helps to explain why the level of violence today is higher than it was 15 years ago. Our tolerant society should not confuse the need to protect the vulnerable, such as easily impressionable children, with censorship.

Many families living in Liverpool -- and the same picture must be true everywhere else -- regularly hire videos. There is nothing wrong with that. Parents who are discerning in what they choose can ensure that the only material shown to their children is innocent and even educational. The Prime Minister, in his reply to me, said that responsible parents could and should vet what their children see. That is all right as far as it goes.

But what about parents who simply dump their children in front of a video; who allow the video to become a surrogate parent and a substitute for conversation? Or the parent who brings hundreds of videos into his home, which include material containing gratuitous violence or soft porn? He might say that his child would not be allowed to watch it, and is sent to bed. But that probably only increases the desire of the child to see the material -- and the parent will not know if the child watches it during his absence.

A video called Child's Play 3 is just such an example. Would you want a video lying around in your home which shows a doll coming to life as a child, to be attacked and mutilated, with its head broken, splattered with blue paint, and its battered, dead body left discarded? The film also includes a macabre ritualistic incantation and chant.

Just 22 days before James Bulger's death, this video was one of three hired by the father of one of the convicted boys. He had hired 440 other videos in the previous few years, including soft pornography, violent horror, and necrophilia. The trial judge remarked on the 'striking similarities? between scenes in Child's Play 3 and the attack on James Bulger which ended in the two-year-old's murder and mutilation on the railway line. His face, like the doll's in the video, was splattered with blue paint; in the video the doll abducts a young military cadet and tries to kill him under the wheels of a fairground train, only itself to be mutilated and killed.

It has also been reported in Manchester that a chant from the same film was used by the torturers of the teenager, Susan Capper, to taunt her during the most brutal and horrifying assault to which she was subjected and from which she eventually died.

A Midlands woman reported that her six-year-old child had seen Child's Play 3 and that he had |become possessed' and tried to kill their pet dog. Yet the Home Office continues to say there is no proven link between this sort of material and violence. Don't be daft. It is common sense that constant exposure has an effect. And, as I told Parliament, television advertisers would not spend 1.7 billion[pounds] a year if they did not think it influenced the people to whom they want to sell their goods to. Americans now spend an average of 18 months of their lives simply watching television advertising.

If we continue to dress up unspeakable acts of violence as entertainment, we should not be surprised if children cannot tell the difference between right and wrong. What chance have parents or teachers in the face of the barrage of material which children see on television?

Broadcasters should have to mark programmes with a |V' for violence if a programme contains violent material. Each week they should have to publish the number of violent incidents which they have broadcast; and horror videos and computer pornography should not be made available for sale or hire.

A new classification, |Not suitable for home entertainment', should be introduced and some more parents put on to the Board of British Film Classification. Michael Alison, the Conservative MP for Selby, who will jointly sponsor attempts to change the Criminal Justice Bill, has suggested that the test for home viewing should revolve around the phrase |likely to cause grave offence to any reasonable person'. Labour's Frank Cook will include references to computer software in the same amendment.

Until my election to the House of Commons in 1979, I worked in Sefton in Liverpool with children who had special needs. Some had been excluded from school because of unacceptable or uncontrollable behaviour. One young man -- almost six feet tall and built like a wrestler -- had taken a throw at a teacher. And yet neither in Sefton, nor before that in Kirkby where I worked for two years as a teacher, did I ever meet a child so conditioned to violence that I believed him capable of killing another child. If an emotionally disturbed child has a predisposition in that direction, however, horrific media violence may well trigger it.

In the aftermath of the James Bulger trial, we must ask what has happened to change society in this way.

First, there is a pervasive culture of violence. Crimes against the person are becoming an everyday and acceptable occurrence. As president of Liverpool's branch of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (founded in Liverpool a century ago), and as a trustee of Liverpool's Victims of Violence shelter, I am only too painfully aware of the brutal and dark side of life. But it is not only in Liverpool, as some commentators have implied. That is quite untrue.

Throughout the United Kingdom there are 47,000 children on child protection registers; one in three of those born in the Fifties had a criminal conviction -- in a third of the cases, for violence -- by the age of 31. Half of those in Britain's prisons are doing time for acts of violence. Drugs are another powerful adverse influence. They are daily more available, with some neighbourhoods awash with them.

During my 15 years in the Commons, I have witnessed a corresponding decrease in the acceptance of personal responsibility. The flaccid language of entitlements, the idea that there is no truth, that everything is just a matter of opinion, are the words which should be written on this generation's collective tombstone.

The absence of fathers and the disintegration of the family have also played their part. Across a broad swathe of society, children are now growing up without father figures. Whole communities lack the moral presence which fathers should apply. James Bulger's death is a tragic reminder of the profound responsibility which adults have for their children.

But, above all else, as family and community life have disintegrated, children have ceased to be able to grow up as innocents. They have been brutalised. In each of the past ten years, between 30 and 80 children under the age of five have been killed in the United Kingdom.

Contrast today's climate of fear everywhere in Britain -- where women are frightened to travel alone on public transport in the evening or leave their children alone in a public park -- with the freedoms we once enjoyed. Twenty years ago you could walk around streets in the Low Hill and Smithdown ward, which I represented on the Liverpool city council, and the doors of terraced streets were left wide open. We call this a free and permissive age -- but what has happened to true freedom and the things we were once permitted to do without fear?

And please, spare us the sociologists' explanations about bad housing and unemployment. I was brought up in a home without a bathroom and later we were re-housed to a block of flats. Yet people were far more law-abiding then than they are now, though the gap between rich and poor was far more obvious. What is more, crime rose throughout the extended periods of extremely low unemployment in the Sixties and Seventies. Deprivation, unemployment, poverty and poor housing all need to be tackled, but while they may be a fertile breeding ground for crime, they are not themselves the cause of it. I have represented some of the poorest parts of Britain, in the heart of Liverpool, since 1972: the poor should not be insulted by being held responsible for what we see around us today.

Home Office ministers accused church leaders of being 'strangely silent' in the aftermath of James Bulger's death. It was another attempt by the government to shift the blame. I put it to Michael Howard that when church leaders had been vocal -- as they had that very day in defending the traditional value of keeping Sunday special for the family by opposing unrestricted shopping on that day -- the government chose not to listen. Last year Cardinal Hume and Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, called for a Royal Commission to examine the causes of violence in society. The government did not listen to that plea either.

On 22nd March three young men were sentenced for kicking a man to death on the Ely Estate in Cardiff. Mr. Les Reed had asked them to stop vandalising a traffic bollard. (Contemporary Review, June 1993, had an article by Tony Sheppard about violence on this estate.) The three murderers are said to have been influenced by watching a video called |Juice'. Some Cardiff video shops have now removed this film from their shelves.