ABSTRACT. Objective. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings system distinguishes among the 3 primary rating categories (PG, PG-13, and R) with respect to violence based on a study of the 100 top-grossing films of 1994.Methods. The Motion Picture Association of America assigns age-based ratings for every film that is released in the United States accompanied by the reasons for the rating. A data abstraction instrument was designed to code each act of violence within the sample of 100 films. A series of Poisson regression models were used to examine the association among rating, seriousness of violence, and primary reason for the rating assignment.Results. The total average number of violent acts within each film by rating category increased from PG (14) to PG-13 (20) to R (32). However, using results from the Poisson models, it is clear that the rating does not predict the frequency of violence in films. For all 3 rating categories, the predicted number of violent acts is almost identical for films with violence as a primary descriptor and films with the highest level of seriousness (R ‫؍‬ 62.4 acts, PG-13 ‫؍‬ 55.2 acts, and PG ‫؍‬ 56.1 acts). The regression analysis shows that the rating does not predict the frequency of violence that occurs in films.Conclusions. Frequency of violence alone is not the most important criterion for the assignment of rating. The content descriptors and average seriousness of films are better measures of the violence than rating assignment. Pediatrics 2005;115:e512-e517. URL: www. pediatrics.org/cgi

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of Beyond Blame: Challenging Violence in the Media, at increasing students' knowledge about the effects of media violence and the core concepts of media literacy. During the 2007-2008 academic year, 1,693 sixth -eighth grade students from school districts around southern California participated in the study. Students were assigned to one of three treatment conditions: trained teacher, untrained teacher or control. Compared with controls, students in both intervention groups were more likely to agree that media violence may cause aggression, fear, desensitization and an appetite for more media violence at the post-test. Students in the trained group were also more likely than controls to understand the five core concepts/key questions of media literacy post-intervention.

Violence permeated nearly 90% of the films in our study. Although only a small subset of this content contained violence that was associated with negative effects, only 1 film contained violence that was associated with protective or beneficial effects.

Youth violence is a major unresolved public health problem in the United States and media exposure to violence is a synergistic source of this national problem. One media literacy curriculum designed specifically to address this issue is Beyond Blame: Challenging Violence in the Media. The purpose of this pilot study was to examine the curriculum's feasibility as a full-scale intervention. Intervention and control groups were similar with respect to knowledge of the Beyond Blame curriculum at baseline. Intervention students scored much higher on the posttest compared with the control students. The majority (90.2%) of the intervention students reported a significant increase in pre- to posttest score compared with only 18.8% of the control students (p < .0001). The magnitude of the score increase for intervention students was much greater than those in the control group. Several intervention students (N = 49; 19.9%) improved their score by 12 or more points compared with the control students who showed only a 1- to 7-point score increase (N = 3; 18.8%; p < .0001). The pre-and posttest scores were similar for males and females. Three of the six intervention classrooms scored higher on both the pretest and posttest compared with the other three classrooms.

This article profiles the violence that occurs in the films that compose the most popular (topgrossing) genres of 1994: comedy, drama, and action. The critical features used to describe film violence are intentionality, frequency, seriousness, consequences, explicitness, and severity (damage to the body of the recipient). Scales for seriousness, explicitness, and severity were systematically applied to the films using frame-by-frame analysis. Although the initiators of violence in American films employ lethal violence in nearly half the violent events, depiction of any consequences to the recipient's body occurs in 1 out of 10 cases. Throughout, the effects of violence on the victim's body are mystified by a form of narrative that occults and minimizes consequences arising from clearly depicted intentional assaults. So far as violence is concerned, the Hollywood body is an impossible one, merely a dramaturgical figure.