Video Games and Rape Culture

As a parent of two children, one boy and one girl, I perhaps was not as vigilant as I should have been in controlling their access to video games and movies that had “adult content.”  I breathe a sigh of relief that I do not have to raise them in today’s environment.    I still remember no longer allowing my son to watch professional wrestling on television.  He used to love to physically wrestle with his stuffed power ranger, and I thought it was cute.  Then, the news of the death of one child by another resulting from a choke hold that the child saw on TV’s “Wrestlemania,” caused me to end my son’s growing preoccupation with professional wrestling.  He took it well and found another way to pass his time.  I always controlled the games he could play on his Playstation I then Playstation II, and he seemed fine with being limited to sports only video games.  My son was told why and also knew that he should not be shooting weapons while playing video games.  I could not control what games he played when he was at friends’ houses but knew that he should not.

I have been learning about the disturbing turn that video games have taken in recent years.  The lines are becoming increasingly blurred when it comes to the intersection of sex and violence in the games that children are buying.  It troubles me and should trouble many people.  Recently, Grand Theft Auto V was pulled from Target and Kmart stores in Australia after pressure to do so after a Change.org petition highlighted the game’s depictions of sexual violence against women. The petition accused the video of encouraging the abuse and murder of women “for entertainment,” such as murdering a sex worker in order to get one’s money back. The Reproductive Health and Sexual Justice Newsletter, found here also describes the inability of the United States and Canada to properly label video games for parents who are paying attention through its unregulated Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB).

Grand Theft Auto V is not the only video game sending the completely wrong messages about sex.  I made the mistake of entering the terms “sex” and “video games” on my search engine and was given endless numbers of games that involved war in which victims get raped by the player and videogames in which dates with girls allow you to feel you are having the physical experience of having sex. 

My stomach was turning and my research ended.   If you want to approach this with some humor, check out Amy Schumer ‘s funny spin on a sad topic here.

I am not offering a solution, but just trying to make sure you know that many of us easily lose track of what technology is presenting to our children.  Someone needs to be paying attention if we are going to  stop the growing trend toward sexual violence in our “rape culture.”