From the 1990's and the birth of N.W.A and the west coast east coast rivalry, until now, there have been extremely high rates of violence in different parts of the United States. With the begininning of objectification of women, suicidal and homicidal lyrics, drug and alcohol abuse the black community has suffered from the conditioning and desensitization through music.Through music, the youth have recieved higher rates of aggression, more use of provocative language , and less respect for each other and authority. From countless research through empirical articles on music, co-victimization, and nihilism, evidence shows that impoverished neighborhoods take worse environmental toll. Due to the struggle embarked on through the community, black youth have been more prominent to develope and adopt the ideology of the code of the streets. This ideology taunts the issues of capitalism, respect, safety needs, and coping mechanisms. Children who have adopted the code of the streets are the direct culprets to the robberies, shootings, and gang violence in the communites of today. through these environmental changes comes Co-victimization.
Co victimization of African American children creates an abnormality in a child’s mindset affecting them during their development. Co victimization is the experience of directly observing the violent assault of another person. This observation includes incest, sexual abuse, sexual assault, aggravated physical assault, armed robbery, arson, and murder. Co- victimization of African American children can result in the long term change in actions and abnormality. Most children spend most of their time outside or watching TV. As they are outside they are exposed to different events that occur on day to day bases. At the age of 16 children will have most likely already witnessed shootings and robberies. Some children have worse observations such as stabbings, and killings. Some of the methods used in a violence investigation were surveys and violence screening forms given to 1035 African American youth from several Chicago Educational Facilities. The findings produced from this investigation were that 75% of boys and 70% of girls surveyed had seen someone shot, stabbed, robbed and or killed. Also, they found that at the age of 16 the highest percentage of participants witnessed violence in their environment. Most kids who live in poverty and attend schools with high dropout rates tend to follow after the wrong crowd which makes them a danger to society. This is the modeling function which produces abnormal behavior. The more children are exposed to violence and bad behavior the more it sticks to their brain and they absorb the information. Cognitive, behavioral effects, and emotional influences, are the major-developmental deviations that stem from and possibly induce co-victimization of youth. Co victimization goes together with George Kelly’s personal construct theory and the cognitive constructs. George Kelly’s cognitive constructs meant that we make predictions about ourselves and about other people and events, and we use these predictions to formulate our responses and guide our actions. Therefore to understand the specific quality of the person, we must first understand our patterns, the way we organize or construct our world. My implications and impressions of this article is that cognitive and behavioral effects, as well as emotional influences, are the major developmental changes possibly resulting from co –victimization of youth. Children’s personalities are so tender at a young age, as they still learn right from wrong, they look at other people to see what society says is right and what society acknowledges as being wrong. Children who undergo co- victimization tend to have a persona archetype because their personality is more so learned then inherited. Persona archetype is a public face we wear to present ourselves as someone different from who we really are. Research on violent forms of entertainment such as video games, movies and music reveals some unequivocal evidence that media violence increases the likelihood of aggressive and violent behavior in both immediate, short term, and long-term contexts. As indicated, Co victimization of African American children is a major obstacle toward the development on a child’s personality. Co-victimization and media promote and unconsciously build negative personalities that result in black on black violence. This blog post is just a brief summary of cognitive and behavioral effects of the environmental influences.
References
Anderson, C. A. (December 2003). The Influence of Media Violence on Youth. Psychological Science in Public Interest , 81-11.
Shakoor, B.H (1991 march). Co-victimization of African-American children who witness violence: effects on cognitive, emotional, and behavioral development. J Natl Med Assoc. 83 (3): 233-238.
