The Eros Association is not a violent organisation.

In fact, Eros is not generally concerned with violence in any form -- we don’t perpetuate it, we don’t lobby for it, support it, encourage it or even comment on violent behaviour in the normal course of our activism.

We’re primarily concerned with freedom of expression, censorship issues and ensuring adults in this country have to access material that doesn’t involve illegal activities, without the interference of government bodies, politicians or others who place themselves in positions of influence over our media.

We represent Australia’s sex industry, in all its facets, from adult videos and magazines to adult services, websites and commercial premises -- and we’re proud to do so. The adult material we support and lobby for adult access to does NOT include violent activities and is generally classed NVE (Non-Violent Erotica) or X-rated.

Consequently, the closest Eros has ever come to discussing violence in the past has been in the production of Moral Hypocrisy, a booklet published in 2000, exposing sex crimes and paedophilia committed by the clergy. Since sex crimes are a form of violence, we accept that in making this information available to the general public, we have begun some level of debate on the issue of violence.

Through our investigation into paedophilic crimes, we found that of the hundreds of cases of paedophilia reported and prosecuted in Australia in the last 15 years, not one single person employed by the sex industry was ever accused of paedophilia (and that is still the case!). However, hundreds of priests and other clergy in Australia, thousands worldwide, have committed, and continue to perpetrate, these heinous crimes (an issue we update in the Appendix Section).

However, this booklet is concerned with violence in Australian media -- how it became the mainstay of our entertainment media, what the dangers of publicising violence might be and what parents, and others, need to know about the diet of violence being fed to Aussie kids.

We believe this topic rates too little debate in our community, especially considering the findings of the masses of research undertaken on the effects of violent media.
While Australia’s censorship bodies, like the Office for Film and Literature Classification (OFLC), exist in order to ‘protect children from material likely to harm and disturb them’, most censorship that takes place in this country is focussed on sexual content, marketed and sold to adults.

Material marketed to children, or easily accessed by children (like violence), is rarely censored and even blatantly gratuitous violence is passed by our censors if it’s of a religious nature.

Take the film Passions of the Christ, (picured top left) an epic detailing the horrifically violent death of Jesus Christ and containing levels of violence one might expect to be censored, or at least restricted to an adult audience through the issuing of an R-rating. But being a religious film, Passions was somehow classified MA, meaning 15-year-olds accompanied by adults were able to see the film. With the recent release of Passions on video and DVD, younger children will now be able to access it more easily.

Any other film containing this level of violence would be banned or restricted to adult viewing. Moreover, the makers of adult entertainment could never release a video with such gratuitous violence (or with any violence at all for that matter) as adult entertainment is much more heavily censored in this country.

It’s a double standard that’s been well documented and leads some to question why religious organisations and their supporters get preferential treatment, not just in the media but, let’s face it, even in the courts. The truth is, outside the adult entertainment industry, violent content is rarely banned or restricted -- it’s as though our censors see nothing wrong with violence except if sex is also included, although ‘art’ films that combine the two are very welcome indeed.

In fairness, one of the reasons our censors treat violent media so leniently may be because most people know little of the harm caused by viewing violence and the importance of protecting children from it.

In many ways, this ignorance has been fuelled by the entertainment media, which is always striving to increase its markets in a world that values profit highly. Without media exposure, information about the dangers of viewing violence doesn’t make it to our screens or newspapers. As a consequence, the greater community is largely in the dark on this issue, with many people totally unaware there’s even a problem and few accepting media violence could become so popular if it were ‘dangerous’.

So, how did the entertainment industry become what it is today, one that perpetuates violence at every turn?

In the 1920s, the medium of motion pictures was still in its infancy but gained popularity quickly as people flocked to the newly built cinemas to see the latest flicks. Movies often contained sex and violence in those days, content the moviemakers quickly discovered was compelling viewing.

By the 1930s, however, Hollywood began experiencing a backlash from moral crusaders. Concerns about the level of sex and violence depicted on the screen began affecting ticket sales and the industry responded by creating the Hays Office to oversee censorship of motion pictures.

It was the Hays Office that decided married couples would sleep in separate single beds on the screen, could only kiss for 3 seconds at a time and that sex should be portrayed coyly, without nudity. Other determinations were made but, somehow, the censorship that came into existence at that time concentrated primarily on sex, rather than violence, and this is still the case today with sexual content much more heavily restricted than violence.

But that’s not to say that violence was never censored.

In the 1950s, for example, many films were banned from Australian movie theatres due to concerns about violence. One such film, banned for many years, was The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando as a biker causing havoc in a small town with his gang of hoodlum buddies.

Over time, the censors became more lenient with regard to violence, less so with sexual content, and filmmakers responded by freely exploring violent themes and content in their movies.

As the level of screen violence increased, audiences became more sophisticated and accustomed to the brutality -- in a very real sense, becoming desensitised to the violence they viewed. By the 1960s, audiences were seeing horrific images from the Vietnam War on television daily so the fictional violence of movies seemed less disturbing by comparison.

As television became more popular, movies once considered only suitable for adult audiences at the theatres were soon screened on TV, with families sitting down to watch them together.

By the 1980s, most people considered films like The Wild One very tame and, by the late-1990s, children were watching films like Halloween (picured left) and The Exorcist unsupervised, while Hollywood embraced the new film genre of ‘teen slasher’ movies, blatantly targeted at teenagers.

At the same time, arcade, video and computer games were making their mark as entertainment suitable for children, even when the games played were full of violence, shooting, murder and mayhem.

But all of these things happened gradually, with each generation exposed to higher levels of violence than the previous one, then in turn exposing their children to levels of violence that were higher still. No one, it seems, was concerned about where all this screen violence was heading or what affect it might be having on our ever-changing society.

In the 21st Century, people take media violence for granted. So much so that, by the age of 18, the average American child has seen 200,000 dramatised acts of violence and 40,000 dramatised murders, with Australian kids not far behind.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out that this predilection towards hard-core violence must be having some kind of effect on our youth and our society. In fact, with more than 3,000 research studies on this subject conducted around the world, in the last 40 years, it’s now clear that viewing violent imagery can be very harmful to children. It’s been shown to increase aggressive behaviour, increase levels of fear and desensitise viewers to the effects of violence while teaching them that violence is the most appropriate way to resolve conflict.

If all of this isn’t worrying enough, the computer age has heralded in new forms of violent imagery, through the use of computer games, that are likely to have a much more potent effect on our kids. It’s worth remembering that many of the violent arcade, video and computer games currently on the market are based on actual training programs used by the military and police to teach their personnel the theory and practise of killing. They take this training very seriously; civilian companies treat them like child’s play. They can’t both be right, can they?

Eros has now funded the production of this booklet to lift the lid on what’s really ‘harming and disturbing’ our kids and we ask the obvious question, why do our censors focus on banning sex when so much research points to violence as the enemy?

We urge you to read on and find out what many researchers have been trying to tell us for years.

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