Violent Video Research Articles

Gendered Violence and Human Rights in Black World Literature and Film, edited by Naomi Nkealah and Obioma Nnaemeka

Gendered Violence and Human Rights in Black World Literature and Film, edited by Naomi Nkealah and Obioma Nnaemeka

Study on Deep Learning Techniques for Finding Suspicious Violence Detection in a Video Surveillance

Detecting suspicious visual objects is essential to applying automatic violence detection (AVD) in video surveillance. Continuous monitoring of objects or any unusual things is a tedious task. Learning about video surveillance is an emerging research problem in AVD applications. Deep learning is an intelligent and trustworthy technique for detecting or classifying suspicious data objects. It classifies suspicious video frames by modeling specific categories of videos. The current deep models convolutional neural network (CNN), convolutional long-term and short-term memory (ConvLSTM), AlexNet, VGG-16, MobileNet, and GoogleNet, are wildly succeeded in real-time violence detection with the input of video clips. This paper presents the findings of experimental studies for deep models using classification measures to demonstrate the models' efficacy for our AVD application. Benchmarked violence (V), non-violence (NV), and weapon violence (WV) video datasets are used in the experiment to describe the model's performance while classifying suspicious videos for public safety.

Desensitized gamers? Violent video game exposure and empathy for pain in adolescents – an ERP study

ABSTRACTThis Event-Related Potential (ERP) study aimed to test how habitual and short-term violent video game exposure (VVGE) may affect empathy for pain responses in adolescents. In a within-subjects design, boys (N = 56; aged 12–16 years) performed a pain judgment task before and immediately after playing a violent video game. In this task, participants judged whether photos of hands depicted on their screen were in a painful situation or not. While both the P3 and the LPP components were not related to habitual violent video game exposure, general exposure to antisocial media content predicted lower P3 amplitudes to painful pictures. Further, 40 min of violent gameplay did not affect the P3 responses; however, it temporarily decreased LPP responses to painful pictures, suggesting a modest short-term desensitization effect. However, this latter interpretation is limited by a strong LPP pain effect – a significant amplitude difference between painful and non-painful pictures – that remained present in the post-game condition. Such persistent LPP effect may relate to the notion that adolescents are still learning how to properly regulate their emotional reactions. This study contributes to the limited literature on violent video games’ desensitization in adolescents’ brains, opening new avenues for media violence research.

Analysis of South Korean Class Conflict Revealed by Elements of Lies and Violence in Cinema - Parasite as an Example

Since the implementation of neoliberal economic policies in South Korea in the 1990s, the huge gap between the rich and the poor has become a phenomenon, an acute social issue, and a frequent topic of film and television series, which has stimulated a series of topics and discussions critical of capitalism and anti-neoliberalism. This paper examines the class conflicts that exist in South Korean society in the context of the neoliberal economic system. It explores the representation of class conflict and the gap between rich and poor in South Korean film and television productions. This paper applies a case study approach to the film Parasite, through reviewing its narratives and the analysis of mise-en-scne, it deals with the elements of lies and violence to illustrate the class conflicts in South Korean society. The findings of this study highlight the presence of a severe class conflict in South Korean society, which is reflected in the immoral behavior of the lower-class characters in Parasite, as well as in the violent declaration of war within the lower class and towards the upper class.

An empirical study of various detection based techniques with divergent learning’s

The prevalence of violence against women and children is concerning, and the initial step is to raise awareness of this issue. Certain forms of detection based techniques are not frequently regarded both socially and culturally permissible. Designing and implementing effective approaches in secondary and supplementary avoidance simultaneously depends on the characterization and assessment. Given the greater incidence of instances and mortalities resulting developing an early detection system is essential. Consequently, violence against women and children is a problem of human health of pandemic proportions. As a result, the focus of this survey is to analyze the existing methods used to identify violence in photos or films. Here, 50 research papers are reviewed and their techniques employed, dataset, evaluation metrics, and publication year are analyzed. The study reviews the potential future research areas by examining the difficulties in identifying violence against women and children in literary works for researchers to overcome in order to produce better results.

At the movies: The changing face of interpersonal violence in cinema

IntroductionThe negative effects of media exposure to interpersonal violence (IPV) have been a controversial topic for decades. Our aims were to identify the prevalence and trend of maxillofacialrelated IPV in top grossing movies 50 years apart to look for changing patterns of portrayal in mainstream cinema. MethodsThe 20 highest-grossing movies from 1970 to 2020 were identified. Each instance of maxillofacial-related IPV was identified and the following data points were analyzed: type of IPV (blunt/penetrating), the injury sustained, gender of the assailant and the victim as well as their relationship, the use of drugs and/or alcohol, any physical and/or legal consequences and if hospitalisation was required. ResultsFrom the movies examined, 13/20 in 1970 and 14/20 in 2020 showed episodes of maxillofacial-related IPV. There was a higher number overall of maxillofacial-related IPV in 2020 (n=54) compared to 1970 (n=30). In 1970s movies, assailants were more frequently known to their victims (96.7 % vs 66.7 %, p=0.01) and maxillofacial-related IPV was more likely to involve alcohol and/or drugs (16.7 % vs 1.9 %, p=0.01). Victims were rarely hospitalized in either 1970 or 2020 cinema (0 % and 3.7 % respectively), assailants rarely suffered legal consequences (13.3 % and 5.6 % respectively) and these differences were not significant. ConclusionLittle has changed in mainstream cinema concerning the prevalence of maxillofacial-related IPV between 1970 and 2020, but there are subtle differences in how this is portrayed. The overarching notion that such injuries do not culminate in either hospitalisation and/or legal ramifications remains.

Big Data Techniques to Study the Impact of Gender-Based Violence in the Spanish News Media

Despite being an underreported topic in the news media, gender-based violence (GBV) undermines the health, dignity, security and autonomy of its victims. Research has studied many of the factors that generate or maintain this kind of violence. However, the influence of the media is still uncertain. This paper used Big Data techniques to explore how GBV is depicted and reported in digital news media. By feeding neural networks with news, the topic information associated with each article can be recovered. Our findings show a relationship between GBV news and public awareness, the effect of well-known GBV cases, and the intrinsic thematic relationship of GBV news with justice themes.

Fight detection with spatial and channel wise attention‐based ConvLSTM model

AbstractAn automated detection of aggressive and violent behaviour in videos has immense potential. It enables efficient online content filtering by restricting access to extreme content and also, when integrated with security systems, helps to monitor violence in surveillance videos. In this work, a convolutional neural network is combined with the proposed Spatial and Channel wise Attention‐based ConvLSTM encoder (SCan‐ConvLSTM). The proposed architecture performs an efficient spatiotemporal fusion of the features extracted from the video sequences containing fight scenes. In order to focus selectively on regions of utmost importance, this blended attention mechanism adjusts the weights of outputs in different locations and across different channels. This recurrent attention mechanism enhances the sequential refinement of activation maps and boosts the model performance. Finally, the experimental results have been presented that show the proposed architecture achieves superior results on the benchmark datasets (RWF‐2000, Violent‐flow, Hockey‐fights, and Movies).

Symbolic violence and discrimination in a social media comment section: A study on discriminatory discursive strategies targeting non-binary gender identity in the context of Indonesia

Symbolic violence and discrimination in a social media comment section: A study on discriminatory discursive strategies targeting non-binary gender identity in the context of Indonesia

Analysis of Social Media Involvement in Violent Injury

This cross-sectional study uses police agency–collected information to quantify the association among social media involvement, crime, and violence.

Mental health, violence, suicide, self-harm, and HIV in series and films of Netflix: content analysis and its possible impacts on society

The media entertainment we consume significantly affects our behavior, our relationships, and our identity. Thus, this study focuses on some of the main problems of society today and analyzes how these variables are represented on Netflix. Specifically, this study analyzes how content related to mental health, violence, suicide, self-harm, and Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) appears in the ten most-watched movies and ten most-watched series on Netflix. To this end, a conceptual analysis method based on a 5-min interval coding is used. Results posit that violence is shown in 38.7% of the movie sections and 37.3% of the series. Suicide and self-harm appear, respectively, in 0.9% and 0% of the movies and 1.3 and 0.2% of the series. Regarding mental health, 0.5% of the analyzed individuals had a mental health diagnosis. Finally, none of the 220 main characters analyzed stated that they had HIV. Among the conclusions, the need to regulate violence in the media or to mitigate the impact it generates should be highlighted. Likewise, mental health, suicide, self-harm, and HIV have been observed not to have a realistic representation in fiction, which generates stigmatization.

Kekerasan Bahasa di Media Daring Nasional

Verbal abuse means impolite, referring to Leech's politeness principle. The problem of this research is: how is language violence in the Indonesian National Brave media? The long-term goal of this research is to prevent conflicts that occur in Indonesia due to hatred. The target of this research is to obtain reliable findings about patterns of language violence in Indonesia's national online media. The method used is pragmatic content analysis. The results of the research show that language violence predominantly occurs in Indonesia's national online media. The violence of language is measured by its violation of the Principle of Politeness which consists of six maxims. Of the total 8,922 analyses, 3,852 complied and 5,070 were tracked. If we look at the analysis of comments for each topic, out of 100 topics, only 16 topics tend to have comments that comply with the principles of politeness and 84 topics tend to violate them. From the research findings, it was also revealed that language violence predominantly occurs on topics related to political issues. While the topics relate to entertainment and the arts, there is rarely any violent language. This research also reveals that language violence has grown rapidly since the 2014 presidential election.

Superheroes: The Prosocial Aggressors. A Systematic Literature Review

Superheroes, recurring characters in contemporary media, bring conflicting elements into their narratives: their goals are prosocial (helping those in need), but their means are violent. The question then arises, how does this duality impact consumers? The present study aimed to carry out a systematic literature review regarding the relationships between superhero media, aggression, prosocial behavior, and related variables. Studies from the last ten years, published in English and Portuguese, were considered, and the final sample went through a qualitative synthesis. The results showed that all studies in the sample pointed to positive impacts of superhero media on prosocial behavior. Data on aggression, on the other hand, were inconclusive. Finally, the variables gender and level of character identification stand out in understanding the effects of superhero media. We highlight the need for a deeper investigation on prosocial violent media and its outcomes.

An automatic fine-grained violence detection system for animation based on modified faster R-CNN

Animation drama and movies are important entertainment sources for children and young people. However, many of these entertainment videos introduce ideas such as violence, fighting, abuse, and car accidents, which are not suitable for children and young people. In order to prevent children from viewing these videos, different countries' government bodies put restrictions on age on these videos. Violence detection is mostly done using manual inspection, which is time and resource consuming and cannot achieve a very good result. Therefore, artificial technologies such as deep learning and machine learning can detect violence in a video. Bleeding is one of the distinct characteristics of violent actions presented in such videos. This paper aims to propose a system that can detect a given video's blood in real-time. Researchers have proposed different image processing-based techniques to detect violence, but their proposed systems lack precision and real-time detection. To this end, a deep learning-based approach is proposed to detect violence in a given video and images. A Faster R-CNN model is modified due to the sophisticated characteristics of the violence in the cartoon and animation images to achieve the highest performance. The backbone of the proposed violence detection model is changed to a modified RegNet model to extract the features from the frame. The standard inner lateral connection is replaced with the modulated deformable convolutional (MDC) layer to extract deformable feature maps. A novel distributed attention module (DAM) is proposed on the feature pyramid network to improve the performance of the feature extraction. The multiscale Region of interest (ROI) Align is adapted to improve the detection performance of violence in a different scenario. Moreover, the classification approach is integrated with the detection model to classify the different levels of violence in a given frame. We have explored state-of-the-art object detection methods such as Faster R-CNN, Cascade R-CNN, yolov3-spp, SSD, FCOS, and yolov5 to detect violence in a particular frame of a video. We compared the different models' performances and found out that the modified Faster R-CNN is appropriate for real-time blood detection in a given video or image with high accuracy. This study makes a significant contribution to detecting violence in animation videos which will help different platforms and government bodies to regulate entertainment content.

What do we research when we study social media violence in Colombia? A systematic literature review

Con el incremento en el acceso y uso de las redes sociales en Colombia, es de esperar que prácticas y discursos violentos se trasladen a estos espacios digitales. Sin duda, hoy en día las redes sociales son parte de los ecosistemas de información y comunicación de los colombianos, donde las culturas de violencia y paz se expanden y transforman. En este contexto, es esencial explorar las formas en las investigamos la violencia en redes sociales, ya que entender este fenómeno permite responder mejor a las necesidades y experiencias de las comunidades del país. El presente articulo busca explorar cómo se ha estudiado la violencia en las redes sociales en Colombia mediante una revisión sistemática de la literatura. Resultados muestran un complejo trayecto de investigación en el país que comprende variados objetivos, como entender las diferentes formas en las que la violencia es ejercida a través de redes sociales o sobre cómo nos permite conocer más contextos de violencia. Igualmente, los resultados muestran que las investigaciones están principalmente enfocadas en dos plataformas: Facebook y Twitter. Finalmente, se encontró que los artículos están principalmente orientados a investigar tres tipos de violencias: violencia de género, violencia relacionada con conflicto armado, y violencia escolar. Los hallazgos de esta revisión sistemática de la literatura permiten, por un lado, valorar previos estudios que han demostrado el complejo panorama de la violencia mediática en el país y, por otro lado, descubrir posibles vacíos en la literatura que podrían ser respondidos por investigadoras e investigadores en el futuro.

Perceived offensiveness to the self, not that to others, is a robust positive predictor of support of censoring sexual, alcoholic, and violent media content.

Harm and offense are two important notions in legal discussions on the extent to which one's freedom may be limited. Prior research on the third-person effect found that perceived media harm on others, not perceived media harm on the self, is a robust positive predictor of support of censoring socially undesirable media content (e.g., pornography). In comparison, how offensiveness perceptions predict censorship support is not clear. Drawing on moral foundations theory, we test here how perceived media offensiveness to the self compared with 1) perceived media offensiveness to others and 2) perceived media harm on others would predict censorship support. We conducted two cross-sectional survey studies in the U.S. to address this question with sexual, alcoholic, and violent media content as test cases. In Study 1 (N = 544 undergraduates), we measured perceived media offensiveness to the self, that to others, and censorship support. In Study 2 (N = 727 non-student adults), we also measured perceived media harm on the self and others. As in prior research, we found that people perceive sexual, alcoholic, and violent media content to harm other viewers more strongly than it harms themselves, and the perception of how much others are harmed predicts perceivers' censorship support. In contrast, while people also perceive the three types of media content to offend other viewers more strongly than they offend the self, the perception of how much others are offended predicts censorship support to a significantly lesser extent or does not predict this at all. Instead, the perception of how much the self is offended does. These findings add to the work on moral foundations theory that distinguishes between how the care/harm and sanctity/degradation foundations relate to moral judgments. These findings also suggest that the current theorizing of the third-person effect needs to expand to reconcile the seemingly inconsistent results on how harm and offensiveness perceptions differently relate to censorship support. The care/harm and sanctity/degradation foundations may underlie how harm and offensiveness perceptions predict censorship support. However, several "anomalous" findings need to be accounted for before moral foundations provide a comprehensive explanation of the third-person effect.

The Impact of Media Violence on Child and Adolescent Aggression

With the continuous development of electronic technology, the media of television and films, video games and music are everywhere in everyday life. Media exposure is increasing among kids and teenagers. As a result, children and adolescents frequently encounter violence in the media in a variety of forms, which has an effect on their behavior. Previous research has found that exposure to media violence increases aggressive behavior or aggression-related beliefs and emotional arousal in children or adolescents. This study summarizes the similarities and differences in the effects of different forms of media violence on children and adolescents based on their different cognitive developmental characteristics and the frequency of exposure to different types of media. Also, it makes suggestions for future research and aims to lessen how aggression in children and teenagers is affected by media violence. This study finds that all forms of media violence were positively associated with aggression in children and adolescents, with younger children mostly displaying aggressive behavior through direct imitation, while older adolescents developed desensitization and cognitive changes related to aggression, and parenting styles also moderated the relationship. The study suggests that parents should adopt autonomous and supportive communication styles and game developers should consider pro-social rather than violent behaviors in games to positively influence the game audience.

Media Coverage of Intimate Partner Violence Incidents in Russia Amid the Conservative Turn

In the literature, the period 2017–2018 has been identified as a time when feminist discourse emerged in the Russian media, with the topic of domestic violence (DV) as one of the main sub-discourses. This suggests that mainstream media can act as an agent of positive social change in relation to gender issues, even amid a broader ‘conservative turn’. This study interrogates this argument by examining changes in representations of intimate partner violence (IPV) in Russian media during the COVID-19 pandemic, at a time when increased attention was given to the global ‘shadow pandemic’ of violence in the home.

Effects of Animated Movies on the Aggression and Behavior Performance of Primary School Students and Their Control Using a Cognitive Behavioral Anger-Control Training (CBACT) Program.

This work is a combination of two studies, Study I and Study II, which aimed to examine the impact of animated movies on the aggression and behavioral performance of primary school students, as well as their control using the CBACT program. In Study I, the influence of animated movies on 300 students from ten primary schools in Pakistan with gender differences (50% male), family systems, and viewing time duration was examined. This study was performed on 7- to 9-year-old children on four subscales of the Buss-Perry aggression questionnaire (BPAQ), three subscales of the child behavior questionnaire (CBQ), and toy selection. Following that, in Study II the CBACT intervention was applied to aggressive students (n = 46) selected from Study I. Students were randomly divided into CBACT treatment (50%) and control groups. The results of Study I indicated that violent animated movies had a greater impact on the aggressive behavior of male students than on that of females, while girls were more affected by watching nonviolent movies. Furthermore, male viewers from nuclear families and females from joint families showed more aggressive problems. It was also observed that aggression in students significantly increased (p < 0.001) with increasing viewing animation time duration (10 to 30 min). The results of Study II showed that aggression in the treatment group was significantly reduced (p = 0.000) with the CBACT program but remained constant for the control group. The findings of Study I showed that violent animation is strongly linked with aggression and behavioral performance in primary school students. The CBACT program in Study II indicates that students may not be completely eliminated from watching violent movies, but their aggression levels were reduced when they watched animated movies. Therefore, the CBACT program opens a new window into behavioral problem treatment, which is casually influenced by violent media.

Discourses on Non-Heteronormative Masculinities and Intimate Partner Violence: a Russian Media Case Study

Abstract Purpose The current paper is devoted to the analysis of the mediation of non-heteronormative masculinities within discourses on intimate partner violence (IPV) and domestic violence and abuse (DVA) in contemporary Russian media. Methods The article presents a discourse analysis of five samples of media texts devoted to IPV and/or DVA among LGBTQ people. The media texts were sampled through a keyword search completed on the websites of two openly pro-LGBTQ media outlets (news and entertainment portals Meduza and Takie Dela) and two media outlets catered for predominantly LGBTQ audiences (the news and entertainment portal Parni PLUS and the website of the NGO SPID-Tsentr). Results The interpretative qualitative analysis of the sampled texts demonstrated that the IPV/DVA survivors’ confessional narratives are framed within wider discourses on non-heteronormative masculinities, which are represented both as transgressing concepts of hegemonic masculinity and as challenging stereotypes about non-heteronormative masculinities. Conclusions The outcome of the analysis presented in the paper is that there is evidence of the emergence of new media discourses on IPV and DVA among LGBTQ communities. Drawing on feminist discourses on IPV and DVA in heterosexual relationships and using media strategies of LGBTQ coming-out confessional narratives, the sampled media data reveals an ongoing search for a new language of discussing the relatively new societal problem. Further research into mediation of non-heteronormative male survivors of IPV and DVA promises insightful findings concerning the evolution of discourses on non-heteronormative masculinities in contemporary Russian media.