Essay on Contribution of Movies Towards Crime

Essay on Contribution of Movies Towards Crime

Movies exert colossal but harmful influence on the young minds. Today’s movies are so full of sex and violence that the youth easily pick up new values, attitudes and personality traits.

On the one hand, movies create social awareness against evil customs, arouse public opinion against undesirable social conditions, and stimulate public demand for civic, social and political reforms, and on the other hand, movies provide vicarious experience to the young people, draining off their tensions and converting their anti-social tendencies into imaginary adventures.

A number of cases are reported in the newspapers where young persons have used the same techniques of committing crimes as were shown in the movies they had watched. The most recent example is the case of a boy in Calcutta reported in January 1996 who, along with two of his accomplices, murdered his parents by using the same methods they had seen in an English movie a few days earlier.

Such cases are often reported from cities like Mumbai, Delhi, etc. However, children and young persons from the lower and middle classes are more likely to be driven towards crime by watching movies rather than those from the upper classes.

Further, already acquired delinquent or criminal tendencies through intimate association with peers are likely to get more aggravated by watching motion pictures which may not result in the acquiring of totally new conduct norms. It may also be added that children are more susceptible to the influence of movies than adults.

The television now faces almost the same charges that were once hurled at the movies. The English movies, particularly those shown on the cable TV, glamourise life, stimulate desire for a life of luxury and arouse sexual passion.

Both English and Hindi movies as well as serials on the TV provide new philosophies of life, new ideas of rights and privileges, and fashions in dress and behaviour.

They also teach the adolescents and the youth’s modern techniques of love-making and some deviant techniques of achieving things and earning money. The youths impersonate actors and imitate them in their conduct.

Herbert Blumer and Philip Hauser (Cf. Sutherland, 1965: 216) have also said: “The motion pictures were found a factor of importance in the delinquent or criminal careers of about 10 per cent of the male and 25 per cent of the female offenders studied.

Movies display criminal patterns of behaviour, arouse desires for easy money and luxury, suggest questionable methods for their achievement, induce a spirit of bravado, toughness and adventurousness, arouse intense sexual desires and invoke day-dreaming of criminal roles.”