10 Stupid Movie Controversies That Totally Missed The Point

8. Was Child's Play 3 Responsible For James Bulger's Death?

The debate about the impact of violent films on our youth is one that will rage forever more, and in 1993, this debate was given a bright spotlight in the UK, when a moral panic abounded around the film Child's Play 3, with sensationalist tabloid newspapers suggesting that the film may have been "responsible" for inspiring Robert Thompson and Jon Venables to murder infant James Bulger in brutal fashion. Though the police rejected the claim, it didn't stop the tabloid rags from banging the drum to the point that large portions of the public were whipped into a frenzy, and to cope with the outrage, the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 then clarified what video material children could have access to. Even if you don't believe that violent films don't have a particularly adverse effect on our children (I've been watching Terminator and Aliens since I was a baby, I think I turned out alright-ish), the police did investigate the tabloid claim, and discerned that though Venables' father had rented the film, it was during a period at which the child did not even reside at the property, so it is impossible for him to have at least accessed it this way. This sort of scaremongering continues today, though the campaign has shifted more towards violent video games than movies. Still, to knee-jerk blame a movie for a human being's actions is to completely gloss over the fact that a) it is an overwhelming minority of people who could even be said to possibly be affected by films like this and b) other psychological factors that are much more likely to blame.