The book Grand Theft Childhood has made quite the splash in the psychological community (man, that sounds bad…) by challenging the long-standing assumption that video game violence is an evil, eight-headed sea serpent. In the book, Doctors Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olsen concluded that “focusing on such easy but minor targets as violent video games causes parents, social activists and public-policy makers to ignore the much more powerful and significant causes of youth violence that have already been well established, including a range of social, behavioral, economic, biological and mental-health factors.”

In short: While their study did show that children who played M rated games were twice as likely as kids who didn’t play M rated games (or about the same percentage as kids who didn’t play games at all) to get into physical altercations, the overall negative impact is insignificant when compared to the child being called a “fat ass” day in and day out for the whole school year.

Unfortunately, this point was either lost or ignored by Joanne Cantor, Ph.D.

Cantor, the Director of the Center for Communication Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is a well-known critic of the media and author of “Mommy, I’m Scared: How TV and Movies Frighten Children and What We Can Do to Protect Them“. As you can imagine by the title of her book, if you were going to find one person to disagree with the book, it’d be Cantor.

Here’s where things start to get interesting: Not only did Cantor disagree with the ultimate findings in the book, but she took issue with everything, and in the process implied that Dr. Kutner and Dr. Olsen were biased, that their funding for the study was earmarked, and even that the authors of Grand Theft Childhood were in cahoots with Take-Two Interactive. Cantor even took issue with the title of the book, saying:

It’s a misleading title anyways, because it seems to imply criticism of the games rather than take criticism of researchers whose findings suggest harm to kids.

Since we already know just how “game friendly” the US Government is, we can throw that insinuation out the window using little more than common sense. You also can neither prove or disprove personal bias without some hard evidence which was not presented by Cantor, so we’ll toss that aside as well. Speaking with OpenEducation, Dr. Kutner explained that the title “Grand Theft Childhood” was originally the name of a chapter in their book, but that Simon & Shuster (their publisher) changed it, most likely to increase marketing. So, that leaves us with the implication by Cantor that Kutner and Olsen were in league with Take-Two Interactive and Rockstar Games, due to the closeness of both the game and book’s release date. Kutner also explained that the release date for the book was set a year in advance — when Grand Theft Auto IV was still slated for an October, 2007 release.

One would think that somebody as renowned as Cantor would look into these matters before writing a scathing editorial on the book, but as has been shown many times before, when somebody is driven to get the result they want, they’ll manipulate, twist, create or ignore information that contradicts their personal belief. But there is good news to be had:

PsychCentral pulled Cantor’s editorial inside of 24 hours. The website says that after having a couple of outside reviews read over Cantor’s glorified rant, the website found the following:

[The editorial] was not up to the usual standards we look for in our editorial content. There were also questions baout specific assertions and accusations…

Going to the page the article was once on now takes you to a 404 notice.

While PsycheCentral is to be applauded for looking into this, they aren’t without at least partial blame for publishing Cantor’s piece in the first place. However, we’re all allowed the occasional error in judgment and they did ultimately do right by removing the piece.

But hey, maybe she’s just one of the many who have come out of the woodwork to try and become the next Jack Thompson. (Ha! I found a way to squeeze him in!)

via OpenEducation (thanks Tom)

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