Criminels, l'art de chercher les faux coupables

Rien de nouveau, mais ça fait toujours plaisir de lire ce genre de choses :

"Ever since cheap, mass-produced popular art first appeared in the eighteenth century, critics have blamed it for debasing public taste, corrupting the morals of minors, and providing potential psychopaths with helpful hints on how to commit crimes. When thirteen-year-old Jesse Harding Pomeroy was arrested for the mutilation-murder of two younger children in 1872, for example, critics immediately pointed an accusing finger at the action-packed "dime novels" beloved by juvenile readers in post–Civil War America. The fact that there was not a single shred of evidence to show that Pomeroy had ever read such literature made no difference to these moralists, who insisted that the frontier bloodshed depicted in books like Raiders of the Rawhide Range and Rattlesnake Ned's Revenge had inspired the "Boy Fiend" to perpetrate his atrocities.

As soon as movies were invented, attention shifted to the new medium. Shortly after the release of the first cinematic Western, Edwin S. Porter's 1903 The Great Train Robbery, a train was held up near Scranton, Pennsylvania, and one passenger murdered. Critics immediately blamed the film, despite the fact that (as it later turned out) none of the culprits had seen it.

The story has been the same ever since. Whenever a new mass medium comes along, it is immediately accused of undermining moral values and instigating crime. During the "Golden Age" of radio, one critic claimed that children were being "rendered psychopathic" by popular on-air melodramas like Lights Out and The Shadow, which glorified "every form of crime known to man." In the 1950s, selfproclaimed child rearing experts declared that comic books caused everything from juvenile delinquency to homosexuality (a type of behavior that, at the time, was regarded as only slightly less heinous than mass murder).

By the early 1960s, the culprit of choice had become television —particularly violent cop and cowboy shows. Nowadays, it is gangsta rap and Grand Theft Auto. In another fifty years, it will undoubtedly be virtual reality shooter games in which players actually feel the blood-spray from the blown-off head of a cannibal zombie (at which point, of course, today's media scapegoats will be looked at in the same way we now regard radio shows and television Westerns —as the quaint relics of a more innocent past).

Though media violence makes a convenient whipping boy (particularly for people who would rather blame their child's behavioral problems on The Matrix and PlayStation 2 than on their own parental shortcomings), there is —despite the countless scientific studies devoted to the question— no definitive proof of a direct relationship between watching make-believe violence and committing real-life murder. In his exceptionally well informed and levelheaded book, Savage Spawn: Reflections on Violent Children, Jonathan Kellerman is so insistent on this point that he puts it in italics: "Not a single causal link between media violence and criminality has ever been produced."

[...]

Indeed, anyone inclined to blame psychopathic violence on a killer's favorite books or movies must deal
with the discomfiting fact that a significant number of serial murderers have been devoted students of
the Bible, capable of committing the most horrendous crimes even while reciting Scripture."

- The Serial Killer Files, Harold Schechter

Désolée, j'ai la flemme de traduire, mais pour ceux qui ne comprennent vraiment pas l'anglais cet extrait explique que différents média ont été consécutivement accusés de pervertir la jeunesse (et donc la pousser au crime) et ce depuis la littérature, et que ça n'est pas près de s'arrêter, parce que les gens préfèrent chercher des coupables plutôt que se remettre en question. Le dernier paragraphe précise que pas mal de tueurs en série ont une connaissance approfondie de la Bible.

Pour une fois que c'est pas moi qui le dit ! (Et j'ai posté ça dans cette partie du blog pour une bonne raison, même si j'ignore laquelle.)