Suzanne Freyjadis-Chuberka has written an excellent post over at DollyMix about a new book called, Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth about Violent Video Games and What Parents Can do. The book is a study about the effect of video games on young and impressionable teenagers.
The study actually is fair in that it addresses why violent video game are not all inherently bad and won’t turn your child into a raving mass-muderer.
But the search is still on because the study felt it was okay to leave out girls in their research because they didn’t feel they could find any.
Suzzanne writes that, “In an interview the lead researcher, Prof. Cheryl Olson says, ‘Since we bought into the myth that girls don’t like violent games, we didn’t recruit them for focus groups in this set of studies.'”
Can we blame the Professors for not knowing where to look to find girls that may play violent games? With the industry continuing to market their games to boys and men, it’s not difficult to imagine that these professors assumed girls just don’t play these games.
