"I think social media has a role to play here. The computer games that young boys are playing where violence is a very significant part of what’s being enforced into their minds on a regular basis … the treatment of women, what they’re seeing in some of the computer games, what they’re seeing on social media, the normalisation of all of that, it’s just the lack of manners in society more generally…"
Attempts to link video games and violence (or even “aggression”) are decades old, and part of a long line of scapegoats for youth behaviour — rap, television, rock music, radio, novels, the waltz, etc. There is literally no evidence from anywhere of any connection between computer games and violence, except possibly that releases of major new games lowers violent crime. But this is a politician who only two weeks ago was bandying about references to Australia’s worst mass murder since the frontier wars, desperately looking for a place to hide in the aftermath of what happened at Bondi and Wakeley.
