IF YOU think soap operas are about romance and glamour, think again.
Soap opera characters claw each other in fist fights, viciously curse and threaten each other and children mimic these nightly acts of violence, says a study done by Women's Media Watch.
The local media watchdog, says it came across the ugly side of these running dramas during 35 hours of television viewing.
The study, funded by UNICEF, found that during the 35 hours one out of every four violent acts committed took place in soap operas. Television news also amounted to a gore sheet of crime and violence, said the group which also looked at radio and newspaper material preferred by young people.
The result, said Women's Media Watch, is that most young people in Jamaica see violent acts as a normal part of life because of the steady diet of media violence.
In addition to its own study, Women's Media Watch compiled information from other reports that looked at the impact of media violence on those younger than 24. It found that violent acts permeated more than 60 per cent of the media material preferred by this generation.
Women's Media Watch, whose work was carried over two weeks between last December and this January, told a recent roundtable discussion that it documented more than 200 incidents of violence perpetrated by 191 persons on 272 pages of newspapers. News, it said, accounted for more than half the violence.
Music was the culprit in the case of radio, where one third of all the violence was contained in the lyrics of popular songs such as Let Them Have It (Merciless), Haters (Ward 21) and Nine (Bounty Killer).
The report also discovered that young people believed what they saw on television, heard on radio and read in the newspapers and therefore mimicked the violence portrayed in songs, commercials and various other programmes.
