As a researcher, let me say this. No one knows precisely what the connection between screen violence and real life violence is. It’s too hard to work out. However, the fact that we can’t work it out does not mean that it is not significant. We learn from experience (vicarious and direct) and a film in a cinema is an incredibly powerful experience.

Those who are not worried about the effect of such films on their children should think again. Don’t blithely repeat what you’ve heard others espouse and say it is nanny state nonsense, don’t just state that children can distinguish between films and reality, really think. Whatever your decision, you at least owe it to your children to seriously consider the consequences.

Personally I don’t think the correlation between screen violence and real life violence is as strong as some might make out but it is still, naturally, a very sensitive issue when an insanely popular film features a violent protagonist, leader of a gang, whose modus operandi is knives, cutting and stabbing; especially when this film is viewable by younger and, perhaps, more impressionable children.

I think the issue here, really, is that it has hit a raw nerve and so the reactions to the film do not stem merely from its depicitions (or not) of violence but from the fact that it seems to chime with a very real social problem that england is now facing – and that’s where, I suspect, this response is coming from.

Personally I don’t think the correlation between screen violence and real life violence is as strong as some might make out but it is still, naturally, a very sensitive issue when an insanely popular film features a violent protagonist, leader of a gang, whose modus operandi is knives, cutting and stabbing; especially when this film is viewable by younger and, perhaps, more impressionable children.

I think the issue here, really, is that it has hit a raw nerve and so the reactions to the film do not stem merely from its depicitions (or not) of violence but from the fact that it seems to chime with a very real social problem that england is now facing.

I believe parents should police their kids and not some movie board but if this had a sex scene it, it’d be rated R. That’s what we do in America, revel in violence but be horrified at nudity. At least the Brits have their priorities “straighter.”

I think fundamental issue is that old adage ‘you are what you eat.’ If we, as a nation, consume so much violence and allow our childer to do so as well, we’re running the risk of desensitizing ourselves to a dangerous level.

I loved the movie. It’s one of the best I’ve seen in a very long time.

I did walk away thinking that it was pretty violent for a PG-13 rating, though. I’ve seen far less violent movies get slapped with R ratings.

Nicholas, you may have seen Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm St. when you were a kid (like I’m sure we all did), but those movies were also properly rated. None of them received PG-13 ratings. They were all rated R, and most of them had very cartoony violence compared to The Dark Knight.

Not that I really care about any of this.