Contrary to popular belief, violence among teens has plummeted due to the popularity of video games.

Should video games like “Grand Theft Auto” and “HALO” accept responsibility for their roles in the escalating number of school shootings?
 
Are movies like “Juno” and TV shows like “Gossip Girl” more than partly to blame for the rise in teen mothers?
 
Have Myspace, Facebook and YouTube made it possible for an increasing amount of young people to learn how to use and find illicit drugs?
 
Those are just a few of the myths that are repeated and often accepted as truth that
University of Southern California sociologist Karen Sternheimer debunks in her new book, “Connecting Social Problems and Popular Culture: Why Media Is Not the Answer” (Westview Press, August 2009).
 
The problem is that while these assumptions about today’s popular culture have soared in popularity, violent crime, pregnancy and drug use among teens is down.  Click here for the YouTube interview.
 
Sternheimer did find a theme among the minority of kids who do things that aren’t in their best interest.
 
“The No. 1 culprit is poverty,” Sternheimer said. “The No. 1 common denominator among teen pregnancy, youth violence, educational failure and obesity is poverty.
 
“We need to look beyond video games and television and the Internet. If we want to solve the problems, we need to look at the underlying structural factors that helped create those problems. When we ignore those factors, we ignore the solution.”
 
In  the last 10 years, video games have become a mainstream pastime for families and profits now rival the movie business. Yet as video game play has skyrocketed, youth violence has plummeted, Sternheimer found.
 
In her research, Sternheimer found juvenile homicide arrest rates fell 77 percent between 1993 and 2003. And students have less than a 7 in 10 million chance of being killed at school, Sternheimer said.
 
Sternheimer has studied the links between the media and societal ills for more than a decade. She builds upon her research that she presented in her previous two books, “Kids These Days: Facts and Fictions About Today’s Youth” and “It’s not the Media: The Truth About Pop Culture’s Influence on Children.”
 
Karen Sternheimer, sociologist in the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, is an expert on mass media, children and popular culture. She writes frequently for her Everyday Sociology blog.