Easter Sunday 2011, Daniel Bartlam murdered his own mother with a hammer, then set fire to her room to try and cover up his crime. If that wasn’t bad enough, he was only 14 when he did this. Even worse, it seems he caught wind of the idea from an episode of Coronation Street.
Now, whatever I have to say after this does NOT take away from the fact that this is hands down horrific. No one should have to go through the trauma the Bartlam family has gone through, and what I have to say is in no way intended to disparage anybody involved in this case.
Right, that said, a murder influenced by Coronation Street? Has anyone heard the calls for Coronation Street to be banned? Of course not, that’s ludicrous.
Imagine if it were a murder influenced, by, say, Grand Theft Auto. You can imagine the outcry that would occur. There would be calls to get the game off the shelves, citing it to be too vicious and bloody for our children to be exposed to.
It sounds like a strange comparison to make, but I thought of it as soon as I heard of the case. The most obvious example to use here is the Columbine massacre of 1999. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were similar to Bartlam in that they were mentally damaged, and embarked on pre meditated murder while in their teens. The main difference is that while Bartlam was influenced by a soap, the Columbine killers were supposedly influenced by the game Doom. So, video games are again vilified after the Columbine tragedy, but Coronation Street gets off scott free? I’m sorry, but this doesn’t make sense.
The Coronation Street episode that Bartlam drew inspiration from.
Obviously I’m not saying the script writers behind the soap are in any way responsible for what happened. It’s ridiculous to even suggest that. But why is it that no one has even examined the possibility? If we follow the same logic as the video game naysayers, then the soaps have the potential to influence young people to do horrible things too, right?
Wrong. What this incident has highlighted is the broken idea that video games can turn ordinary children into violent criminals. What actually happens is that ANY kind of media can influence those who are already suffering for mental illnesses that would give them the tendency to commit these crimes. There is a huge, huge difference.
It’s not the media that failed Bartlam’s mother, or the Columbine victims. It’s the lack of care given to the perpetrator’s mental states. The Telegraph reports that Bartlam was clearly unstable before he committed murder, having suffered several episodes in school and undertaking counselling. Despite the evidence to the contrary, he was declared as ‘mentally stable’. If they had found otherwise, would his mother still be alive today? We can’t speculate on that, but one hopes she would have been.
I personally believe that these incidents happen because of society’s inability to own up and deal with problems before they occur. Instead, awful crimes happen and then rather than admitting their wrongs, society points to the easiest scapegoat they can find. In today’s age, that’s video games. It frightens me because this means we keep deflecting attention away from the true problem at hand, rather than attempting to solve it. How long before we implode?
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