Showing gore and grimness to tweens and teens

[gornwiththewind]

At what age (tweens upwards) do you think it would be at all useful to show images or footage of distressing or traumatising subjects, whether contemporary (eg footage of man being run down by police after he had stabbed people and then man being shot) or historical (eg drawings of how slaves were physically punished). Also when talking about "fake news" showing really grim images or footage instead of using less grim examples.

Whenever I hear about this happening in class at school I just think "why..." - subjects are important, but imagery and footage not so much. One of dc's teachers seems to have entrenched ideas about how it is good for tweens/teens to see grimness.

We had this at school too. In the end my DS had a breakdown and I had to take him out of school. I had told the school repeatedly that it was going to happen and they ignored me.

Please do look after your kids. Take them out of school if you have to.

Thank you, and I hope your DS is okay now? Did the school ever try to justify it?

I'm not sure. I think a lot of teens (and preteens) love the gross and gory side of history (and the world in general) - look at how popular Horrible Histories is, and all the other books like Gruesome Geography.

It's often a great way to engage them in learning and to keep their interest in what can otherwise be quite a boring subject (to them, anyway).

Tween is 8-13 right?

Are you talking police bodycam style footage of the person being run down and shot - not pixelated or cut away from, with blood and brains everywhere sort of thing? Because I can't imagine it's reasonable to show that level of real violence to pre-teens. But Police Interceptors style footage of a car chase, and where the violence is not actually shown, it's blurred or edited out, I could see there being a time and place for that.

Historical drawings of things are in history textbooks as primary sources. Illustrations of a Wound Man and historical punishments and stuff like that, I'd expect from secondary onwards. Younger children might be a bit sensitive about it, but equally we talk about events like the Great Fire of London, the Black Death, Henry VIII having his wives beheaded, Guy Fawkes being tortured then hung drawn and quartered and how we burn his effigy on a bonfire all pretty routinely in primary school.

Just thinking through for wider context - at the Imperial War Museum the Holocaust section is for 14 year olds or older, but that is incredibly graphic and harrowing. Most other sections of museums, torture equipment, guns and tanks, medical instruments from history, literal dead bodies on display, all open to all ages.

I am over 60 and I would walk out of any situation I wasn't in voluntarily if these type of images were shown. I skipped the museum in Hiroshima for this very reason. I didn't need to see pictures to grasp the horror. Shame on schools for forcing them on children.

Some of the children are less bothered than others, but in all honesty I have never met a child of any age (or adult) who loves the gross and gory side. It was forced on us when I was younger and I can't remember any school friends liking it, or anyone liking it - it was more a case of wide eyed amazement and then silently trying to process! Families who have things like Horrible Histories talk about children being engrossed - as they would - but i don't know any child who says "I just love this because it is so disgusting".

In all seriousness, has a child ever actually said to you "I love the idea of a man being tied up naked and then whipped" or "I love see the stretching machine which literally pulled bodies apart" or "when they chop off the heads and you see all the blood and gore that is amazing"?

Thanks for your comments. It is interesting to hear another point of view.