A lawmaker in the Southeast Asian country is indirectly blaming videogames for recent violence, and wants the government to step in.
Whenever there’s an incident of extreme violence, many are quick to point fingers and more often than not, videogames end up getting the blame – even if there’s evidence that suggests otherwise. It’s happened before in Russia, Great Britain and most recently in America, and now a politician from the Philippines is the latest to suggest that videogames are to blame after a pair of shootings in the country resulted in the tragic death of nine people, including two children.
Representative Bernadette Herrera-Dy, the vice chairman of the House committee on children’s welfare, recently claimed that many videogames promote violence and sexual promiscuity, and is calling for local government agencies to step up and impose classification standards to control who has access to what kind of videogames. Currently, the Phillipines does use the age and content ratings offered by the Entertainment Software Rating Board, but Herrera-Dy states that they aren’t enforced since none of the games reviewed by the ESRB are made locally, and the country has no specific government agency that handles videogame classifications on its own.
Along with pushing for the new videogame classification standards, Herrera-Dy is also pushing for several new measures promoting stricter gun-control and violence prevention. While she did admit that there’s no direct connection between videogames and the recent gun-related violence in the Philippines, Herrera-Dy believes that a lack of one “should not deter local and national legislative bodies to pass laws against video game violence, most of which are even more brutal and ruthless than those committed in real life.”
Source: The Peninsula via Game Politics
