Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad is Good For you: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter, is the subject of this article on canada.com regarding violence in video games. In the midst of it, he links to the Child Well-Being Index at Duke University.

The latest index, released last March, shows that violent crime among teens and adolescents in the United States has plunged by almost two-thirds since 1975, to less than 10 juveniles per 1,000 people.

I did a search, and found the CWI here. I’m working now, so I won’t have time to dig into the data that’s there to criticize it until later today. At a casual glance, the only place I could find the data Steven cites is here in the press release.

The study mentions nothing about video games in particular, but instead attributes the dramatic decline in youth violence to improved policing and an overall rosier economy. Steven goes so far as to give more credit to video games, claiming that they allow teens to play out their thrill-seeking dangerous behavior without threatening society.

“If you look just at something like Grand Theft Auto — the primary crime you commit in GTA is carjacking, right? You run in and throw somebody out of their car and you jump in their car.”

“We talk about crimes like car jacking as thrill crimes, right? People are doing it not because they have any kind of dire economic need but because they are showing off and jumping into a car and intimidating someone and throwing them out and racing around in a car. And it is entirely possible that kids now get those thrills from video games. They don’t need to actually car jack people the way that they needed to 10 or 15 years ago because the games are so accurate in their simulations,” he said.

I don’t know if I buy this. It sounds very close to the psychological concept of catharsis — the idea that punching a pillow will reduce your aggression in a harmless fashion. The concept of catharsis has long been discredited by the psychological community.

On the other hand, maybe catharsis is the wrong way to look at it. Maybe it’s just that the teens don’t have the TIME to carjack because they’re playing these games so much. I mean, really, if television ratings are down across the board because video games is eating some time, is it unreasonable to expect that it might cut into some of their other ‘hobbies’ as well?