“There are mostly little ones, sixths singing the song in the cafeteria, I think it’s not good for them.” Clémence is in her final year and has watched all the episodes of the Korean series Squid Game, broadcast on Netflix. She finds the series violent and she sucks the consequences for his younger comrades.
At 11, Tom is one of those followers of the show and has watched all episodes. “It’s not that violent. I’ve seen worse“, says the young schoolboy in front of his mother. “I am ashamed, replies Armelle, Tom’s mother. I let him watch when it’s not his age. At first, I didn’t know he was watching this, I hadn’t seen it.”
A trivialization of violence
“I don’t really police what she does, explains Marie-Laure, the mother of a 13-year-old college girl who has also seen the series. I’ll watch when she’s on Netflix. I go to see what movie she’s watching from time to time but clearly since I don’t watch the movie, it doesn’t speak to me more than that. ”
There is, however, a real risk. In schoolyards, some young people come to reproduce the violent games from the series. “From the moment you expose products from adults to young children, you should not expect it to go well, explains Stéphane Blocquaux, doctor in information and communication sciences and author of the book Le biberon numérique. He denounces a phenomenon of trivialization of violence : “These are adult products, we tend to forget that. Squid Game is not a children’s series.”
The influence of social networks
For the researcher, social networks are one of the explanations for the explosion of the phenomenon among young people: “These are sound boxes. We do not count the number of young people who have not seen the series but who have seen a tiktok video, have a brother who showed them a few things on the networks etc. We have gradually lowered At the age of access to these social networks, parents have left high-performance smartphones in the hands of children at an earlier age, which are becoming a veritable direct line of access to all media. “
On Netflix, the series is prohibited at least 16 years old. This is not enough for Stéphane Blocquaux.