On a May afternoon in 2001, nine-year-old Julian Roman climbed to his apartment roof in Bedford Park, the Bronx. Friends said he had jumped between rooftops, emulating his favourite superhero. This time, witnesses said, he yelled “Look, I’m Superman” before leaping. He fell five storeys and died. Three years later in Kolkata, nine-year-old Reshmi Roy died attempting to spin like Shaktimaan, a towel tied around her as a costume. In Santiago, a five-year-old in a Superman cape fell from a tenth-floor window and lost her life. These children absorbed the superhero not as a story but as a template for a powerful, admirable body, and acted accordingly.
These deaths are rare but expose an ordinary process in millions of children who read comics or play games. Albert Bandura’s early-1960s Bobo doll — social-learning experiments showed that children acquire behaviour by observing a model without direct reward or punishment; later research found identification deepens the effect. Children are especially receptive when the model is prestigious, distinctive and repeatedly rewarded, precisely the conditions superheroes supply. The genre repeatedly makes violence look like justice and invulnerability like courage. Public admiration usually confirms the hero’s infallibility. Before a child can articulate masculinity, comics entrench its stereotype: broad-shouldered, square-jawed, supremely confident, entitled to command and born to rescue. The superhero becomes an early curriculum in gender, virtue and civilisational hierarchy, delivered without the scrutiny applied to schoolbooks.
Copyright©Madras Courier, All Rights Reserved. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from madrascourier.com and redistribute by email, post to the web, mobile phone or social media.Please send in your feed back and comments to editor@madrascourier.com
