NEW YORK - High-school boys, and girls in particular, who regularly watch pro wrestling television shows seem to be more likely than non-viewers to get into fights with their partners when they're on dates, new research suggests.

Parents who watch wrestling may not feel it has any effect on themselves and so they don't think it affects their children, but "high school children are very much in a rapid developmental process," study co-author Dr. Robert H. DuRant told Reuters Health.

"They are affected by this," he said, citing the extreme violence involved in television wrestling as well as the blatant use of sexuality, vulgar language and derogatory terms for women.

DuRant and his team at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, followed a random sample of 2,228 students from all of the public high schools in Winston-Salem/Forsyth County, North Carolina for a six- to seven-month period.

The students completed a questionnaire that asked about various risk behaviors, such as if they had recently carried a weapon, whether they had been involved in a physical fight during the previous year and if they had initiated the fight or been a victim. They were also asked how often they had watched pro wrestling during the past two weeks.

The investigators found that the more frequently the students watched television wrestling, the more frequently they reported initiating or being the victim of a date fight. Also, the researchers note in their report in the journal Pediatrics, the association between television wrestling and date-fight perpetration was particularly strong for girls.

Specifically, boys and girls who watched wrestling just once during a two-week period were 10 percent and 12 percent more likely, respectively, to be involved in date fighting than were their peers who had not watched any wrestling. Boys who watched it six times in two weeks were 77 percent more likely to perpetrate date fighting, while girls who watched it six times were 170 percent more likely to do so.

Girls who more frequently watched television wrestling were also more likely to report carrying a knife at school, carrying a gun, and fighting than were their peer.

The specific reason for the greater association between television wrestling and date fighting among females is unknown, but DuRant and his colleagues speculate that it may be because of desensitization among boys. Or, girls who already engage in violence may simply prefer to watch wrestling or other programming that reinforces their behavior, which may also lead them to fight and carry weapons more frequently than their peers.

"The bottom line is that adolescents are affected by what they are exposed to," DuRant said in a university statement.

"It's easy for parents to think that their adolescent children are just little adults, but they aren't," DuRant told Reuters Health. "We do know their brains are still growing," he said. "Exposing children and adolescents to extreme violence in the media can have an influence on them."

SOURCE: Pediatrics, August 2006.