Iain Duncan Smith says games are destroying the innocence of UK's kids

Ex-Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith has told The Times that videogames are destroying the innocence of UK children because "nobody pays attention to age ratings".

Speaking with Times Online about "power, alcohol abuse and Britain’s broken society", Smith claims that some games were "extremely violent", and used GTA as an example.

"We are driving children to lose their childhood, and some video games are incredibly violent, like Grand Theft Auto," he said. "They are meant to be 18 but nobody cares what it says on the label."

Television programming was also blamed for this loss of innocence, as well as the government giving tax credits to workers while not seeing stay-at-home parents as having a job.

"When a worker goes out to build a car, the Government gives him a tax exemption, if she or he stays at home you double tax that family by not allowing that tax exemption to exist," he stated. “I see a lot of dysfunctional families where you are really seeing a society in collapse. We are now into three or four generations of lone parenting, multi-fathering.

"I’ve been to places where the girls have such low self-esteem that they think being abused is the norm. They have never had unconditional love, they have seen nothing but sex as the basis of relationships so they can’t say no themselves.

“In some areas, the way in which society should work has been inverted — instead of wisdom being passed from mother to daughter or father to son, dysfunction is being handed from one generation to the next.”

Not sure paying attention to game ratings can help fix all this.

Maybe if the ratings on the game box were larger, it would help. Wait. They already happened, and the government started enforcing the labeling system around Christmas.

Still, 33 percent of parents in the UK allow their kids to play over-age games.

Thanks, CVG.