by Richie Caldicott

Created on: January 06, 2009

When fourteen-year-old Stefan Pakeerah was murdered by his seventeen-year-old former friend Warren LeBlanc in February 2004, the UK media's reaction reflected the shock and horror of the country's citizens, appalled not only by the ages of the perpetrator and victim but also the viciousness of the act (LeBlanc had stabbed Pakeerah to death with a claw hammer) and it wasn't long before the whole country was thrown into yet another repeat of the "x-is-responsible-for-all-society's-ills" furore when it emerged that a scene in one of the Child's Play franchise movies featured a character attacking another with a claw hammer (and that LeBlank had seen the movie).

The Childs Play series of films had come under fire from the press before and for a moment it looked as though motion pictures containing scenes of violence (or Video Nasties as they were dubbed during the UK censorship furore of the nineteen-eighties) would again bear the burden of society's collective guilt. But then, just as the nation's tabloid editors were busying themselves Googling "Chucky", Stefan's mother, Giselle Pakeerah, claimed that LeBlanc had played and was obsessed with the video game Manhunt. Instantly the motion picture industry was in the clear and we could all go back to watching Evil Dead or Driller Killer as often as we liked because the UK media had just decided that the new villain on the block was a video game in which the player could "kill" other characters.

Ok, so Manhunt is actually a little worse than that, it's certainly not the root of all the world's evils but it is far from being a pleasant video game. For those unfamiliar with the game, the player controls a convict allowed to escape the death sentence in exchange for participating in a televised "snuff" game show. The more people the player kills and the more stylishly or brutally they do so, the better ranking they will receive. It is, quite simply, a horrid little squalid game and not only did I enjoy playing it immensely but I didn't feel tempted to murder anybody afterward, either.

In the wake of the press's reaction to Manhunt possibly providing the inspiration for a murder (it too featured a scene of a character being killed by a claw hammer), retailers such as Game and Dixons removed it from their shelves. Oh but there'd been a terrible mistake. The police claimed that they had no evidence of LeBlanc owning a copy of the game and that it was, contrary to his mother's insistence, Pakeerah, the victim, who had a copy

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