Let me first fess up to the fact that I can't cope with screen violence from any source.

Here is a wuss who had to leave the cinema when someone kicked the puppy in Benji.

So very clearly I am not the target audience for the latest batch of video games for the Christmas market, whose not so unique selling point, to quote one current sales pitch, is "more gore, more blood (that's different?) more strippers."

Let's accept too that the debate still rages over what the effects of constantly engaging with violent video games might be on the user, of which more later. But what is incontestable is that there is a lot of very unsavoury material regularly being watched and played with by children who wouldn't be allowed within 10 country miles of much less disturbing violence were it packaged as a film, and screened in a public cinema.

The other day I had occasion to listen to a presentation by a trained counsellor who deals with troubled kids in their school setting courtesy of the charity Place 2 Be. The latter sets up safe spaces in customised classrooms used only for the purpose of letting children with problems unburden themselves in private. It may be bereavement, it may be bullying, it not infrequently involves domestic violence, drugs and alcohol abuse.

The counsellor was using play dolls to help one little boy explain what was happening in his home which so disturbed him. When the male doll hit the female one and knocked her to the floor he was asked how the female might feel. The wee lad opined that she was probably OK because it showed that he loved her.

The counsellor went on to talk about how many troubled primary schoolchildren were also witnesses to violent adult video games having ready access to them in households where a parent or older sibling had bought them. Yet you constantly hear spokespeople for manufacturers intone that there is no problem because these games are clearly labelled for 18+ only.

It kind of reminds you of the days when airlines routinely had a few rows at the rear reserved for smokers, and cheerfully described the rest of the plane as non-smoking. As if by some miracle of physics the tobacco toxins were trained to stop in mid-air over row 30.

So let's wind back for a moment to that ongoing debate as to whether violent games, some laced with violent sex, can be deemed likely to provoke similar behaviour in real life.

The truth is that no study has yet made a direct link between mowing down folks on screen in your bedroom and tooling up to shoot strangers in the nearest shopping centre. But what does consistently come through the studies is that playing these games, especially in a steady diet, makes you less sensitive to the effects of violence, more aroused by it, and less likely to be what the jargon calls pro-social - in other words, likely to behave in an empathetic way to your fellow humans.

That came over pretty loud and clear from this month's study at the Indiana University School of Medicine which has done a fair whack of research in this area over a number of years. The latest involved two groups, one of which played violent games over the space of the week, whilst the other engaged with non-violent ones where the turn on was speed rather than mayhem. Then both groups had their brain activity scanned. Unsurprisingly the group force-fed violence were ultimately less questioning of it.

Hardly a newsflash when you take a closer look at what's on offer. Those who queued for the recent launch of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 knew they were on a fast track to role playing, including the opportunity to slit throats in the good old fashioned way before deploying weaponry able to wipe out hundreds and thousands.

But it's not just a question of how mentally healthy it is for the console commander; there's a wider question around the kind of cultural norms and morality these products are selling on.

Do we really think it is OK to have kids playing games where you get rewards for killing the innocent, taking out prostitutes, murdering cops? The advertising makes few bones about what's on offer.

Once upon a more innocent time, video material warned about excessive violence, now it uses the more grotesque storylines, weaponry upgrades and not-so-soft porn as positive selling points.

Get your state of the art killing machines here.

One particularly arresting front cover has a man holding a machine gun in front of his privates, whilst alongside a pneumatic blonde with violent tattoos brandishes weapons in the hands of both raised arms. Subtlety is not a big feature in this marketplace.

There is, of course, a dual responsibility in play here. Ideally what children watch and do should be monitored by the adult(s) caring for them.

But not all households are ideally run, and even in homes where the kids are looked after, there will be parents, especially dads, with adolescent sons who think this is no more than the current manifestation of the macho games boys have always enjoyed playing. They will say that it is just a hyped up form of leisure gaming which hardly means their lads are about to turn into mini-mobsters. But what if these selfsame lads turn instead into adults whose general view of whether violence is acceptable might have been partially formed by years of participating in it at one remove? (One researcher, Professor David Grossman of the US Military Academy West Point, now calls these games of casual slaying "murder simulators".)

What if children who watch them at home, despite being 10 years short of the supposed cut-off purchase age, grow up believing violence to be the norm, and the only protection lies in deploying more firepower than the other guy? Fanciful? I don't believe so.

Not when any child, for any reason, can conclude that a violent act can somehow be construed as a warped sign of affection.