Game:

Grand Theft Auto V (2013)

Duration: 2:17

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10

Both Kmart and Target Australia have pulled Grand Theft Auto 5 from their shelves after a petition on Change.org received more than 46 thousand signatures. The petition says a few things that I suspect aren’t particularly well-researched, such as:

“It's a game that encourages players to murder women for entertainment”

And

“This misogynistic GTA 5 literally makes a game of bashing, killing and horrific violence against women.”

In a press release, Target said:

“Target Australia will stop selling the R-rated video game Grand Theft Auto 5 (GTA5) following feedback from customers about the game's depictions of violence against women… The decision was made following extensive community and customer concern about the game.”

Target General Manager Corporate Affairs Jim Cooper said:

“We feel the decision to stop selling GTA5 is in line with the majority view of our customers. While these products often contain imagery that some customers find offensive, in the vast majority of cases, we believe they are appropriate products for us to sell to adult customers. However, in the case of GTA5, we have listened to the strong feedback from customers that this is not a product they want us to sell."

Kmart then added to this by saying:

“Following a significant review of all content in Grand Theft Auto Games Kmart has taken the decision to remove this product immediately. Kmart apologises for not being closer to the content of this game.”

Both Kmart and Target are actually owned by Wesgarmers, a retail group, which means it may have just been a group-wide decision.

However, as someone who has played quite a lot of GTA 5, I’d certainly contest that the game encourages violence against women, or that it ‘makes a game’ of killing women. Killing women is optional entirely, there’s no obvious encouragement that I’m aware of, and you spend very vast majority of the game killing other men. While you do have the option to have sex with a sex worker and then pretty brutally kill her to get your money back, it’s just that – an option. It’s a very small part of what is a very big game, and I certainly never did it, nor ever felt incentivised to.

That’s not to say that I’m disagreeing with the reasons for the petition, but I certainly feel like it has factual inaccuracies. It also says:

“Games like this are grooming yet another generation of boys to tolerate violence against women,” even though it’s an R18+ game which ‘boys’ certainly shouldn’t have access to, and can’t be sold.

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