TV Violence

The teenage boys who hangout at our guest house have the TV on anytime we let them, and while we find it annoying since we don’t like to waste much time on TV, it has been very interesting to see what is being shown through satellites mainly from Egypt, Ghana, and N’geria.  There are a ton of music video channels, with a mix of blinggy artists doing their thing to more traditional sounding drum beats and high middle-eastern-like singing, or straight-up rap, or more gospel sounding music.  The most interesting though are the soap-opera like movies/sagas that depict either a more rural tribal setting or a more urban and muslim setting.  Most of these are about people who love each other but aren’t allowed to be together, or about conflicts between multiple wives, or some other tragedy that ends by showing the power of love.  There’s not a lot of high-powered weapon violence shown (I’ve only noticed one “movie” that had people shooting guns), but there is a fair amount of B movie style smacking, wrestling to the ground, and stabbing people with make-shift weapons.  

The most disturbing thing is a lot of this simulated violence on TV is violence against women.  I'm often shocked by what is shown on even commercials in the States, but I think it’d be pretty rare to see a husband in the act of beating up a wife for doing something wrong on any show or TV movie.  My first reaction is that this shows pretty starkly a systematic problem in many African countries and showing it so graphically/openly on TV probably contributes to the problem with people like our young male TV watchers.   But it also makes me wonder if maybe the African producers of these shows are just more honest about how it’s a part of life in their culture and trying to represent things true to life.  Maybe it is shuffled under the table too much in the States without being addressed, which contributes to why it continues to be perpetuated there as well.  It makes me pray that people in all these cultures will make much more progress in finding better ways to address this problem in art and society!