Rid Us of the Persistent Depiction of Domestic Violence!
Mass media, in any society, has a powerful position to influence the overall culture, making it a critical component in creating and altering current ideologies within the given society. In a patriarchal orthodox society like Pakistan, our media’s role has been nothing short of a terrible nightmare in normalising our minds towards the glorification of abuse on women. The misfortune of the portrayal of abuse against women is deeply embedded in various aspects of productions of most drama. Be it working with alleged real-life abusers or showing the protagonist as a harasser who eventually gets the female protagonist – despite his evident red flags – coupled with the absence of support from the family towards victims of abuse, there are many layers of normalisation of domestic abuse on television.
All these mentioned aspects lead to a disadvantageous targeting of the entire female gender. The majority of our national dramas represent women as victims. They’re the ones who are held accountable for the abuse and considered as the cause of mishandling. Only Ramzan dramas are an exception. They serve as a respite from the usual harsh monotonous content, with light love stories of lead pairs and portrayal of healthy family dynamics. The rest of the daily soaps serve us with repetitive content with a severe roller-coaster of emotions.
I often wonder, why have we, as a nation, collectively stopped questioning the pernicious content being fed to us? Have we turned tone deaf towards the exploitation of women? This nonchalance in our attitude is concerning and benefiting the existing patriarchy in our society. Additionally, it’s worsening the status of women in our society and simultaneously leading to extraordinary welcome to misogyny. The creators of such dramas are to be held accountable and questioned about their irresponsibility. Although they come up with the same excuses every time – either that this is the demand of audiences or we are educating the masses on current scenarios of society.
However, there is not much truth to this. Most of the nation’s populace – especially the youth – feels alienated by the content as it hasn’t changed with societal changes and norms over the years. When will the makers realize, we have gone past the ‘educating’ segment, and are now glorifying abuse and assaults so casually that it’s actually frightening.
Read More: https://www.theyouthblog.com/2023/05/22/the-fault-in-our-star-studded-dramas/
While it’s the laden duty of makers to take responsibility for the content, concurrently the actors are equally liable for choosing such scripts. Actresses like Sajal Aly, Mahira Khan, Kubra Khan, Saba Qamar are wise enough to reject such work and I would love to see many other actresses join the mission. The famous twins, Aiman and Minal Khan and Ayeza Khan – the most followed celebrities in the country – have always taken the responsibility very mildly. Do they not realize how impactful their contribution is to society? Repeatedly doing dramas like Jalan, Ishq Hai, Hassad, Zindaan , Mere Paas Tum Ho, and Nand were not educating the masses.
If we talk about responsible actors the names are very few including Billal Abbas Khan, Ahad Raza Mir, Fawad Khan, Zahid Ahmed , and Hamza Ali Abbasi. The most irresponsible actors have to be Feroze Khan, Muneeb Butt and Danish Taimoor who continue to provide their fans with monotonous content, full of assaults and toxicity.
Talking about dramas and media in general, there is a far greater role for them to play apart from creating a frenzy situation and sensationalizing it. It ranges across instructive, educative, informative, entertaining, therapeutic, social and cultural to religious and political experiences. Most of these problematic dramas usually have positive endings where the female protagonist takes a stands for herself and everybody applauds her actions, but the unfortunate ground reality is that women caught in an abusive marriage are not always lucky to escape to initiate a new life. In fact, in most of the cases they stay trapped in the prison of abusive marriage till they die. Many times, due to the fear of societal judgments and comments or because of their financial dependency upon their husbands, women don’t have the option of leaving the abusive relationship.
Are women’s lives this futile to be wasted on a wrong man? At times I feel like we’ve regressed with time, instead of progressing. In crucial times like the ones we are currently going through, with our country dealing with numerous crises at once, instead of providing the nation with relief through fiction, these kinds of dramas add more stress to our minds. Its high time we bring a revolution to our drama industry by making different and diverse content based on other social issues.