MEDIA-BRAZIL: Gov’t Limits Sex, Violence on TV

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep 21 2000 (IPS) - Brazil’s Justice Ministry has begun to enforce a new resolution aimed at reducing the exposure of children and teenagers to scenes of explicit violence and sex on TV.

Record, one of Brazil’s main TV networks, was given a rap on the knuckles Wednesday for airing a movie Sunday afternoon considered inappropriate for children under 14, due to its violent content.

According to a Justice Ministry resolution in effect since Sep 11, the movie should not have been broadcast until after 21:00.

The “informal warning” for Record was the first measure enforcing the resolution, which establishes age-based guidelines and special timeframes for TV programmes meriting discretionary viewing.

Justice Ministry authorities gave TV stations one week to bring their programming into line with the new norms.

The new classification lays out guidelines along which TV programmes, movies and videos will be rated inappropriate for children under 12, 14, 16 or 18 years old, which means programming will be pushed later and later into the night. Shows or movies judged to “induce sex”, for instance, can only be aired from 00:00 to 05:00.

Due to the inherent difficulties involved, programmes broadcast live will not be previously classified. But their presenters and producers will be subject to sanctions if they are found to violate the viewer discretion norms.

Justice Minister José Gregori based the new resolution on the 10-year-old Statute of the Child and Adolescent, which details the rights of minors and measures designed to protect them, as well as sanctions in case of incompliance.

“This is not a question of reviving censorship,” Gregori stressed, in an attempt to head off comparisons with the restrictions imposed on the media by the 1964-85 military dictatorship.

Two years ago, while serving as National Human Rights Secretary, Gregori took up the fight against violent and erotic TV programming, identified by some studies as one of the factors contributing to the rise in crime in Brazil and aggressiveness among the young.

However, he failed in his bid to get TV stations to create a voluntary code of ethics, similar to the one adopted by advertising agencies, which have already begun to ban publicity deemed unethical.

Although the Brazilian Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters has its own standards, they have never been applied due to the lack of sanctions.

Today, in the Justice Ministry, Gregori has decided to take the initiative, arguing the pressing need to defend the rights of children, given the soaring rates of violence, which has even leaked into the schools of this South American country of 167 million.

A particularly brutal shooting incident last year in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, when a young man imitated a scene from a film, opening fire with a machine-gun in a cinema and killing several movie-goers, led to even louder demands and pressure by society for the adoption of measures implementing discretionary viewing times.

The ratings war between TV stations has led to increasingly erotic and sensationalist programme content in the bid for viewers.

Prior to announcing the resolution, the Justice Ministry had already given the Brazilian Television System a warning for showing glimpses of the genitals of people participating in the “Bano de Gugu”, a game played by semi-nude men and women in a tub filled with water.

Globo, Brazil’s media giant, currently broadcasts a soap opera at 19:00 showing scantily-clad men. The star of the programme, which is aired at a viewing time that targets teens, is a young blond man raised among indigenous people, who returns to the city wearing very little.

Reactions to the Justice Ministry’s new ethical controls were split between cries of censorship and support for the decision to set limits on what can appropriately be aired on TV.

Playwright and TV-scriptwriter Lauro Cesar Muniz spoke out against the risk of censorship.

But local non-governmental organisations working on behalf of children welcomed the initiative, which they said served as a wakeup call to broadcasters to ensure that they lived up to their responsibilities vis-a-vis the youngest viewers. They also lauded the Justice Ministry for responding to calls by civil society.

Law professor Sergio Bermudes at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, meanwhile, maintained that there was no basis for the complaint that the measure restricted freedom of the press or freedom of speech.

There is some controversy, however, as to how effective the measure will be, given the difficulties of countering the powerful broadcasting industry and of addressing the widely divergent views regarding what is appropriate for a medium that “invades” people’s homes.

For example, public opinion is divided over whether it is proper to present the issue of prostitution in a soap opera aired at 20:00, through a character who provides extremely well-paid sexual services in her attempt to maintain the living standards of her son and her parents.