Entertained Into Social Change

Can sub-Saharan Africans slow the spread of AIDS if the stars of their favorite TV melodramas practice safe sex?

Will Chinese families coping with the country’s one-child policy stop valuing boys over girls because the heroine of the most-watched television drama is as successful and dutiful as any son a parent could imagine?

Is the answer to Brazil’s bloody struggle between wealthy barons and landless peasants the sympathy generated for the destitute squatters by a wildly popular prime-time series?

Tune in tomorrow for a daily dose of encouragement for the behavioral changes that these shows’ producers believe will create a better world.

Soap Operas for Social Change is a multinational mission aimed at lacing entertainment with role models whose trials and tribulations mirror the everyday lives of listeners and viewers in developing nations.

It’s an international cross-breeding of philanthropy, development aid and local media talent. Germany, as one of the top media powers in the developed world, has become an incubator for ideas on how to spread democratic values via entertainment.

From teenage pregnancy to pollution, domestic violence to school dropout rates, education masked as dramatic diversion reaches a far broader audience via the airwaves than it ever could on a face-to-face basis, says Hans Fleisch, head of the German Foundation for World Population.

“With hundreds of millions of people in the world living in trauma--forced [female] circumcisions, war, discrimination against women, AIDS--there will never be enough resources to provide individual therapies, which is why television presents such a great opportunity to convey an important message,” he says.

“Television in the developing world isn’t only for entertainment, and it’s not regarded as a waste of time. It’s seen as an engine for social change and development,” says Dietrich Berwanger, head of the television training division of Germany’s international broadcast service, Deutsche Welle.

Berwanger, a sociologist who has worked in Kenya to help create local radio serials with a message, contends that the number of TV viewers in Latin America, Africa and the Arab world is as high as in developed countries despite the lower number of TVs and radios per capita.

Watching Television Is a Family Affair

TV watching remains a communal affair in developing nations, he notes, with extended families gathering each night around whatever sets are available and often discussing the plots and predicaments after the program is over.

“Viewers trust TV characters more than their governments, so it’s important for the entertainment media to take up issues that will enlighten audiences and lead to resolution of social problems,” says Benedito Ruy Barbosa, a Brazilian writer of soap operas and prime-time dramas for the last 30 years.

Barbosa’s hugely popular “O Rei do Gado” (The Cattle King), which aired in the late 1990s, was credited with instigating land reform because it brought home the suffering and injustice of the landless to 80 million Brazilian viewers six nights a week.

“Even before the end of the series, the government was forced to impose a tax on land left fallow to pressure the ‘fat bellies’ to allow the landless to farm it,” says the writer.

Television soap operas have long had the power to educate viewers, even against the will of their governments or families, as German sociologist Gabriele vom Bruck reported in a 1987 study of Yemeni women who, after viewing Western programs, began challenging traditional dictates to wear veils when in the presence of anyone outside the immediate family.

Berwanger suggests that Western respect for diversity and racial equality displayed in prime-time television programs such as “The Cosby Show” also contributed to the defeat of apartheid in South Africa.

Similarly, West German soap operas that could be seen in the East during the Communist era kept viewers aware of the prosperity and freer lifestyles on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

At a recent seminar to brainstorm broadcast interventions into the world’s most pressing problems, the German activists and the U.S.-based Population Communications International were approached by Primus Guenou, a production executive from Togo, who was seeking collaboration on a soap opera to educate Africans about the causes and prevention of AIDS.

‘They Want to Be Entertained’

“This is the only way to do it. People won’t read brochures or listen to lectures. They want to be entertained,” says Guenou, the director of Primus Entertainment Production based in Berlin, where he also serves as his embassy’s media liaison.

PCI President David J. Andrews confirms that Africa’s AIDS crisis is his organization’s next big priority and that the New York-based operation, funded by private donors, hopes to partner with local broadcast producers throughout Africa. Soaps for Social Change is the core of PCI’s development aid programs.

The inspirational side effects of melodrama were first noticed after the massively successful Latino soap opera “Simplemente Maria,” which aired from 1969 to 1971 and was later translated and rebroadcast in dozens of countries, Andrews says.

It was a Cinderella story that followed a poor country girl’s travails through a big-city servant job, an ill-considered love affair, an unwanted pregnancy and the prospect of lifelong poverty but for her wise choice to become literate and learn how to sew. By the end of the 448 episodes, Maria is a world-famous fashion designer living the life every poor girl dreams of.

“In every country where ‘Simplemente Maria’ was broadcast, sales of Singer sewing machines skyrocketed,” Andrews says.

PCI began supporting radio and television serial productions a decade ago and had empirical evidence from the very start that the messages embedded in the dramas were contributing to beneficial change, he says.

PCI hopes a soap opera now in its third season in China will resolve a reproductive problem--in this case the marked preference for male babies among couples allowed to have only one child.

“The purpose of ‘Bai Xing’ [Ordinary People] is to get across that the birth of a girl child is equal cause for celebration as the birth of a boy,” Andrews says, “and we can do this more effectively through melodrama than any other form of communication.”

Despite the opportunities television and radio offer in educating people in developing nations, bureaucratic and ideological obstacles remain. The St. Lucia government bans the use of the word “condom” in the PCI-assisted serials it otherwise welcomes. To get around the technicality, writers aiming to educate listeners about family planning simply substituted the word “catapult” for “condom.”

“It took people no time at all to realize what was meant when the girl would ask her boyfriend if he remembered the catapults, or if he knew how to put one on. The result is that today there isn’t a single person in St. Lucia who doesn’t know what a catapult is,” says Andrews, adding that the euphemism was probably more effective than the real word would have been because listeners like to think they are in on a secret.

Indian sociologist Ravi Vasudevan, who heads the New Delhi Center for Study of Developing Societies, notes the need for sensitivity to prevailing social values and gentle nudges toward change to avoid the risk of alienating audiences who have long been subject to official manipulations.

Soap operas in India tend not to challenge the traditional authority of older males in the family, instead imparting female role models with respect for their fathers and grandfathers as well as wit and ambition to lift them up from the current standard of abject submission.

The 40-odd countries now receiving development aid via soap operas and other entertainment vehicles are mostly poor states with too few resources and production skills to undertake such programming tasks on their own. But even highly developed countries are experiencing similar influences when soaps tackle delicate subjects such as teen pregnancy and breast cancer, or subliminally encourage public donations to international relief efforts, as did one episode of Germany’s most-watched soap, “Lindenstrasse.”

“When encouragement of good works comes in the form of a favorite program, it doesn’t feel so much like being lectured to or made to feel responsible for the outside world’s problems,” says Rolf Seelmann-Eggebert, a veteran television correspondent who created an ongoing relief project, One World, in response to the 1984 Ethiopian famine.

Barbosa agrees that the motivational message is best when it’s subtle. “After a long day, when a guy comes home and wants to forget about the world and its problems that he has just closed the door on, he turns on the TV because he wants to be transported. You have to strike the right balance between raising consciousness and letting people relax.”