The invisible wounds” “

In terms of relations between TV and the protection of the under age, the common tendency in European countries is towards a system of co-regulation by which the authority agrees with broadcasters a kind of self-regulation as the condition for obtaining a licence; broadcasters regulate themselves according to a variety of forms and methods; the authority exercises control on the implementation of the self-regulation provisions and inflicts sanctions in the case of violations of the code: that’s the picture traced in the seminar on: ‘If violence goes on the air’, held in Rome in recent days on the initiative of the Committee for the Application of the Code of Self-Regulation ‘TV and Minors’, recently established in Italy . Time bands and signs. “Time bands and signs represent the two different traditions followed in Europe in terms of the protection of minors, also in conformity with the European directive on the matter”, explained Piermarco Aroldi, assistant director of the Communication Watchdog of the Catholic University in Milan, who was participating in the recent seminar ‘If violence goes on the air’. “The system of time bands or watershed – Arnoldi said – responds to the logic of the major public services (as in Germany or the BBC in Great Britain), based on the trust of the public and on the recognition of the expectations of families through a policy of family viewing, guaranteed up till 9.00 pm. The signalling system is based on a more contractual relationship: the broadcaster cedes a part of his own responsibility to the spectators and pledges to place them in a condition of choosing more consciously by giving them more information about the programmes themselves”. Applications in Europe. “The two models – added Aroldi – tend everywhere to converge due to the effect of the above-mentioned directive: in France, for example, a certain level of sign automatically leads to programming in a certain time band”. Both systems, moreover, “depend on the programme rating; i.e. the evaluation that the broadcasters are obliged to express on the contents of a transmission or a film to exercise their own role of self-regulation”. The solutions on rating methods and institutions vary from country to country: “in France, where a system of signs in 5 categories is in operation, each broadcaster is obliged to establish within its own organization a ‘viewing committee’, composed at the discretion of the broadcaster, and responsible for viewing programmes”. “A similar system – continued Aroldi – operates in Germany: here a kind of independent commissioner responsible for minors is appointed within each public or private national broadcasting corporation with the task of dictating the guidelines for the protection of minors. A third system is operated in Holland, where the sole broadcasters authorized to transmit programmes that in some measure may harm the development of minors (i.e. with violent or otherwise detrimental contents), are members of the Institute for the classification of the media (NICAM); they are obliged to submit each programme to expert evaluation. How are violent contents evaluated? What are the criteria by which, in particular, a programme’s violent content is evaluated? “In France – explained Aroldi – the number and nature of the violent scenes, the gratuitousness of such scenes in relation to their context, the recourse to violence to solve conflicts, the treatment of the image and the sound, the psychology of the characters and the crudity of the language are all evaluated. In Germany, in conformity with the guidelines of the GSJP, the Office for the protection of minors and programming, the system of evaluation assesses not only the quantity, quality and intensity of the scenes, but also whether the violence provokes a degrading effect or whether the consequences are minimized, whether the violence is likely to prompt imitation, and whether ‘do-it-yourself justice’ is considered a viable option”. In Holland, again, “the approval of the use of violence by anchormen, guests or the public invited to attend studio programmes, the recourse to verbal violence in talkshows, the closeness of violent acts to common experience, and the visibility of injuries” are all evaluated. In Great Britain, “the guidelines laid down by the parliamentary commissions or by the BBC itself suggest the contents of violence to be avoided with particular reference to domestic environments.