Violence makes for hit TV in Turkey

Turkish television series saturated with images of brutality amid a culture becoming increasingly numb to violence

ISTANBUL:

Sefer Calinak killed his first wife when he was 17 and murdered his girlfriend a few decades later with an axe. Now, the 62-year old is making the rounds on hit Turkish TV shows, part of a ratings race increasingly driven by a thirst for violence.

From breakfast shows playing CCTV footage of robberies and road-rage incidents to punch-ups in parliament on the nightly news, Turkish television is saturated with images of brutality — a symptom and perhaps cause, psychiatrists and rights workers say, of a culture increasingly becoming numb to violence.

Why would a man kill? prime-time talk show host Seda Sayan asked Calinak, who served two separate prison sentences for the murders before being released under an amnesty programme.

“The devil pushed her into a grave that she dug herself,” he replied, appearing on her TV show this month after taking part in a hit dating series called Luck of the Draw in May, in search of a new partner.

Yakup Kara, who is awaiting trial accused of stabbing his wife 43 times with a screwdriver, was a guest of rival talk show host Songul Karli a few days earlier.

Karli described Kara as a ‘gentleman’, prompting applause from men in the audience, one of whom blamed the wife, who survived the attack, for having an active social life.

Shows featuring men such as Calinak and Kara normalise criminal behaviour, said Sebnem Korur Fincanci, head of the Ankara-based Human Rights Foundation. They encourage people to take the law into their own hands, particularly against the backdrop of slow court cases and lenient sentences for violent crime, she said.

“Whether it is at a football match, at home or out on the street, or at hospitals ... people attempt to solve problems with violence,” she said.

Decades of political violence, Fincanci said, had seeped into religiously conservative Turkey’s popular culture.

Calinak’s September 2 appearance on the Seda Sayan Show, which is aimed at a female audience, drew almost 3,000 complaints to the Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTUK).

Critics question why the state regulator requires images of cigarettes and alcohol, both demonised by an Islamist-rooted government, to be blurred out while apparently doing little to censor scenes of brutality, particularly towards women.

Ali Oztunc, a member of the RTUK, said that the watchdog takes violence on TV seriously and pointed out that both Sayan and Karli’s shows had been reviewed for potentially violating rules barring the “praise of criminal acts and criminals”.

Karli’s show was fined, while the council postponed a decision on Sayan’s case.

Neither of the privately-owned TV stations responsible for the shows has commented, but household goods distributor Shafer withdrew its sponsorship of the Seda Sayan show.

Inci Sen, an Istanbul-based child psychiatrist, said Turkey’s rapid economic and social change, with a decade of growth and urbanisation widening the divide between rich and poor, had contributed to its increasingly violent culture.

“Murder is presented as if it’s normal. It’s like he did something right. It’s being rewarded and the killer becomes legitimised,” she said of Calinak’s TV appearances.

“This shows the increasing moral erosion and downfall in Turkey. It is the peak of violent capitalism ... For everyone to have whatever they want whenever they want it, it is as if everything is permissible,” she said.

Calinak, who has been married five times, was jailed for 4-1/2 years for the murder of his first wife. He was sent back to serve a six-year term after killing his girlfriend but was freed in 2000 under an amnesty aimed at reducing overcrowding.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 22^nd, 2014.

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