A dead, raped or assaulted female victim has long been at the centre of television and film plots – Twin Peaks, countless Law & Order episodes among them – but it has begun to raise the ire of viewers.

Loading

HBO’s popular and bloodthirsty Game of Thrones suffered a widespread backlash, which coincided with the MeToo movement, prompted by repeated depictions of sexual violence. In the first five seasons there were 17 episodes featuring scenes of rape or attempted rape, according to Vice.

Creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss reportedly took viewer feedback into account and there were no rape scenes in the sixth or seventh seasons, however the final season had the highest numbers of women’s on-screen deaths.

“You can barely sit down and watch anything on TV that doesn’t contain violence against women,” says Susan Heward-Belle, professor of social work at the University of Sydney. “Most people who watch television that contains scenes of violence against women don’t necessarily go and commit acts of violence against women. But I think it does raise a lot of wider questions about what kind of attitudes might repeated exposure to tropes about violence against women cause?”

Heward-Belle, who has led investigations for Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS), says film and television makers should try to “set the record straight” by raising awareness of real-world violence against women.

“I think there’s an ethical responsibility around if you’re going to have content that relates to violence against women or violence against children, then let’s actually try to portray that realistically and in a way that hopefully is actually trying to move society towards change,” she says.

“We’ve got this political commitment, which is aspirational, about ending violence against women in a generation. If we were really serious about that, then all sectors of the community, including arts and entertainment, would really be thinking hard about how we actually do things differently and build empathy and awareness and try to decrease misunderstanding around intimate partner violence.”

Change may already be underway as screenwriters increasingly reject cliches such as the battered wife or the beautiful victim whose life was cut short. Critics note such plot lines usually rob the female of any agency and throw male characters into powerful positions of protectors or avengers such as Liam Neeson in the Taken franchise and Keanu Reeves in the John Wick films.

Today, viewers are more likely to see violence from the perspective of a female character than that of the “flawed” male perpetrator.

Strong female leads have also begun to emerge in more screen narratives, including those featuring female victims of violence.

In season five of Fargo, Juno Temple plays Dot Lyon, the former wife of the town sheriff Roy Tillman. Tillman seeks revenge on Lyon for leaving him, but she eventually turns the tables and begins to hunt him down herself.

In I May Destroy You, filmmaker Michaela Coel shines an unflinching spotlight on surviving sexual violence, while SBS’s Safe Home explores the issue of family violence through the eyes of a legal centre worker played by Aisha Dee.

Loading

“Women are coming into powerful roles and complex women are coming more and more to the centre,” says Sue Turnbull, senior professor of communication and media at the University of Wollongong.

“And if you just look at something like what we’ve had in Australia recently with a show like Total Control (iview) with Deborah Mailman and Rachel Griffith, women at the centre of politics, taking on the audience and speaking from a position of power.”

Television and film doesn’t have the power to represent reality accurately, but it can stir debate, says Turnbull.

“I think the TV representations are just an echo of the real horror that we’re experiencing as a result of the real events that are happening in the same way as people are only sitting up and taking notice about climate change because they’re being flooded, because they’re being burned out, because it’s actually happening,” she says.

“They’re not representing the real, they can’t represent the real. What they’re doing is they’re actually telling stories that come to our attention and which provoke discussion and thinking.
“The fictional world informs and it gives us ways of talking about issues in the real world.”

Support is available from the National Sexual Assault, Domestic Family Violence Counselling Service at 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732).

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.