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Screen Media for Arab
and European Children
Policy and Production Encounters
in the Multiplatform Era
Naomi Sakr
Jeanette Steemers
Screen Media for Arab and European Children
Naomi Sakr • Jeanette Steemers
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgements
This book is one of numerous publications that have resulted from research
undertaken as part of two projects funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities
Research Council (AHRC). The first, which ran between 2012 and 2016,
bore the title Orientations in the Development of Pan-Arab Television for
Children. As authors we wish to acknowledge the AHRC research grant
(AH/J004545/1) and to thank all those who helped with the grant and
the project.
The second, which ran between October 2017 and November 2018, is
linked to the first as a follow-on project for impact and engagement.
Entitled Collaborative Development of Children’s Screen Content in an Era
of Forced Migration Flows: Facilitating Arab-European Dialogue it was
designed to share knowledge from the first project, but also stimulate dia-
logue between European and Arab stakeholders around European screen
content for and about young children of Arab heritage who are living in
Europe. It was this project that stimulated us to explore more deeply the
many cross-cultural connections between Arab and European countries
around policy for and production of children’s screen media, which form
the focus of this book. Again we wish to acknowledge the AHRC research
grant (AH/R001421/1) and thank all those who offered guidance and
support. We especially thank Dr Christine Singer for her expert research
assistance and our project partners: BBC Children’s, BBC Media Action,
CPH:DOX in Copenhagen, the Danish Film Institute, the International
Central Institute for Youth and Educational Television (IZI) in Munich
and the Public Media Alliance. The second project consisted of three
workshops in different locations (Manchester, Copenhagen and Munich)
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Index137
vii
About the Authors
ix
CHAPTER 1
Havens analysed some time ago (2007) how the “vibrant business cul-
ture” of North American and European “children’s television merchants”
privileges an “industry lore” among insiders, which tracks North American
and European models of childhood tastes and promotes them as universal.
Public recognition of ethnocentric scholarship in the field is more recent,
as are concerns about a lack of studies on the institutions and industries
involved in children’s media. Revealing that only 14 per cent of articles
published in the Journal of Children and Media between 2005 and 2018
had studied the “processes of production, political-economic forces, or
the institutional policies and practices in the media with which children
engage” (Lemish 2019, 121)—namely processes related to the phenom-
enon articulated by Havens—the journal’s founding and outgoing editor,
Dafna Lemish, recalled her efforts to correct an “underlying ethnocen-
trism” in submitted manuscripts, whereby the “American context was
assumed to be the default position” (ibid., 123). She noted that her pre-
ferred practice of always naming the place where research had been con-
ducted met resistance: there were worries the published findings would be
seen as having narrower applicability, plus an implicit understanding on
the part of some scholars that research beyond the US represents “case
studies” of limited relevance.
This short book addresses gaps of this kind in our understanding of
processes that underpin the making and circulation of screen content
across two adjacent regions of the world. It attempts to do so by setting
“centrisms” aside, whether ethnocentrism, Euro-centrism or Arab-
centrism. It does in some sense seek to engage with an outward-looking
version of what might be called child-centrism. That is to say: outward-
looking in the sense of not “isolat[ing] children into child-centred areas
and concerns away from such matters as politics, economics or law”
(Anderson 2016, 6). The book’s “wide-angle” approach to geographical,
political-economic and childhood concerns is prompted by recent disrup-
tive shifts in regional geopolitics and large-scale population movements,
which have occurred simultaneously with global shifts in delivery plat-
forms for children’s screen media content.
Shifts of this magnitude call for new insights into how children’s screen
media policy and production proceed across divides of language and cul-
ture. Insights sought in this book start with questions about the extent to
which young children in Arab and European countries engage with the
same or similar content. By “young children” we mean those aged under
around 12 years since they are the focus of most industry attention. The
1 LOCAL, REGIONAL AND GLOBAL MEDIA AT A TIME OF FORCED… 3
book focuses on sources of funding and ideas in the creation and delivery
of content targeted at children and, by examining some examples of col-
laboration, seeks to understand whether and how finance and ideas inter-
act across territories and cultures, and for whose benefit. Whose voices are
loudest when it comes to pressures for regulating children’s screen con-
tent, and what do they want: a vaguely worded catch-all protection from
ill-defined “harmful” content, more generous provision of beneficial
material or opportunities for children themselves to take part in media-
making? How do commissioners and producers of children’s screen con-
tent respond to population flows that are changing the composition of
child audiences in those Arab and European countries that have taken in
the largest numbers of refugees? Questions like these problematise
attempts to assign initiatives or trends to separate geographic regions. For
one thing, content providers operate on an increasingly global scale and
the most powerful are based in the US. For another, the geographic remits
of relevant institutions are not always clear-cut. The European Union
(EU) overlaps with the larger Council of Europe (CoE), and Arab entities
are represented on bodies such as the European Broadcasting Union
(EBU) and the CoE’s European Audiovisual Observatory.
If regional demarcations can be problematic analytically, terms like
“local” and “global” have also been roundly challenged in studies of trans-
national media and childhood studies. Where media are concerned, migra-
tion and digital communication technologies mean that “local” content
can be accessed from anywhere, arguably leading to a situation in which
the local and the global “inform and transform one another in a constant
dialogue” (Chalaby 2009, 3–4). In the context of childhood, the global
scale of migration has reinforced analysts’ dissatisfaction with ethnocentric
binaries between a normative universal “global” and culturally particular
“local,” especially the subaltern “local” childhood of the majority world
(Hanson et al. 2018, 274, 292). Migration has blurred the “boundaries
between majority and minority worlds,” leading to research on transna-
tional families as well as the way children use digital technologies and
social media to develop and maintain relationships beyond the family and
“local” community and to relate with their peers in new ways (ibid., 277).
In the days when transnational television was still something of a nov-
elty, the concept of a “geolinguistic region” (Sinclair et al. 1996, 11–14)
seemed to suit the Arab world rather well, because certain forms of Arabic
were intelligible across multiple contiguous countries from the Atlantic to
the Indian Ocean. Even that concept, however, took account of media
4 N. SAKR AND J. STEEMERS
flows not only within an “immediate geographic clustering” but with dia-
sporic communities “on other continents” (ibid., 26). Today an Arab-
centric view of children’s media is rendered even less useful by the effects
of violent conflicts within the Arab region that set governments and com-
munities against each other. Among the six states (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman,
Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates or UAE) belonging to
the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), an “unprecedented” concentration
of power in the hands of the crown princes of Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi
(the UAE’s most powerful emirate) is seen to have “widened existing frac-
tures, created new fault lines, and inflicted potentially long-term damage
on what had been the most durable regional organization in the Arab
world” (Coates Ulrichsen 2018). Starting in 2015, Saudi Arabia led a war
on Houthi rebels in neighbouring Yemen, with backing from the US, the
UK and France. Describing the ensuing 4-year toll of death, injury, fam-
ine, disease and deprivation as “the world’s largest humanitarian crisis,”
the United Nations Children’s Fund’s (UNICEF’s) Regional Director for
the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region said it had “not spared
a single child” (Cappelaere 2019). Fractures between governments on the
Arabian Peninsula, notably Saudi Arabia and Qatar, were meanwhile
implicated in escalating the civil war that started in Syria in 2011, because
of their support for different factions in the fighting. In March 2019,
UNICEF’s Executive Director reported that 2018 had seen the most chil-
dren killed in Syria of any year in the war so far, mostly through unex-
ploded ordnance and the highest number of attacks against education and
health facilities (Fore 2019).
In addition to these militarised rifts, another fault line that undermines
the rationale for studying media specifically for Arabic-speaking children is
the deep disparity between the plight of children living with the effects of
armed attacks and daily insecurity in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, the Gaza Strip
and Libya and the situation of those in other Arab countries where the
phenomena of displacement, lack of schooling and traumatic experiences
are not part of the everyday. Moreover, when it comes to finding what is
done to meet the information and self-expression needs of children in
these diverse circumstances, the story often involves non-Arab bodies,
including non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from Europe. This is
the irony of what is and what is not allowed under Arab authoritarian
regimes. These regimes are responsible for so many civilians having left
their homes to escape violence or because there are no jobs and they can-
not make a living or because they are under threat of detention for c laiming
1 LOCAL, REGIONAL AND GLOBAL MEDIA AT A TIME OF FORCED… 5
their civil and political rights. Yet the political systems that perpetuate
pressure for forced migration cannot realistically be discussed without ref-
erence to a “tradition of external intervention” (Henry and Springborg
2001, 8), sustained in the post-colonial era through US and European
deals in arms and oil. Even before the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 it
was recognised that any attempt to analyse “human development” in the
Arab region needed to include a “critical understanding of ‘external’
power dynamics,” including the “blind eye” turned by Western govern-
ments to “large-scale abuses of human, civil and political rights by client
regimes” (Levine 2002). Continuing cross-regional intergovernmental
relationships since 2003–04 may have been camouflaged on occasion by
efforts at “democracy promotion,” but true democratisation proved
incompatible with achieving the political continuity that governments on
both sides ultimately preferred (Sakr 2016, 175–176). The result has been
a situation in which Arab governments “mistrust” voluntary rights-based
associations, often to the point of banning them (Kandil 2010, 53), but
still allow a form of civil society to exist as a democratic “façade”—secure
in the knowledge that, by forcing associations that promote democratisa-
tion and human rights to limit their activities so as to avoid dissolution,
political authority in the country remains “profoundly authoritarian”
(Cavatorta and Durac 2011, 143).
Non-Arab NGOs conducting activities in the Arab region conse-
quently face constraints imposed by the underlying international power
dynamics. But, since some of these NGOs advocate for, or provide, chil-
dren’s media, including to refugee children, their presence constitutes a
further reason for looking beyond Arab countries themselves to discover
sites and processes of funding, conceptualising, producing and regulat-
ing children’s media, which are addressed in this book. The following
two sections of this introductory chapter consider media initiatives that
seek to respond to the impact that recent dislocations, conflicts and
demographic changes have had on Arab and European children. The
first looks specifically at media and education projects for displaced chil-
dren in Syria and its neighbouring countries and the second at ways in
which media practitioners have sought to share stories generated by
children’s and young people’s anxieties amid the upheavals of recent
years. The chapter concludes by articulating how the remainder of the
book conceives questions about decision-making across geographies
and cultures, taking account of children’s presence or absence from the
decision-making process.
6 N. SAKR AND J. STEEMERS
Shared Stories
For children displaced to Europe and for European-born children who
witnessed new arrivals in their classrooms and communities, there have
been other media initiatives aimed at allaying anxieties and countering a
backlash against migration. One way of monitoring what worries children
is through child helplines, a telephone service that children and young
people can call to ask for help or protection. In 2007 the European
Commission reserved the number 116 111 for helplines to provide social
services to children and youth in the EU and a year later the International
Telecommunication Union encouraged all countries worldwide to adopt
the same number for the same purpose, with the result that, by end-2017,
181 helplines across 147 countries were networked through Child
Helpline International, based in Amsterdam (Child Helpline International
2017, 2, 14). From 2014 an increasing number of calls received by
European helplines related to child migration, with the difficulty of adjust-
ing to a new environment being the single biggest problem reported in
2016 (ibid., 7). In the MENA region, many children contacted helplines
because they were affected by conflict. The Palestinian helpline Sawa,
established in 2004, received more than 22,000 calls in a few months after
the war on Gaza in 2008–09, while helplines in Jordan and Iran were
contacted by child refugees left scarred by witnessing violence and having
to “face situations and take on responsibilities far beyond their years”
(Child Helpline International 2013, 11). Fears brought to light by
helplines have informed the making of content for children. After the
UK’s Childline added a webpage called “Worries about the World” in
2016, in response to a rising number of calls expressing anxiety about
world events, the UK production company Evans Woolfe created the
series Where in the World? to familiarise young children with the everyday
normality of their counterparts around the globe (Steemers et al. 2018,
23). The producers of 4eVeR, a semi-scripted drama series for 9–12-year-
olds shown on Ketnet, the Flemish public service children’s channel,
10 N. SAKR AND J. STEEMERS
c ollaborated with the local child helpline Awel to identify storylines that
would respond to children’s fears (ibid., 61).
Sharing the concerns of teens and young people across countries and
regions through a transmedia format was the purpose of a project called
“Generation What,” which started off in France in 2013 but then expanded
across Europe in 2016 and, in 2018, across a number of countries in Asia
and a small number on the southern and eastern shores of the
Mediterranean. The project, consisting of an online survey, an interactive
website, web videos, television documentaries and other media output,
had the support of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO), the EBU, Asian Broadcasting Union (ABU)
and Arab States Broadcasting Union (ASBU). It was aimed at young peo-
ple rather than children, but official online accounts show that the lower
age limit for participation varied from 15, when it launched as Génération
Quoi in France, to 18 for the Europe-wide version and 16 for the Arab
version. In Europe, the project yielded nearly 1 million survey responses,
amplified in videos by young people’s reactions to the survey questions as
well as their answers, thereby painting a detailed, if self-selected, portrait
of 18–34-year-olds. Christopher Nick, of Yami2, the production company
that worked with web specialists Upian to create Generation What, said in
May 2017 that it had worked well in France and Europe because the need
for that generation to be taken seriously was “nearly an emergency” (Nick
2017). He said the survey—containing 149 survey questions (EBU 2017),
divided into 21 themes (Generation What 2018a)—gave young people a
chance to engage with each other and a research operation that they per-
ceived to be beneficial to society, did not involve journalists and was fun to
do (ibid.). Nick envisaged that sharing answers to the questionnaire could
help to lower tension between neighbouring countries, suggesting that an
Algerian and Moroccan would realise how much they have in common
with each other and, for example, with someone their age in Spain (ibid.).
It remained to be seen how far that objective could be achieved. Although
Tunisia permitted all questions, this was not the same across the other
seven Arab broadcasters involved in the project (EBU executive 2017).
With just 4500 responses by May 2018 (Generation What 2018b), the
portrait of young people’s concerns in the eight ASBU countries surveyed
was relatively small scale.
Children’s media projects initiated in Europe and seeking to share Arab
and European children’s experience internationally have also had relatively
small Arab components. They can be said, however, to have tried in
1 LOCAL, REGIONAL AND GLOBAL MEDIA AT A TIME OF FORCED… 11
The challenge of putting children “at the centre” also applies to the mak-
ing of children’s media policy just as much as to the production of screen
media for children. Considering whether children’s voices are listened to
in media matters affecting them adds a crucial dimension to this book’s
scrutiny of Arab-European policy and production encounters and its
attempt to locate sources of input and influence across territories and
jurisdictions.
Examples of collaboration such as those discussed above illustrate the
range of political, social, cultural and economic factors at play in the policy
and production landscapes, as well as the diverse nature of players.
Institutions range from intergovernmental bodies such as UNESCO,
UNICEF and the EU to government ministries, private philanthropic
foundations, NGOs, broadcasters, broadcasting unions, media and web
production companies—both commercial and not-for-profit—academic
research centres and children. Some players in this context, with a “vested
interest” in outcomes (Van den Bulck and Donders 2014, 20), may be
referred to as stakeholders. Stakeholders may have a “distinct interest in a
certain outcome” without being part of the policy process that produces
it, while policy actors such as academics or bureaucrats may influence the
outcome even though they have no “explicit stake” (ibid., 21). Children,
being on the receiving end of the output of these collaborations, certainly
count as stakeholders. Yet they have rarely been listed as such. The “chil-
dren’s television community” was said to include content creators, pro-
grammers, toy tie-in companies, advertisers, government bodies, advocacy
groups and philanthropic organisations (Bryant 2006, 40). The “commu-
nity of key stakeholders” was seen as consisting of “academic researchers,
child advocates and industry lobbyists, among others” (Jordan 2008,
236). Even though children make up a substantial proportion of popula-
tions in the EU and an even more substantial proportion in Arab countries,
14 N. SAKR AND J. STEEMERS
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18 N. SAKR AND J. STEEMERS
Abstract In this chapter we outline the type and volume of screen con-
tent available to be seen by children on various delivery platforms in both
Arab and European countries, tracking interconnections where these take
place in modes of delivery and the supply chain. We assess the changing
landscape of delivery and the impact of the arrival of subscription video-
on-demand. We consider what this means for provision, before comparing
and contrasting trends in the spread of US content in each region, particu-
larly animation and the consequences of a pan-Arab approach when
sources of finance are limited. Analysis of the spectacular growth of online
video via YouTube raises questions about the future dominance of
imported animation, as well as the persistent prominence of global
corporations.
The latter include mass forced migration, which results in displaced chil-
dren from the Arab world being exposed to European content—a topic
we come to in Chap. 5. This chapter’s purpose is to chart the type and
volume of content that is available to be seen by children in both regions.
At another level, however, any exploration of who makes, distributes and
accesses this content inevitably raises questions that were discussed in
Chap. 1, about power relations behind production, distribution and
reception decisions and their outcomes. As well as tracking transnational
flows of content and consequent interconnections, the following analysis,
therefore, seeks to locate where critical decisions are made at various stages
in the supply chain.
countries and Lebanon is between two and three times that of Egypt,
Jordan or Morocco (Maurell et al. 2018, 10). Reasons for the disparity are
explained by data in a World Bank study, which showed that large seg-
ments of the population in Gulf countries had access to high-speed broad-
band internet, compared with fewer than a quarter of households in many
other Arab countries, with the cost being prohibitive for low-income fami-
lies in Morocco, Tunisia and Yemen (Gelvanovska et al. 2014). Since then
wars in Yemen and Syria have put access further out of reach for many
more. Northwestern University in Qatar has tracked aspects of media use
across the region over several years. In 2018, it reported that 87–98 per
cent of nationals in Lebanon, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab
Emirates (UAE) watched video content online and that the number of
nationals doing so in Tunisia had shot up from 46 to 71 per cent between
2016 and 2018 (Northwestern University in Qatar 2018). In Egypt, the
equivalent figure in 2018 was 48 per cent (ibid.; see also Schoenbach et al.
2018, 705–706)
The ability to watch television-style content on any device with a suit-
able internet connection has implications for what gets watched. A rise in
fixed and mobile broadband penetration has increased the viewing options
for many, especially young people, in Gulf countries with advanced broad-
band infrastructure. In a region where tight censorship and lack of invest-
ment limit local production—including production for children—a key
rationale behind paying for television is to gain access to foreign content
that is not subject to the full range of local limitations. The entry into Gulf
markets specifically and Middle East and North Africa (MENA) markets
more generally, of US-owned “over-the-top” (OTT) players like Netflix
and Amazon Prime, which provide subscription video-on-demand
(SVOD) by internet, shook up the region’s existing pay TV landscape.
Netflix started in the UK in 2012, France and Germany in 2014 and parts
of the Middle East in 2016 as part of a big push that year to expand to
over 130 countries. Amazon Prime Video was added to Amazon’s existing
Prime service in the UK, Germany and Austria in 2014 and became avail-
able in the UAE at the end of 2016, then spreading to other parts
of the Gulf.
SVOD providers’ success in parts of MENA where credit cards are less
widespread is dependent on partnering with local telecommunications
companies and internet providers to come up with alternative payment
solutions. For example, Dubai-based Icflix, which started up in 2012,
partnered with Maroc Telecom in Morocco and Orange Egypt, allowing
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