•  united nations
• Tuesday, April 19, 2011
• Inter Press Service

The fight against domestic violence and abuse relies heavily on education, and what’s best to educate people around the world than a new campaign combining animation and humour? That is the bet made by Firdaus Kharas, Chairman of Chocolate Moose Media and Culture Shift, a social media enterprise specialising in multimedia development activities.

Kharas launched a new campaign here Monday targeting domestic violence and abuse in a series of 11 animated videos of 30 seconds each. 'I’m hoping [that] these animated spots will create behaviour change in millions of households around the world by directly targeting the abusers and by being the catalysts for conversations that happen within families,' Kharas told reporters.

The campaign’s overall goal is to reach 5.75 billion people around the world - 85 percent of the world population. The campaign materials, downloadable free of charge, will be translated into 73 languages.

Eventually, these videos, directly targeted at the abusers, would address the cultural justifications of violence, violence against women, the perceived right of men to commit violence, sexual abuse of women, rape [including rape perpetrated by soldiers], escalation of abuse into violence, the inter-generational cycle of violence, violence by mothers against children, violence by fathers against children, and verbal abuse of children and the elderly, as according to Kharas.

Kharas stressed to reporters here that all videos would be adapted to the local context. This work will all be 'done locally', he said. This means the scripts are completely rewritten in every language in order to include each country’s sense of humour and national identity, and to be better understood and more widely broadcasted.

In an effort to make the campaign videos as universal as possible, characters are blue with no hair, and the places where the scenes take place are never shown entirely in order to look more neutral, said Kharas. In that way, he said, 'we think that the whole world can identify with them.'

Firdaus Kharas, has completed several media campaigns to bring to the world’s attention some tough global issues - HIV/AIDS in 2005, and malaria prevention in 2008. Both campaigns have received multiple awards and have been broadcast all over the world. The campaigns were made available by Kharas in almost 40 languages.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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