Ramadan soaps portray overwhelmingly negative image of women

CAIRO – 14 June 2017: This year’s Ramadan soap operas are showing are overwhelmingly portraying a negative image of women, the National Council for Women (NCW) said in a report issued Wednesday.

The report says 55.58 percent of scenes portraying women show them in a negative light. While some positive scenes exist, they are “not enough” compared with the scenes showing women as unfaithful wives, drug dealers or even as a murderess.

What’s more, over 500 scenes “promoting violence against women” have aired so far during this year’s Ramadan soaps. The major sources of on-screen violence against women were men playing the roles of brothers, managers and husbands, the report said.

So far the sexual or verbal harassment of women has appeared in roughly 51 scenes operas aired as of the report’s release two-thirds through Ramadan.

On May 20, NCW head Maya Morsy announced that a committee would be formed to monitor how women were portrayed on television screens this Ramadan. Suzan el-Qelini, dean of the Faculty of Arts at Ain Shams University and head of the Media Committee at the NCW, was announced as head of the committee.


Shortly after heading the committee, Qelini said the observatory would prepare content analysis on all the series, adding that a final report should be prepared at the end of Ramadan based on the results of monitoring as well as recommendations.

The observatory will choose at the end of the month the best series that “truly reflects” the correct image of Egyptian women, she added.