Bill protecting children from violent, obscene TV shows filed

Two party-list lawmakers have introduced a bill that would limit the exposure of children to violent and sometimes obscene programs, both on free television and cable channels.

Reps. Joel Villanueva and Cinchona Cruz-Gonzales of the Citizens Battle Against Corruption said House Bill 5625, or the proposed “Children’s Media Protection Act,” will finally provide a solution to parents’ concerns about offensive TV programs.

The sectoral representatives are proposing a television violence rating code for children and a ban on violent and sexually themed non-educational programming on TV during certain hours, thus protecting children, which is a state policy.

Villanueva and Gonzales pointed out that neither the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board nor the National Telecommunications Commission can block these violent and sexually themed non-educational programming on television.

The bill provides that the MTRCB and NTC shall jointly prescribe, in consultation with TV broadcasters, cable operators, concerned NGOs for children, and interested individuals from the private sector, the rules for rating the level of violence and non-educational sexual themes in television programming, including rules for the transmission by TV broadcast and cable systems of signals containing specifications for blocking violent and sexually themed non-educational programming.

It also assigns the MTRCB and NTC to jointly pass rules and regulations which shall prohibit the broadcast on commercial TV and public telecommunications entities of programming that contain violent and obscene scenes for children based on the established ratings code, including the broadcast by cable operators, from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.

The two cited as reason the repeated warnings of the Journal of the American Medical Association since 1975 about the adverse effects of televised violence on child development, including findings of an increased level of behavior among children viewers.

Another is the May 1999 report of the Hany Frank Guggenheim Foundation in the US, which reveals that there is irrefutable connection between the amount of violence depicted in the TV programs watched by children and increased aggression among them.

The CIBAC congressmen lamented that Presidential Decree 1986, or the MTRCB charter, does not authorize the agency to prescribe ratings for violence and non-educational sexual themes in TV programming.

It also does not provide rules for signals containing specifications for blocking violent and sexually themed non-educational programming in apparatuses with such technical capability, according to the lawmakers.

The same is true with Republic Act 7925, or the Public Telecommunications Policy Act of the Philippines, which does not give such authority to the NTC for broadcast operations of public communications entities, they said.