Screen Media for Arab and European Children: Policy and Production Encounters in the Multiplatform Era [1st ed. 2019] 978-3-030-25657-9, 978-3-030-25658-6

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-ix
Local, Regional and Global Media at a Time of Forced Migration: Evolving Geometries of Power (Naomi Sakr, Jeanette Steemers)....Pages 1-18
Joining the Dots: How Arab and European Children Are Connected by Screen Media (Naomi Sakr, Jeanette Steemers)....Pages 19-43
Towards Well-Being? Stimuli for Shared Practice on Policy and Regulation (Naomi Sakr, Jeanette Steemers)....Pages 45-72
Face-to-Face: Cross-Cultural Collaboration in Provision and Delivery (Naomi Sakr, Jeanette Steemers)....Pages 73-99
Arab Children in Europe: Managing Diversity on Children’s Television (Naomi Sakr, Jeanette Steemers)....Pages 101-125
Children’s Visibility as Stakeholders: From Provision to Participation (Naomi Sakr, Jeanette Steemers)....Pages 127-135
Back Matter ....Pages 137-142

Citation preview

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

Screen Media for Arab and European Children Policy and Production Encounters in the Multiplatform Era

Naomi Sakr Westminster School of Media and Communication University of Westminster Harrow, UK

Jeanette Steemers Department of Culture, Media & Creative Industries King’s College London London, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-25657-9    ISBN 978-3-030-25658-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25658-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Pattern © John Rawsterne / patternhead.com Cover design: eStudioCalamar 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 dialogue 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

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

and a symposium in London on 14 September 2018 under the title Invisible Children: Children’s Media, Diversity and Forced Migration. It generated five separate briefing reports and one final report that consolidates all five, which can be accessed at www.euroarabchildrensmedia.org. We also thank Mala Sanghera-Warren, Lucy Batrouney and Heloise Harding at Palgrave Macmillan, and the anonymous readers of our proposal and manuscript, for their encouragement and assistance. This volume is a companion to Pivot title Children and Screen Media in Changing Arab Contexts: An Ethnographic Perspective by Tarik Sabry and Nisrine Mansour.

Contents

1 Local, Regional and Global Media at a Time of Forced Migration: Evolving Geometries of Power  1 2 Joining the Dots: How Arab and European Children Are Connected by Screen Media 19 3 Towards Well-Being? Stimuli for Shared Practice on Policy and Regulation 45 4 Face-to-Face: Cross-Cultural Collaboration in Provision and Delivery 73 5 Arab Children in Europe: Managing Diversity on Children’s Television101 6 Children’s Visibility as Stakeholders: From Provision to Participation127 Index137

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About the Authors

Naomi  Sakr  is Professor of Media Policy at the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI), University of Westminster. She is the author of three books about Arab media, editor of two others, and co-editor of two, including Children’s TV and Digital Media in the Arab World (2017, with Jeanette Steemers). Jeanette Steemers  is Professor of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London. She has published widely on European media industries and media policy, including numerous articles and a book on children’s media industries in the UK and internationally. Before becoming an academic, she worked in children’s television distribution.

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CHAPTER 1

Local, Regional and Global Media at a Time of Forced Migration: Evolving Geometries of Power

Abstract  Highlighting gaps in our understanding of processes underpinning the making and circulation of children’s screen content across the Arab region and Europe, this chapter explains how this book sets aside Euro- or Arab-centrism to engage with an outward-looking version of what might be called child-centrism in respect of policy and production. We consider recent disruptive shifts in regional geopolitics and large-scale population movements, before discussing production initiatives for displaced and anxious children in Arab and European countries. We contemplate the challenges of terms like “local” and “global” in relation to the Arab world and Europe, before setting out a framework informed by the concept of “power-geometries” (Massey, Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place. In Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, ed. Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, George Robertson, and Lisa Tickner, 59–69. London: Routledge, 1993), and questions about who has the power to initiate flows and who is on the “receiving end.” Keywords  Convention on the Rights of the Child • Ethnocentrism • Child migration • Local and global • Power-geometries • Sesame Workshop Ethnocentrism is a recurring feature of both the industries that produce children’s screen content and scholarship on children and media. Timothy © The Author(s) 2019 N. Sakr, J. Steemers, Screen Media for Arab and European Children, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25658-6_1

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Havens analysed some time ago (2007) how the “vibrant business culture” 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 phenomenon articulated by Havens—the journal’s founding and outgoing editor, Dafna Lemish, recalled her efforts to correct an “underlying ethnocentrism” in submitted manuscripts, whereby the “American context was assumed to be the default position” (ibid., 123). She noted that her preferred practice of always naming the place where research had been conducted 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 disruptive shifts in regional geopolitics and large-scale population movements, which have occurred simultaneously with global shifts in delivery platforms 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 culture. 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

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book focuses on sources of funding and ideas in the creation and delivery of content targeted at children and, by examining some examples of collaboration, seeks to understand whether and how finance and ideas interact across territories and cultures, and for whose benefit. Whose voices are loudest when it comes to pressures for regulating children’s screen content, 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 content 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 transnational media and childhood studies. Where media are concerned, migration 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 transnational 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 novelty, 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

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flows not only within an “immediate geographic clustering” but with diasporic 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 communities 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 fractures, 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, famine, 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 children killed in Syria of any year in the war so far, mostly through unexploded 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 cannot make a living or because they are under threat of detention for c­ laiming

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their civil and political rights. Yet the political systems that perpetuate pressure for forced migration cannot realistically be discussed without reference 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 governments 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 democratisation 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 consequently face constraints imposed by the underlying international power dynamics. But, since some of these NGOs advocate for, or provide, children’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 regulating 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 children 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.

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Initiatives for Displaced Children According to estimates collated by the Pew Research Centre in 2018, the 13 million Syrians displaced by conflict at that point made Syria the nation with the largest percentage of its population displaced in recent decades (Connor 2018). While more than 6 million were displaced inside Syria, 5 million were living in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and North African countries like Egypt and Libya, 1 million had moved to Europe as asylum-­ seekers or refugees and smaller numbers to North America. Iraqis fleeing conflict in their country followed similar routes. In 2015, when a record 1.3 million migrants applied for asylum in the 28 member states of the European Union, plus Norway and Switzerland—more than double the number for the previous year—Pew Research Centre (Connor 2016, 15) calculations, based on Eurostat data, showed that Syrians accounted for 29 per cent of all asylum applications to these countries, followed by people leaving Afghanistan (15 per cent) and Iraq (10 per cent). On average, around a third of asylum-seekers are children. UNICEF (n.d.) reported that European countries, led by Germany, received nearly 606,600 asylum claims by children in 2016–17, with half the total number in 2017 coming from just three countries: Syria (27 per cent), Iraq (10 per cent) and Afghanistan (10 per cent). Of the overall total, 42 per cent were girls. Responding to the communication and information needs of young children caught up in humanitarian crises is not often the stuff of news headlines. But the necessity of meeting these needs, alongside physical ones, is rooted in several principles agreed internationally. The United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), signed by all European and Arab states, makes various guarantees to children about their rights to access information from diverse national and international sources and to be heard on all matters affecting them. Under Article 2 of the CRC these guarantees are not affected by displacement: they apply to children “without discrimination of any kind, irrespective of the child’s or his or her parent’s or legal guardian’s race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national, ethnic or social origin, property, disability, birth or other status.” Recognition of the right to information and participation of all age groups is also enshrined in the Core Humanitarian Standard, a voluntary international code adopted in 2014 to make humanitarian action more accountable and effective. Of the Standard’s nine commitments, the fourth pledges among other things to communicate in “languages, formats and media that are easily understood, respectful and

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culturally appropriate for different members of the community, especially vulnerable and marginalized groups,” and to “ensure representation is inclusive” with due attention to gender, age and diversity (CHS Alliance et al. 2014, 13). The UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted by a UN General Assembly resolution in 2015 for the period to 2030, include Goal 4, on quality education, which promises to “[b]uild and upgrade education facilities that are child, disability and gender sensitive and provide safe, nonviolent, inclusive and effective learning environments for all” and Goal 16, on peace, justice and strong institutions, which seeks to promote “public access to information” and strengthen “institutions upholding human rights at the national level” (UN SDGs n.d.). Despite such promises and aspirations and despite the earlier creation of a UNICEF resource pack in many languages, including Arabic, on Communicating with Children in settings characterised by injustice, prejudice and poverty (Kolucki and Lemish 2011), a focus on the development needs of very young children in emergency settings was still considered enough of an innovation in December 2017 for the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation to select a project with this aim as the winner of the US$100 million award in its “100&Change” competition. The 2016– 18 round of the competition sought a proposal that would articulate a “critical problem of our time” and propose a “proven solution” that would create value for people beyond the grant recipient and “inspire other funders to make the large investments needed to fund solutions at scale” (MacArthur Foundation 2018). A partnership of two organisations based in New  York, Sesame Workshop and the International Rescue Committee (IRC), won the 5-year award with a proposal to deliver a combination of media content and direct caregiving programmes to mitigate what a MacArthur Foundation press release called the “toxic stress experienced by children in the Syrian response region.” The programme aimed to create a new “standard for humanitarian assistance that will benefit the youngest children affected by conflict” (MacArthur Foundation 2017). It would do so through a Sesame television show made with local production companies that would “model respect, inclusion, and equity,” build children’s language, reading, mathematics and socioemotional skills (ibid.) and be available to more than 9 million children aged 3–8 years in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq. A year later, the Lego Foundation, based in Billund, Denmark, granted another US$100 million to Sesame Workshop for a project with young children affected by the Syrian crisis and the crisis of the Rohingya who had fled Myanmar for Bangladesh, to ensure that

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they would have “opportunities to learn through play.” A press release on the Lego Foundation website on 5 December 2018 said the programme would provide “critical new insights into effective models of learning through play for children affected by crisis.” The Sesame Workshop-IRC projects were not the only ones of their kind in Syria and the surrounding region. BBC Media Action, the BBC’s international development charity, worked with an independent radio outlet in Syria and an animation producer to make content for children and parents about the effects of post-traumatic stress, the dangers of unexploded ordnance and the possibilities of catching up on schooling even after a long absence (Butros 2017). In early 2019, with EU funding promised but later put on hold, BBC Media Action moved to extend research it had been doing in Lebanon since 2016 into providing learning resources through video for Syrian and other vulnerable children, aimed at building resilience and life skills and providing psychosocial support. It advertised a 2-year post for a Beirut-based Head of Research, who would be responsible, with a team in London and Beirut, for designing the research needed to develop a project to deliver non-formal educational content to three age groups: 6–10, 11–14 and 15–18 (UN Jobs 2019). It is relevant to this book’s interest in tracking children’s place in media activities and the geometries of decision-making to note the obvious point that initiatives like those of BBC Media Action and Sesame Workshop are not carried out in a vacuum. On one side there is coordination with funders. On the other are institutions and political realities of countries where the intervention takes place. For example, BBC Media Action’s Head of Research was expected to liaise with “various stakeholders” in Lebanon, including the Ministry of Education and Higher Education and the Center for Educational Research and Development (ibid.), which itself reports directly to the Ministry. In the Sesame Workshop case, its collaborators included the Global TIES for Children research centre at New York University (NYU), which is linked to Abu Dhabi through its NYU Abu Dhabi campus and NYU Abu Dhabi Research Institute. Its funder, the MacArthur Foundation, supported a period of reassessment before the start of the project, as a result of which the media plan changed so that, instead of delivering media content only in colloquial Arabic, it was decided to add versions dubbed into two Kurdish dialects and English (MacArthur 2018). Given Kurdish mobilisation over the past century towards uniting a Kurdistan that had been divided across Turkey, Syria,

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Iraq and Iran, through elaboration of a symbolic unity, including a “common language” and “largely unified historiographical discourse” ­ (Bozarslan 2018, 14, 21), the decision to dub into Kurdish was an innovation. In that respect, it ranked along with other cultural elements of the project that were innovative in the local context, such as the attention paid to preschool children and the emphasis on learning through play.

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 adjusting 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,

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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 people 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 perceived 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

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­ rinciple to replace ethnocentrism with an approach that puts children of p diverse ethnicities at the centre. The Prix Jeunesse Foundation, set up by Bavarian public institutions in Germany in 1964, describes itself on the home page of its website as a “world-embracing movement for high-­ quality television for children that meets their unique needs.” On the website under “About us,” Prix Jeunesse says it wants to “bring forward television that enables children to see, hear and express themselves and their culture, and that enhances an awareness and appreciation of other cultures.” In 2018 the biennial Prix Jeunesse Festival in Munich bore the theme “Strong Stories for Strong Children,” alluding to a longer-term project by the Foundation to foster resilience in children experiencing difficult life situations and provide outlets for their creativity. One component of the project, the Storytelling Club, ran in partnership with UNICEF and the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation’s International Central Institute for Youth and Educational Television (IZI). It brought groups of children together in different countries to “play, listen, tell, draw and write stories of strength they have experienced” with the aim of creating a storybook, in which the children themselves are the “heroes and heroines” of narratives that can help other children in a similar situation (Taher et al. 2018, 37). Along with the clubs, IZI and Prix Jeunesse developed an international screen drama format called The Day I Became Strong, in which 15 participating countries (European, African, Asian) produced a live action episode, 5–6 minutes long, telling the true story of a 7–11-year-­ old (Gӧtz 2018, 32). Making an Egyptian film for the series The Day I Became Strong and running Storytelling Clubs in Egypt and Lebanon challenged norms and assumptions on the part of Egyptian, Lebanese and German facilitators. The Egyptian film, The Day I Became a Big Brother, followed 8-year-old Ahmed who, having been an only child all his life, is suddenly confronted with a baby brother and, charged with taking care of him one day, realises he cares enough about this little human being to overcome his revulsion at the baby’s full nappy and change it. Europeans who saw the film at the Prix Jeunesse Festival in May 2018 asked its producer, Andria Gayed, why there were no shots of the nappy or the baby’s bare bottom; Gayed told them that showing these things was “forbidden” (Gayed 2018). But the film did contravene conventions—not only in Egypt—by implying that “real men” change nappies, that it is not weak for males to share their feelings and that when children share feelings this is “not a joke” (ibid.). When Storytelling Clubs were held in Luxor, Sinai and Cairo, local

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e­ducators needed persuasion from their Egyptian colleague to try an approach that differed from the “same authoritarian system” the children were “subjected to in schools” (Taher et al. 2018, 38). In Beirut, the project took place with seventeen Syrian refugee children. Some of their harrowing stories of physical and emotional abuse (ibid., 39) raised questions beyond the work plans and advice contained in the Storytelling Club handbook for educators. For if adults decide to place children at the centre of recounting traumatic experiences, they also have a responsibility to provide additional support such as counselling (Steemers et al. 2018, 7). Putting children “at the centre” can be contentious in any cultural setting. Jan-Willem Bult, a Dutch producer, director and scriptwriter with long experience of working on children’s content in different cultures, believes that putting children at the centre—which means not “under your control and your rules”—is often perceived as dangerous by production staff or unacceptable to parents (Bult 2018a). Appointed in 2014 to run the Free Press Unlimited international network, Wadada News for Kids, Bult applied his approach, which values children’s “autonomy,” “power and talent” and recognises that “children are bothered with rules all the time” (ibid.). That meant, among other things, doing away with presenters but implicitly keeping adults sufficiently in the frame to ensure that children first have “good information,” to avoid having a “kid saying things on television about things they can’t know” (Bult 2018b). Of the 20 countries in the Wadada network by 2019, only Egypt was in the MENA region and all the others, apart from Ukraine, were in South America, southern Africa and Southeast Asia. The Egyptian production company, Icon Media, joined the network in 2015 and the resulting show, called “I-News,” illustrates some of the obstacles and outcomes of the Icon-Wadada collaboration. Instead of being shown on a state channel, Icon Media relied on distribution through Facebook, YouTube and SAT7 Academy (Taher 2018). The latter is part of the Cyprus-based pan-Arab SAT7 network funded and governed by a number of Christian organisations based in North America and the Middle East. The network, which broadcasts in Arabic, Farsi and Turkish and has studios in Cairo, Beirut and Istanbul, also runs a channel called SAT7 Kids. It contributed to the cost of I-News production, including through the use of its facilities (ibid.). But the series, rather than being aimed at the core age group of the Wadada model, which is 8–12 years, targeted teens in the 13–16 bracket after research showed that this group talks “a lot about hot topics but without understanding what’s happening” (Taher 2018). I-News adopted

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a 7-minute magazine format that includes a “teen report,” filmed and uploaded by a teenager themselves. Through training with Wadada, Icon Media’s managing director found that crews learned “how to put a child in the centre of all your production,” a child who is at “ease in front of the camera,” “not acting” but “spontaneous” (ibid.).

Children, Other Stakeholders and Sources of Input and Influence The challenge of putting children “at the centre” also applies to the making 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 “children’s television community” was said to include content creators, programmers, toy tie-in companies, advertisers, government bodies, advocacy groups and philanthropic organisations (Bryant 2006, 40). The “community 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 populations in the EU and an even more substantial proportion in Arab ­countries,

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they are not “courted as stakeholders” because their communication needs are seen as subordinate to the priorities of national governments and media business, with the latter primarily interested in “parental expenditure” and, in Europe at least, deterred by restrictions on advertising aimed at children (Steemers 2019, 181–182). The following four chapters of this book deal with stakeholders and players in content provision, policy, collaborations in production and dialogue about how production takes place. Chapter 2 charts the type and volume of content that is 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. Chapter 3 considers initiatives aimed at reducing disparities in European and Arab regulatory approaches to children’s screen media. Chapter 4 presents some case studies of Arab-European collaboration in delivering video content for children. Chapter 5 draws on dialogues that took place between Arab and European practitioners in 2017–18 around the creation of European content for the continent’s refugee and immigrant children, to understand diverse stakeholder positions on such content and the conditions for producing it. In each chapter, the analysis is informed by geographer Doreen Massey’s term “power-geometry,” which she coined to highlight the social differentiation that occurs within the “geographical stretching-out of social relations” that came to be called “time-space compression” (Massey 1993, 59–61). In the flows and interconnections invoked by the notion of time-space compression, Massey argued that it is “not merely” an issue of “who moves and who doesn’t” but about power in relation to flows and mobility. As she put it: “some are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movement, others don’t; some are more on the receiving end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it” (ibid., 61). Her focus was on place and space, but Gillian Rose (2016, 343) has shown how the concept of power-geometry serves in analysing the “highly uneven distribution of different kinds of digital cultural work.” In drawing attention to the dimensions of control and initiation that warrant scrutiny alongside “movement and communication,” Massey offered diverse examples of complex social differentiation in terms of ­location, gender, class and age. It is interesting that age in her essay was represented by a pensioner but not a child (1993, 61–62). As Anderson notes (2016, 6), “the words people and human beings often refer only to men and women,” with the result that the world’s child population is often not “explicitly considered” (ibid.). Nevertheless, a “power-geometry”

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approach to flows and interconnections relating to children’s screen media opens up multiple avenues of inquiry. It points to relationships and differential levels of control between and among investment, production and regulatory entities based in different places and systems, and how these shape screen content creation and distribution. Equally it points to the position occupied by children in different places and systems vis-à-vis the shaping of screen media aimed at them. Further perspectives on children’s access, voice and participation are set out as part of the book’s conclusion in Chap. 6.

References Anderson, Priscilla. 2016. The Politics of Childhoods Real and Imagined: Practical Application of Critical Realism and Childhood Studies. Abingdon: Routledge. Bozarslan, Hamit. 2018. When the Present Sends Back to the Past: Reading the Kurdish Issue in the 2010s. Middle East Critique 27 (1): 7–24. Bryant, J.  Alison. 2006. Understanding the Children’s Television Community from an Organizational Network Perspective. In The Children’s Television Community, ed. J.  Alison Bryant, 35–55. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Bult, Jan-Willem. 2018a. Children at the Centre: Quality in Children’s Films. Presentation to the 2nd International Conference on Film Education. Ljubljana, April 12. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnqGkXZ4zK4. Accessed 4 May 2019. ———. 2018b. Authors’ interview. Munich, May 28. Butros, Julie. 2017. Coping with Conflict: Making Media to Support Children in Syria. BBC Media Action, November 19. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcmediaaction/entries/0e3516f1-5eba-40e4-84ee-6cc464cd09a0. Accessed 4 May 2019. Cappelaere, Geert. 2019. The Brutal War on Children in Yemen Continues Unabated. Statement from Geert Cappelaere, UNICEF Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa. February 25. https://reliefweb.int/report/ yemen/brutal-war-children-yemen-continues-unabated-across-yemen-12-million-children-face. Accessed 4 May 2019. Cavatorta, Francesco, and Vincent Durac. 2011. Civil Society and Democratization in the Arab World: The Dynamics of Activism. Abingdon: Routledge. Chalaby, Jean. 2009. Transnational Television in Europe: Reconfiguring Global Communications Networks. London: IB Tauris. Child Helpline International. 2013. Rewind: The Voices of Children and Young People in the Middle East and North Africa. Amsterdam: CHI. http://orgchitukhnakal.savviihq.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/mena_english.pdf. Accessed 4 May 2019.

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———. 2017. Voice of Children and Young People in Europe: Looking Back. Amsterdam: CHI, https://www.childhelplineinternational.org/wp-content/ uploads/2017/10/VOC_2016.pdf. Accessed 4 May 2019. CHS Alliance, Group URD, Sphere Project. 2014. Core Humanitarian Standard on Quality and Accountability. London and Geneva: CHS Alliance, Group URD, Sphere Project. Coates Ulrichsen, Kristian. 2018. The Exclusionary Turn in GCC Politics. Lobe Log, August 23. https://lobelog.com/the-exclusionary-turn-in-gcc-politics/. Accessed 4 May 2019. Connor, Phillip. 2016. Number of Refugees to Europe Surges to 1.3 Million in 2015. Pew Research Center, August 2. https://www.pewglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/08/Pew-Research-Center-Europe-AsylumReport-FINAL-August-2-2016.pdf. Accessed 6 May 2019. ———. 2018. Most Displaced Syrians are in the Middle East, and About a Million Are in Europe. Pew Research Centre, January 29. http://www.pewresearch. org/fact-tank/2018/01/29/where-displaced-syrians-have-resettled/. Accessed 4 May 2019. EBU (European Broadcasting Union). 2017. Press Release. Geneva, April 25. https://www.ebu.ch/news/2017/04/ebus-landmark-generation-what-project-reveals-picture-of-modern-european-youth. Accessed 4 May 2019. EBU Executive. 2017. Interview with authors by Skype, EBU/Geneva-London, September 14. Fore, Henrietta. 2019. 2018 Deadliest Year Yet for Children in Syria as War Enters 9th Year. Statement by UNICEF Executive Director. https://www.unicef. org/mena/press-releases/2018-deadliest-year-yet-children-syria-warenters-9th-year. Accessed 4 May 2019. Gayed, Andria. 2018. Q&A at Prix Jeunesse “Resilience Night”, Munich, May 27. Authors’ transcript. Generation What. 2018a. About. https://ps.generation-what.org/en/page/ about#. Accessed 4 May 2019. ———. 2018b. Is the Arab Youth Optimistic or Pessimistic? May 31. https:// ps.generation-what.org/observatory/en/. Accessed 4 May 2019. Gӧtz, Maya. 2018. The Day I Discovered that I’m Strong: Stories of Strength in Middle Childhood from Around the World. TelevIZIon 31/E: 26–32. Hanson, Karl, Tatek Abebe, Stuart C. Aitken, Sarada Balagopalan, and Samantha Punch. 2018. ‘Global/Local’ Research on Children and Childhood in a ‘Globalized’ Society. Childhood 25 (3): 272–296. Havens, Timothy. 2007. Universal Childhood: The Global Trade in Children’s Television and Changing Ideals of Childhood. Global Media Journal 6 (10). http://www.globalmediajournal.com/open-access/universal-childhood-theglobal-trade-in-childrens-television-and-changing-ideals-of-childhood. php?aid=35250. Accessed 4 May 2019.

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Henry, Clement, and Robert Springborg. 2001. Globalization and the Politics of Development in the Middle East. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jordan, Amy B. 2008. Children’s Media Policy. The Future of Children 18 (1): 235–253. Kandil, Amani. 2010. An Attempt to Evaluate the Development of Arab Civil Society. In The Changing Middle East: A New Look at Regional Dynamics, ed. Bahgat Korany, 43–58. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press. Kolucki, Barbara, and Dafna Lemish. 2011. Communicating with Children: Principles and Practices to Nurture, Inspire, Excite, Educate and Heal. New York, NY: UNICEF. https://www.unicef.org/cwc/. Lemish, Dafna. 2019. ‘A Room of Our Own’: Farewell Comments on Editing the Journal of Children and Media. Journal of Children and Media 13 (1): 116–126. Levine, Mark. 2002. The UN Arab Human Development Report. Middle East Report Online, July 26. https://merip.org/2002/07/the-un-arab-humandevelopment-report/. Accessed 4 May 2019. MacArthur Foundation. 2017. Press Release. December 20. https://www.macfound.org/press/press-releases/sesame-workshop-and-international-rescuecommittee-awarded-100-million-early-childhood-education-syrian-refugees/. Accessed 4 May 2019. ———. 2018. 100 & Change Learning and Evaluation Final Report. December 7. Chicago: MacArthur Foundation. https://www.macfound.org/press/ grantee-publications/100change-learning-and-evaluation-final-report/. Accessed 4 May 2019. Massey, Doreen. 1993. Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place. In Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, ed. Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, George Robertson, and Lisa Tickner, 59–69. London: Routledge. Nick, Christopher. 2017. Interview with UN News. Baku, May 5. http://webtv. un.org/d/watch/christopher-nick-generation-what-un-news-interview-atthe-4th-world-forum-on-intercultural-dialogue-5-6-may-2017-baku-azerbaija n/5422970767001/?term=&lan=French. Authors’ translation. Accessed 4 May 2019. Rose, Gillian. 2016. Rethinking the Geographies of Cultural ‘Objects’ Through Digital Technologies: Interface, Network and Friction. Progress in Human Geography 40 (3): 334–351. Sakr, Naomi. 2016. Media ‘Globalization’ as Survival Strategy for Authoritarian Regimes in the Arab Middle East. In Global Media and National Policies: The Return of the State, ed. Terry Flew, Petros Iosifidis, and Jeanette Steemers, 173–189. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sinclair, John, Elizabeth Jacka, and Stuart Cunningham. 1996. Peripheral Vision. In New Patterns in Global Television, ed. John Sinclair, Elizabeth Jacka, and Stuart Cunningham, 1–32. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Steemers, Jeanette. 2019. Invisible Children: Inequalities in the Provision of Screen Content for Children. In Digital Media Inequalities: Policies Against Divides, Distrust and Discrimination, ed. Josef Trappel, 179–192. Gӧteborg: Nordicom. Steemers, Jeanette, Naomi Sakr, and Christine Singer. 2018. Facilitating Arab-­ European Dialogue: Consolidated Report on an AHRC Project for Impact and Engagement: Children’s Screen Content in an Era of Forced Migration. London: King’s College London. https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/files/102210294/ Consolidated_Report_FinalSV_221018.pdf. Accessed 4 May 2019. Taher, Fadi. 2018. Authors’ interview. Munich, May 27. Taher, Fadi, Suzanne Kanso, and Maya Gӧtz. 2018. The Storytelling Club. TelevIZIon 31/E: 37–39. UN Jobs. 2019. Head of Research, Lebanon. https://unjobs.org/vacancies/1549401408398. Accessed 4 May 2019. UN SDGs. n.d. United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. https://www. un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/. Accessed 4 May 2019. UNICEF. n.d. Information on Children Arriving in Europe. https://www.unicef. org/eca/emergencies/latest-statistics-and-graphics-refugee-and-migrant-children. Accessed 4 May 2019. Van den Bulck, Hilde, and Karen Donders. 2014. Analysing European Media Policy: Stakeholders and Advocacy Coalitions. In The Palgrave Handbook of European Media Policy, ed. Karen Donders, Caroline Pauwels, and Jan Loisen, 19–35. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 2

Joining the Dots: How Arab and European Children Are Connected by Screen Media

Abstract  In this chapter we outline the type and volume of screen content 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, particularly 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. Keywords  Amazon • Animation • Online screen distribution • Netflix • Subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) • YouTube In this chapter, we outline connections that may potentially exist between some groups of Arab and European children through the screen media they use. The connections are partly brought about through the global spread of online video-on-demand, along with large volumes of imported content on the expanded number of children’s channels in both regions. In parallel, however, connections are also driven by offline phenomena. © The Author(s) 2019 N. Sakr, J. Steemers, Screen Media for Arab and European Children, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25658-6_2

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The latter include mass forced migration, which results in displaced children 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.

Content Crossover on Pay TV Platforms In the age of global providers of video online, such as YouTube and subscription video-on-demand operators like Netflix, how accurate is it to suggest that children under twelve are likely to be familiar with at least a few of the same items of screen content whether they are in Amsterdam, Avignon, Amman or Al-Ain? The question of what children are watching on whatever screens are available to them—tablet, television, computer or mobile phone—is one that can be answered more readily in Europe than the Arab world, because the collection and credibility of data differ sharply between the two regions. However, a key factor in assessing the potential for crossover in content viewed is the changing landscape of delivery platforms and what this means in terms of the range of provision. Connection to high-quality broadband internet is a prerequisite for access to the increasing range of online video content available from platforms and services which, with or without payment, compete with television supplied by traditional broadcasters. Similarly, connectivity is essential for catch-up and streaming services that help to underpin the market positions of big television networks. Over the decade to 2017, the proportion of households using broadband internet in the 28 member-countries of the European Union (EU) more than doubled from 42 to 85 per cent (Eurostat 2018). Some non-EU European countries like Norway and Switzerland had higher rates, while the lowest rate in the whole EU, in Bulgaria, was 67 per cent. The Arab region differs from Europe not in the highest rates of broadband internet penetration but in the presence of wide variations from one Arab country to another. The percentage of TV households that regularly watch television or video online in rich Gulf

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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 segments of the population in Gulf countries had access to high-speed broadband internet, compared with fewer than a quarter of households in many other Arab countries, with the cost being prohibitive for low-income families 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 suitable 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 broadband infrastructure. In a region where tight censorship and lack of investment 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 available 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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the cost of SVOD services to be added to telephone bills. Starz Play Arabia, US brand Starz’s first venture outside the US, launched in seventeen MENA countries in 2015. It partnered with STC in Saudi Arabia, Vodafone in Egypt and Etisalat in the UAE, where it had a 5-year deal. Etisalat operations beyond the UAE are advantageous for its partners. Etisalat’s subsidiary, content aggregator E-vision, which also operates in Saudi Arabia, runs a children’s channel, e-junior, and launched an app in 2018 to provide more than 1500 hours of curated on-demand content for children. Etisalat also has a stake in Maroc Telecom. Thus Starz Play, through its Etisalat connection, had early access to Morocco and added a deal with Orange Morocco in 2018. Starz Play Arabia’s chief executive officer, Maaz Sheikh, indicated in 2018 that 70 per cent of the company’s clientele were Arabic speakers looking for English content (Shakeel 2018). Shaking up pay TV in both Europe and MENA is a phenomenon with discernible links to the provision of screen content for children. Ampere Analysis, reporting in 2016, found that, in nine of Europe’s largest economies and the US, the early adopters of SVOD were homes with children under 10 years old. According to research on 10,500 homes, traditional pay TV remained “highly relevant” in those with under-10s, but these were also the homes showing the “most dramatic shifts in content behaviour of any demographic segment, embracing non-linear viewing, SVOD and multi-device TV consumption” (Bisson 2016, 1). Two years later, in 2018, the shift to SVOD and catch-up in homes with younger children remained very significant (Bisson and Deane 2018, 2). Meanwhile, SVOD was also taking off in parts of the Arab world. Figures for the ages of children in households choosing these subscription services were not forthcoming as in Europe, but IHS Markit reported in 2018 that SVOD was already accounting for one-third of overall pay TV subscriptions in the MENA region by end-2017, as a result of rapid growth in subscriptions and revenue during the year (McDonald 2018). At this point, pay TV penetration stood at 60 per cent in Gulf countries (Hamid 2017) with satellite and cable remaining the primary means of delivering paid-for content rather than OTT. However, IHS Markit forecast that OTT’s share in all paid-for television in the MENA region as a whole would increase to 50 per cent in 2020 and 67 per cent in 2022, with revenues that year reaching US$500 million (McDonald 2018). In 2017, Starz Play Arabia had just over one-quarter of the OTT market share, followed by Netflix at 16 per cent and Icflix at 11 per cent, according to IHS Markit figures (ibid.). By late 2018 the ranking had reportedly changed slightly, with Starz Play

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Arabia at just under 24 per cent, MBC’s Shahid Plus at 21.7 per cent and Netflix at 18.4 per cent (Papavassilopoulos 2018). For companies seeking to persuade households to pay for television, providing premium children’s content can be one means of persuasion. Until 2016, Netflix provision for children consisted mainly of re-runs of material from Nickelodeon. But when Netflix set out to expand globally at the start of 2016, its Chief Content Officer, Ted Sarandos, announced that Netflix intended to increase the number of its original shows for children from 15 shows to 35, using a large slice of that year’s US$5 billion programming budget to do so (Flint 2016). In 2017, Amazon Prime also increased its children’s offering, with Netflix and Amazon combined adding 2718 hours of children’s content, most of the addition accounted for by Amazon Prime and most of it acquired, with only 98 hours of originations or exclusive acquisitions (Bisson and Deane 2018, 9). One way to gauge the impact of SVOD content for children and families in the Gulf region is to consider some of the titles most frequently viewed on Netflix in the UAE during the Eid al-Adha holiday in 2017. Out of the top ten, as reported by a YouGov survey for Netflix, at least three were for families with children. One was The Worst Witch, a Netflix co-production with the British and German broadcasters BBC and ZDF, based on the books of the same name by British children’s writer and illustrator Jill Murphy. A second was A Series of Unfortunate Events, a Netflix series that follows three orphans investigating their parents’ mysterious death, under their villainous guardian Count Olaf (Hamdan 2017). A third was Anne with an E, a Canadian television drama series based on the 1908 novel Anne of Green Gables by Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery, about a 13-year-old orphan. Like Netflix, regional SVOD providers made a push to attract subscribers by making or acquiring children’s content. In 2014 Dubai-based Icflix launched a dedicated children’s app, Icflix Kids, available across all Android devices. In 2015 it teamed up with AppyKids, owned by UAE-based Growl Media, to offer animated series Mughamarat Zee (The Adventures of Zee) on both the app and its main service. Available in both Arabic and English and centred on an Arab girl who likes discovering things, Zee was presented in a Growl Media press release as influenced by the renowned Arab explorer Ibn Battuta. Icflix’s founder, Beirut-born Carlos Tibi, attended the MIP Junior trade event in Cannes in 2015 saying he was looking for animated children’s series in the early stages of development and was open to localising children’s formats in both Arabic and French

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(Franks 2015). Among the resulting commissions was a 10-part animation, Dunia, about a 12-year-old girl who uses her secret martial arts skills to fight injustice and thereby, in the view of Icflix co-founder Fadi Mehio, offers a positive role model to children across the region (Dickens 2015). Subsequent Icflix acquisitions were for preschoolers and came from European companies. In 2016 there was Kit ’n’ Kate, produced by Cyprus-based Toonbox Animation Studio and distributed by France’s Ankama Animations, featuring two kittens. In 2017 there was a 3D animation series of 5-minute shorts called Super Geek Heroes, produced by a UK company, Yellow Spot Productions. In meeting competition from US and local SVOD companies, Arab pay TV providers set up their own online services and entered various deals featuring premium children’s content from abroad. Regional competition at this time had a political as well as business dimension because of the split discussed in Chap. 1 between Qatar and its Gulf neighbours Saudi Arabia and the UAE. OSN, based in Dubai, has Kuwaiti and Saudi shareholders; it started life in the 1990s as two separate pay TV companies, Saudi-owned Orbit and Viacom subsidiary Showtime, which merged in 2009 as a consolidation measure when subscriber bases were still small. OSN first created an SVOD service in 2014 but in 2017, in a bid to shore up subscriptions against increasing competition from Qatar’s beIN, OSN launched new low-cost packages, for its pay TV service and a new OTT SVOD operation called Wavo. In Egypt in 2017, OSN’s cheapest subscription was a “kids’ package” offering Disney and Discovery-branded channels available for the equivalent of US$14 per month (Esterman 2016). In February 2018 it signed a deal with Netflix that promised OSN customers access to the Netflix entertainment catalogue, including a wide range of children’s titles, through a new hybrid set-top box. However, while waiting a year for the delayed box to be released, Netflix did a separate deal with UAE telco Du (Papavassilopoulos 2019). A focus on viewing for families and children was much in evidence on the part of Qatar-based beIN Media Group when it added entertainment to its pay TV sports offering in 2016. Among the early deals signed were one with Turner, part of US giant Time Warner, for channels including Cartoon Network and Boomerang. Another, with the Belgium-based production company Studio 100, aimed at creating a channel called beJunior, based on Studio 100’s own pay TV channel Junior that broadcasts in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, showing European animation series

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like Maya the Bee, Vic the Viking and Heidi. Discovery Kids was one of six Discovery channels added to beIN in February 2016 and in April 2016 it was joined by the English-language BBC preschool channel, CBeebies. A BBC press release noted that this was CBeebies’ first entry into the MENA region; its advertised offering included four animated series, Go Jetters, Hey Duggee, Sarah and Duck and Clangers and the live action drama, Katie Morag. In a press release on its website on 26 July 2016, US-owned AMC announced a deal to launch five channels with beIN, including the preschool channel JimJam, whose series include Mattel properties Thomas and Friends, Bob the Builder, Pingu, Barney, Angelina Ballerina and Fireman Sam. This was followed in August by a partnership with DreamWorks Animation, for the launch of the DreamWorks channel in Arabic. Publicity material at the time indicated that series to be shown would include Dragons: Race to the Edge, How to Train Your Dragon, Dinotrux, All Hail King Julien, The Adventures of Puss in Boots and Dawn of the Croods. A daily morning preschool block was set to feature UK animated series Guess with Jess, Roary the Racing Car and Little Red Tractor. With OTT SVOD services and pay TV packages gaining ground in Arab markets, which had long resisted paying for screen content, the region’s biggest free-to-air satellite television network, MBC Group, responded to the trend. In 2013 it created a new pay TV revenue stream for its high definition channels. It did so by putting them on My-HD, a low-cost Dubai-based pay TV provider, which was already partnered with the Saudi Arabia-based pan-Arab satellite operator Arabsat. Having already launched Shahid.net as a free VOD and catch-up service in 2011, MBC then added its own advertisement-free pay TV service called Shahid Plus in 2015. In late 2018 it reached agreement with Fox Networks to add the Fox Plus streaming service to the Shahid Plus catalogue, including the Fox Networks subsidiary, Baby TV. MBC Group’s other content acquisitions for children are discussed below, in relation to its advertising-supported children’s channel, MBC3. In July 2017 France’s Lagardère Active chose My-HD to launch an international version of the French children’s channel Gulli for children across the Arab region. Named Gulli Bil Arabi (“Gulli in Arabic”), it provided an outlet for French animations such as Oggy et les Cafards (Oggy and the Cockroaches), Marsupilami (based on a French comic strip from the 1950s) and the French-Canadian co-production Bali, along with other shows like My Little Pony, Transformers, Totally Spies, Power Rangers and the French version of the British animation series, Fireman Sam.

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Comparable Trends in the Spread of US Content The shift to catch-up and subscription services described above came after a long period, since around 2000, in which children’s screen media migrated from dedicated programming blocks on generalist channels to standalone children’s channels in both European and Arab countries. In both regions, the shift opened the way to increasing volumes of US content. A Council of Europe (CoE) report in 2017 counted a total of 329 specialised children’s channels across 40 CoE countries, mainly because many of the children’s TV networks offering these channels were providing multiple language versions—25 in the case of Disney (Ene 2017, 20). The report’s author made the point that, whereas the expansion of transmission space for children’s content was potentially beneficial in generating opportunities for creating original output, in effect it opened the way for “more US acquisitions, because these are relatively low cost and risk-­ free” (ibid., 7). Like US-made content for adults, US children’s shows are low cost because their owners have a large back catalogue of properties, many of which have already paid for themselves several times over, meaning the rights can change hands for a modest outlay. The relative absence of risk comes from the opportunity to choose acquisitions with a record of prior success. The report demonstrated the importance of US content in the European landscape by comparing networks and channels. Private European owners have 58 per cent of children’s networks, while 16 per cent are national public networks and 26 per cent are under private US ownership. However, when channels are counted instead the situation is very different: private US owners, with their different language versions— more than half of them licenced in the UK—account for 69 per cent of channels, followed by private European owners with 25 per cent and only 6 per cent for publicly owned national channels (ibid., 24; 26). As a result of strategies pursued by the top four US groups in Europe in terms of the size of their children’s TV portfolios, namely Walt Disney, Viacom, Time Warner and AMC, by 2017 these groups had multiple networks addressing children in different age groups and with different viewing interests, thereby gaining 60 per cent of the European audience (ibid., 10; 38; 55). One outcome of increasing US competition over 20 years or more has been the cumulative impact on local European TV provision for children. Even in the UK, with its strong public service broadcasting base, quotas for original children’s content were dropped under new legislation that came into force in 2003. The commercial ITV network closed its in-house

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production unit, ITV Kids, in 2007 and drastically reduced its originations (D’Arma and Steemers 2013, 131), filling its digital children’s channel, CiTV, mainly through acquisitions. Meanwhile, budget cuts affecting the main public service broadcaster, the BBC, contributed to a reduction in its commissioning of children’s programmes. A report by the BBC Trust in 2013 pointed out that the UK had 32 digital TV channels dedicated to children’s content but only 20 per cent of original programmes were being made in the UK, while Disney (possibly due to the prominence given it on the electronic programme guide in homes with Sky subscriptions) had overtaken CBBC, the BBC channel for children aged 6–12, as the most watched in homes with satellite and cable (BBC Trust 2013). In Germany, the privately owned children’s channel Super RTL, a joint venture between Disney and Bertelsmann-controlled RTL, was also the market leader at this time, with around 20 per cent of viewers aged 3–13, compared to 15 per cent for the public service channel KiKa, around 10 per cent for the free-to-air Disney Channel that was launched in Germany in 2014 and 5–8 per cent for Nickelodeon (Roxborough 2014). US transnationals in Europe have localised their operations to a degree, as is evident from the number of different language versions of channels counted in the CoE report cited above. But they “usually exhibit a marked preference for using wholly owned content because of a combination of economies of scale and low cultural barriers” (D’Arma and Steemers 2012, 153), the latter attributable to the ease of dubbing US animation into local languages. A concern to maintain a global brand image is also part of the rationale. A study of content on Cartoon Network, Disney Channel, Nickelodeon, Nick Jr and Playhouse Disney in each of France, Germany, Italy, the UK and the Netherlands in September 2009 showed that US originations occupied more than 60 per cent of airtime on these channels in the UK, France and the Netherlands, more than 80 per cent in Germany and around 50 per cent in Italy, where non-Italian content (Japanese and other European) accounted for most of the remainder (ibid., 150–151). Two of the trends identified in Europe also apply to the Arab region. On one hand, the rise of Arab-owned children’s channels, starting with the launch of Spacetoon from Dubai in 2000, created airtime that leading operators filled with US as well as European acquisitions. On the other, US transnational children’s channels entered the region, on pay TV platforms such as those of OSN and beIN, as outlined in the previous section, but also, as in the case of Cartoon Network, with a combination of pay TV

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and free-to-air options. Localisation is a different proposition in Arab countries compared with Europe, because of intra-regional imbalances in affluence that correlate with the disparities in broadband internet access already alluded to above. Ultimately, only Saudi Arabia combines the wealth and population size that make its media market attractive for screen content supported by income from either advertising or subscription. Other rich countries such as the UAE and Qatar have small populations; other large countries such as Egypt have smaller incomes. Economics and the linguistic landscape militate against localisation. Instead of a wide array of languages, the Arab region has a standardised literary version of Arabic, which children’s channel owners and managers in the region have generally adopted for their output, in preference to the dialects used for conversation in individual countries. There is an obvious economic dimension to this choice, given that content in standardised Arabic can be distributed in at least 18 countries from Morocco in the west to Oman in the east. It is a choice that saves US transnationals the considerable spending on translation and administration that they have been willing to commit to much smaller markets in Europe. Elias Muhanna, a professor of comparative literature in the US, commenting on distribution of the Disney film Frozen in 2014, questioned the idea that dialect markets in the Arab world could be too small to be viable, given that Scandinavia had five different translations of Frozen for a total population less than a third the size of Egypt’s and that Disney had commissioned separate translations of its films for speakers of Castilian Spanish and Latin American Spanish, European and Brazilian Portuguese and European and Canadian French (Muhanna 2014). The answer to Muhanna’s puzzlement lies in the much lower volumes of advertising and subscription revenue generated by children’s screen content in the Arab world. A 2016 industry report put television advertising spend per head of population at US$17 in MENA in 2015, compared with US$80 in Western Europe and US$195 in North America (Northwestern University in Qatar 2016). The low figure for the MENA region is largely attributable to a lack of credible audience data, caused in turn by a long-standing monopoly on the pan-Arab advertising market (Sakr 2007, 186; Harb 2015), held by a single agency that one observer has called the “Middle East’s sole media sales powerhouse” (Akerman 2018). When “tview” in the UAE, the region’s first and only audience measurement system to be based on a people metre, was closed in November 2016 after a few years in operation and despite passing an independent audit based on internationally

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approved criteria a few months earlier, the decision was widely suspected to have been made to avoid hurting the “incumbent” (Anon 2018). Those involved blamed the closure on “short-term, narrow thinking” that would “lead advertisers to question their investments and damage the long-term prosperity of the region’s media and advertising market” (quoted in Field 2017). Evidence suggests that, for children’s television in MENA, advertising spend is even lower than the overall average. An Egyptian producer told us in 2018: “There is a big problem in Egypt that children’s shows never attract ads, so no [generalist] channel wants to take kids’ material.” A former Spacetoon executive with experience of the Gulf market said in 2013 that the pressure to import children’s content was economic: “the minimum cost for any animation of 26 episodes is not less than US$5 million and the market cannot monetize that amount” (quoted in Sakr 2017, 36). Thus, when US transnational channels arrange distribution in Arabic, they keep costs down by doing so in a standardised form of the language that is assumed to suit the region as a whole. Nickelodeon entered the Middle East in 2006, initially as a channel licenced to the UAE’s Arab Media Group and then through a block deal with MBC3. As of February 2015, the channels Nickelodeon HD and Nick Jr were made available on OSN in Arabic as well as English, ensuring translation of new episodes of shows such as SpongeBob Square Pants, Paw Patrol, Dora the Explorer and a new series of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Characters from these shows were on hand to meet children at venues in the Saudi Arabian cities of Jeddah and Riyadh in early 2018 as part of a joint OSN-Nickelodeon promotion. Turner Broadcasting launched its Cartoon Network free-to-­ air, in Arabic only, from Dubai in 2010 and added in a morning block of preschool content from its Cartoonito brand between 2011 and 2014. Cartoon Network’s best-known properties include Ben 10, PowerPuff Girls, Uncle Grandpa and Transformers: Robots in Disguise. It invested in local content in 2012 by picking up and developing a locally made animation, called Mansour, about an Emirati boy and by creating an Arabised version of Ben 10. In 2015 Turner decided to move the Cartoon Network channels it had on OSN to beIN Media Group, which also gained Cartoon Network Arabic in HD, while the standard definition channel remained free-to-air. Disney has a long history in pan-Arab pay TV, having signed a 5-year deal with Orbit in 1997, long before the latter merged with Showtime to become OSN. In 2013 OSN obtained exclusivity in the region for ­first-­r un

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Disney movies and renewed its right to carry Disney Channel, Disney XD and Disney Junior, which it renewed again in 2017. That was after it introduced an Arabic-language audio feed for Disney Junior, making series such as Sofia the First, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, The Lion Guard, Miles from Tomorrow and Doc McStuffins available in Arabic. The option to watch in Arabic, as well as English, was added to Disney XD in 2018. Meanwhile, Disney’s presence in children’s media diets across the region was endorsed by Arab executives on two important Arab-owned channels as offering the kind of “quality” and “appeal” that locally produced content was allegedly not able to match. Speaking in 2013 about a change of strategy at Qatar-­owned Jeem TV, whereby local production was being replaced with imports from Disney and the BBC in a bid to compete more effectively with MBC Group’s children’s channel MBC3, Jeem’s acting general manager, Saad Hudaifi, explained that he was focused on “high quality” (Sakr and Steemers 2016, 244). He said that deals had been done with Disney and the BBC because both represented the high quality needed to increase “viewership satisfaction” (ibid.). Fadel Zahreddine, MBC Group’s Director of Brand Management and Digital Businesses, interviewed on the topic of children’s content in 2018, made a similar point. He said there are “certain strong IPs that have strong international appeal … We tend to think that what is produced in the US seems to have a more universal appeal than the rest.” He went on to contrast this appeal with the fact that “even locally-produced content may not at times work locally” because of the region’s diverse “dialects, customs and protocols” (Bisson 2018). MBC3 was one of the first Arab-owned free-to-air children’s channels off the blocks when it launched in 2004 and it entered a children’s television space already filled with imports, courtesy of MBC3’s only predecessor, Spacetoon Arabic, a Dubai-based satellite channel that grew out of a dubbing operation for imported animation based in Syria. Qatar’s Al-Jazeera Children’s Channel followed in 2005, to be split later into a preschool channel called Baraem, launched in 2009, and one for 7–12-year-­ olds that was rebranded as Jeem in 2012–13 (Sakr and Steemers 2017), after which beIN took over both Jeem TV and Baraem, putting them behind the beIN Media Group paywall in April 2016. Research conducted by IPSOS in Saudi Arabia in March-April 2014, while Jeem and Baraem were both still free-to-air, placed MBC3 first in terms of reach among children, both boys and girls aged 7–10 and 11–14 years, with Cartoon Network Arabic and Spacetoon in second and third place for both age

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groups (Cartoon Network 2014). The remaining six channels covered in the study scored much lower than these three for “yesterday viewership.” Whereas 78 per cent of respondents aged 7–14 had viewed MBC3 “yesterday,” with equivalent figures of 51 and 47 per cent for Cartoon Network Arabic and Spacetoon respectively, other scores in this category ranged between 15 and 32 per cent. At the higher end came Tuyur al-Jannah (Birds of Paradise) a privately owned Jordan-based channel launched in 2008, with a focus on religiously themed children’s chants and songs. In the middle were Qatar’s Jeem TV and Baraem and Jordan’s Karameesh, a channel with government support. Saudi Arabia’s state-run Ajyal, launched in 2009, came last on the scale. Ajyal underwent a rebrand in 2014 as part of a branding overhaul for the Saudi Broadcasting Corporation carried out by the Paris-based agency Télécreateurs, which rebranded itself a year later as Insurrection. The French agency’s Gabrielle Mimram did the new Ajyal design. At the time of the 2014 viewership survey, there were perhaps 22 or more dedicated children’s channels serving the region, half of them based in the UAE and as many as eight of them intended to teach versions of Sunni or Shia Islam (Sayfo 2012, 7, 20). However, Jeem TV’s decision to try to compete with MBC3 on its own terms by signing a multi-year exclusivity deal with Disney in 2013, thereby denying a raft of Disney shows to MBC3 (Sakr and Steemers 2017, 110), testified to the realities of child viewership. By demonstrating the dominance of foreign imports in the schedules of the most-watched Arab-owned children’s channels, Jeem’s decision also highlighted the increasingly complex matter of rights in a multiplatform era. These rights have cultural implications insofar as they may extend beyond transmission by satellite or cable into digital platforms and toys and other merchandise that give the characters and narratives of imported content a more profound presence in children’s lives than was previously the case. Today, since MBC Group provides children’s content not only on its linear channel but through advertising-supported video-on-demand (AVOD), SVOD, merchandising of toys and games and events, any acquisition needs to come with digital and merchandising rights attached as a minimum and preferably the option for live theatre-­type events as well. This multi-dimensional approach was evident in two European CGI-animated preschool series that MBC3 acquired in 2018. One was Wissper, whereby MBC3 bought the rights to air 52 seven-­minute episodes of the series, dubbed in Arabic, along with SVOD and AVOD rights for MBC’s digital platforms and

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exclusivity for MBC Group as the licensing agent for IP rights to a line of toys, to be made by Simba Toys Middle East. Wissper is a young girl who can talk to animals. The show, originally commissioned by the UK’s Channel 5, is a German-English series with input from companies in India and Ireland. The second deal was for rights to air Cuby Zoo, coproduced by Italy’s Mondo TV and Aurora World of South Korea, which Mondo TV said at the time offered possibilities for merchandising and other licensing (Hawkes 2018). A mix of US and European content has been much in evidence in MBC3 schedules from its outset and continued after Jeem TV reached its exclusive deal with Disney in 2013. In 2014 Zodiak Kids, a content production and distribution company with production arms in London and Paris, sold more than 170 hours of programming to MBC3, to be broadcast in English and Arabic across the MENA region. The channel acquired 156 episodes of Totally Spies, 62 of Martin Mystery, 52 of Amazing Spiez, 39 of Extreme Football and 26 of Officially Amazing, along with Zodiak’s preschool series Tickety Toc. Other foreign acquisitions included 52 episodes of the 7-minute preschool animation Munki and Trunk, produced by Aardman in the UK, and Sunny Bunnies, produced by Digital Light Studios in Belarus. Both these shows were also picked up by broadcasters serving Scandinavian and other European countries. The volume of imports on MBC3 has for many years all but guaranteed that its viewers will be familiar with content also seen by children in Europe, whether the latter watch shows made in Europe or the US. In early 2019 the MBC3 schedules included numerous well-known items from Nick Jr. There was also a Canadian animation, Looped, previously seen on the UK’s CiTV; Transformers Rescue Bots, also shown on Cartoon Network, Discovery Kids and Amazon Prime and based on a franchise from the US toy manufacturer Hasbro; and Pound Puppies, produced for Hasbro Studios and previously aired on Discovery Family. Besides Wissper, the European titles were mostly French, represented by Floopaloo, co-­ produced by Xilam and France Télévisions with Castelrosso and Rai Fiction of Italy, and Chrono Kids, released by Glénat Editions based in Grenoble. The CGI animated series Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat is also French and premiered on Nickelodeon in the US, with Netflix holding some of the rights. It was co-produced with multiple animation studios and other firms, including Disney Channel for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

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Usage of YouTube The crossover of television content seen on European and Arab screens also applies on YouTube, which, like Facebook and Snapchat, has become an increasingly important platform for children’s viewing. YouTube’s ability to reach children directly in Europe and the Gulf can be gauged from data gathered from very nearly 7000 parents in August 2018 on behalf of Symantec. Entitled Norton’s My First Device Report, the study covered eight European countries—France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Poland and the UK—and two Gulf countries—Saudi Arabia and the UAE. It found that it was now “common for children as young as 5 to own a connected mobile device,” notably a smartphone or tablet, “despite parents feeling that the age should be older” (Edelman Intelligence 2018, 4). Based on answers to the question “Does your child own or borrow this device?,” the report found the highest rate of tablet “ownership” among children aged 5–10 in Saudi Arabia, at 74 per cent, followed by the UK and UAE at 69 per cent and 68 per cent respectively; the lowest rate was in Germany, at 39 per cent, compared with an average of 57 per cent across the ten countries for this age group (ibid., 11). The three top countries also had the highest tablet ownership among 11–16-year-olds, at 74, 73 and 69 per cent respectively in Saudi Arabia, the UK and the UAE, compared with an average of 65 per cent. For smartphones, however, Poland, Germany and the Netherlands had the highest rates of “ownership” among 5–10-year-olds, at 53 per cent, compared with 34 and 31 per cent in Saudi Arabia and the UAE and a sample average for this age group of 43 per cent, rising to an average of 89 per cent for 11–16s (ibid., 11). As for time spent on connected mobile devices, whether smartphones or tablets, this was remarkably similar across the ten countries, based on combined data for weekdays and weekends. The longest was in the UK at 2 hours 55 minutes and the shortest in Spain at 2 hours 24 minutes (ibid., 8). Accessing YouTube on a smartphone or tablet gives children even more autonomy than VOD and SVOD: apart from the YouTube Red subscription service, YouTube channels are free to those with internet access; individuals can upload content as well as view it; and content on YouTube is varied enough to suit a wide range of user demands in terms of focus and length. At the start of 2015, before YouTube launched its YouTube Kids app, six out of the top ten YouTube channels worldwide were for children (Dredge 2015). Two of them were in the “unboxing” genre, where

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c­ hildren or adults open, demonstrate and review toys, gadgets or confectionery online. A third was created by an adult gamer called Stampy, posting videos about the game Minecraft. A fourth was a UK-based nursery rhyme channel called Little Baby Bum and two others were Russian channels, one featuring the Russian animation Masha and the Bear and the other, called Get Movies, offering family films (ibid). The spectacular growth in viewing of YouTube content for very young children demonstrates its wide geographic reach and its use in family homes. Little Baby Bum went from thirty-sixth biggest channel on YouTube in 2014 to fifth biggest by January 2015, at which point it was close to 2 billion lifetime views, based, according to its creators, on the format of 50–60-minute videos that enable parents or carers to “just press play and leave your child to watch it while you get something done” (quoted in Dredge 2015). Proliferation of nursery rhyme channels on YouTube is evident from listings on Social Blade, a statistics website that tracks use of several social media platforms, with the top five of these channels having gained between 2 and 11 billion views by early 2019. YouTube was also seen as the delivery platform of choice by educators wanting to disseminate Arabic materials for toddlers and preschoolers. When Qatar’s preschool channel, Baraem, stopped being free-to-air in 2016, a family in Jordan created Adam wa Mishmish, later gaining corporate sponsorship from Tommee Tippee and Hamleys among others (Al-Adnani 2018; Ma’ayeh 2017), to screen original educational cartoons and songs teaching literacy and numeracy. With fewer than 3 million views by early 2019, the channel was in a different league from the YouTube version of an Arabic alphabet song performed by Maysaa Kara for the Abu Dhabi-based co-production of Sesame Street, Iftah ya Simsim, first aired in 2015. According to an online press release posted by the Abu Dhabi production company, Bidaya Media, the song, revamped from the original Kuwait-­ based Iftah ya Simsim series of the late 1970s, achieved 1 million views on YouTube in single day in 2016. The total was 27.5 million by early 2019. Pacca Alpaca is another early learning brand, developed around a fluffy 2D character, that went from creating apps to making video for a dedicated YouTube channel with the aim of achieving a viable business model. Pacca Alpaca was the brainchild of Sarah Faisal Al Saud, with input from her 3-year-old daughter (Seymour 2017), when she was unable to find a suitably entertaining app that would support language learning in Arabic for young children. Al Saud set up a company, Anamil Tech, but found that, even after investing heavily in developing two apps in 2014, getting them

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into app stores in 2015 and gaining good publicity through awards and nominations, downloads only soared when the app was briefly made available free as part of a promotion (ibid). The Anamil Tech team, including creative director, Nicole Seymour, who worked previously with Disney Junior and CBeebies, judged that videos made to a mixed-media format, including self-shot live action footage and personal photographs, with only a limited amount of animation, were a “more affordable and less restrictive way to achieve an even larger audience” (ibid.). In December 2016 the company won a “Mom’s Choice” Award for its YouTube channel teaching Arabic, English and French to young children. In the process of localising the videos for use with all three languages, a template was created to facilitate addition of other languages and, by mid-2017, 100 videos had been published on YouTube, with Spanish also included and Russia under consideration based on traffic to the site. Alongside Pacca Alpaca’s presence on third-party children’s platforms Lamsa (based in Abu Dhabi) and Hopster (UK), the YouTube channel hit a modest 1 million views milestone in May 2017 (ibid.). Animation crosses cultural borders more easily than nursery rhymes and alphabet songs. According to WildBrain, a subsidiary of the Canadian firm DHX Media, views of animated videos increased by 40 per cent on YouTube in the year to February 2018, much of it being “language-­ agnostic” with “high production values” that “appeals in many markets” (quoted in Bisson and Deane 2018, 19). WildBrain itself creates and manages children’s content on other platforms besides YouTube, including Apple TV and Amazon Fire, linking advertisers to the 600 or so third-­ party children’s brands on its YouTube network, which is one of the biggest of its kind. WildBrain’s own online publicity said in 2019 that its YouTube network had more than 145,000 videos in up to 22 languages, including Arabic, watched by one in three children worldwide with access to YouTube. The content available includes material from DHX’s library, such as Teletubbies, Strawberry Shortcake, Caillou and Inspector Gadget. WildBrain announced in an online press release in December 2017 that the highest views of YouTube episodes of Teletubbies (a mix of live action and CGI-effects in a 2014 remake of the original series) were in English, Italian, French, Arabic and Dutch. YouTube’s appeal to children was recorded and analysed in the 2019 edition of the annual report on children’s media use by the UK media regulator, Ofcom. After logging a big increase in UK children’s YouTube use between 2016 and 2017, with 45 per cent of 3–4-year-olds having

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used it (mainly to watch animation), 2018 data showed that 49 per cent of children aged 8–11 years would prefer YouTube content over TV programmes when watching on a TV set, while 37 per cent of respondents in that age group liked both types of content equally (Ofcom 2019, 5). Ease of navigation was cited as an advantage of YouTube, combined with the availability of content tailored to children’s interests, including items by child presenters or vloggers, such as “how-to” and gaming tutorials and unboxing videos, many of them made in an accessible way that inspired child viewers to post their own material online (ibid., 6–7). Increases in watching vloggers were particularly marked among the younger UK age groups in 2018, with the proportion having done so rising to 15 per cent of 3–4-year-olds and 25 per cent of 5–7-year-olds (ibid., 6). Across Europe, observers have noted that “kids watching other kids is huge” (quoted in Evans 2018, 14). A report on live action screen content for children in Europe and North America suggested that the growth of short-form documentaries “made by kids for kids” on YouTube had piqued producers’ and channels’ interest in the sub-genre, because it had also shown that children were interested in the lives of children in other cultures (ibid.). In Arab countries, the ability to self-publish through YouTube was deployed with increasing intensity by teenagers and young people from the time of the Arab uprisings in 2011. Atia (2017, 127–132) documents examples of young Egyptian teens, male and female, including one aged 12 at the time he started uploading material, experimenting with different genres, from comedy and satire to gaming videos. Saudi Arabia was already the biggest user of YouTube per head of population in 2013, with use mainly driven by young creators and their younger audiences (Smith 2013). UTURN Entertainment, set up by a 24-year-old and two university friends in Jeddah in 2010, had gained 286 million views on YouTube by September 2013. Its success was attributed by one Saudi teen at the time to its ability to make young people laugh about issues close to home (ibid.) and it was just one of a number of similar ventures. Statistics collated in a study of social media use in MENA in 2017 suggested that 15–24-year-olds in the region were spending an average of 72 minutes per day watching YouTube videos online, with short-form amateur content curated by “Arab youth” being the fastest-growing “video segment” (Radcliffe and Lam 2018, 12). The economics of one-off short-form content are not always conducive to profitability, given that YouTube video creators need a million views

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before they can hope to receive US$1000–2000 as a share of advertising revenue (Evans 2018, 20). When Little Baby Bum was sold to an agency called Moonbug in 2018, which planned to take the brand to traditional TV, industry analysts forecast that a lot of YouTube channels would be bought out or merged with OTT platforms or television channels, noting that video creators and companies on YouTube were finding it necessary to look to merchandising and “proper” TV shows for revenue (Stokel-­ Walker and Shaw 2018). However, the ability to track YouTube views and subscribers gives distributors of children’s content information they need to decide on acquisitions. The Dubai-based Spacetoon Group announced in December 2018 that it was bringing a localised Arabic version of the children’s song Baby Shark to the Arab region. The song, created by Pinkfong, a subsidiary of the South Korean company Smartstudy, had by then had more than 2 billion views on YouTube. The Spacetoon deal, described in Spacetoon publicity material as a partnership, included other songs from Pinkfong along with exclusive rights to entertainment events featuring the Baby Shark theme. Smighties, a children’s animation with mobile games co-produced by New York-Herotainment and Toonz Media Group of India, was launched on YouTube Kids in July 2017 and within months Discovery Networks secured rights to air the show in Arabic and English in 25 MENA territories through its DKids channel on the beIN pay TV platform (Watson 2018). YouTube Kids was not available in these territories at the time of the deal. Deals like these indicate that, despite the opportunities for children’s own creativity and small-scale operations, certain types of children’s content on YouTube are just as likely to spread across multiple regions as they do on other platforms, through the global reach of major media players, many of whom—including MBC3 and Spacetoon—use YouTube themselves to promote material that is also shown on those other platforms. The spread of content in this way includes not only shows that have been dubbed into Arabic but also local versions of international formats. The Voice Kids is an offshoot of the adult talent show The Voice, created by the Dutch company Talpa Media, owned by John De Mol, co-founder of Endemol, known for a large number of formats that have succeeded in local versions around the world. The Voice Kids, sold in around 25 territories, was acquired for the MENA region by MBC Group and shown as family entertainment on its main channel, MBC1, its Egyptian channel MBC Masr and YouTube. Overlap and interconnections between globally available online video and the US, European and Arab corporate worlds

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were encapsulated in the finale of The Voice Kids Season 2 in 2018. The winning contestant, 10-year-old Hamza Labyad from Morocco, won prizes including a scholarship, family trips to Disneyland Paris and to London and a contract with Platinum Records. At Disneyland, thanks to a partnership between Disney and The Voice Kids, Labyad was due to shoot his own music video featuring an Arabic version of the new Disney Princess song, Live your Story (BroadcastProME 2018).

Conclusion If this chapter reads in places like an electronic programme guide, containing long lists of shows from the US and Europe, that is because lists of what is available through Arab media platforms for children offer the clearest proof that the same items provided for US and European children, with or without subscription, are also widely available for Arab children —the difference being in the language of delivery. The lists also demonstrate how large a proportion of screen content for European and Arab children consists of animation, much of it from the US but some also from French, British and Italian as well as Canadian sources. Scrutiny of beIN channels for children showed their content to be almost exclusively animation, except for a CBeebies live action drama. A rare exception to the array of animated series imported by Arab companies was Mansour, a locally made animation picked up by Cartoon Network’s operation in the UAE. However, despite the extensive similarity in content, there are regional differences in the reasons why so much of the content seen by Arab and European children is the same. In Europe, governments forced budget cuts on several public service providers and introduced liberalisation measures from the 1980s that opened the way to more material originated in the US. Even so, institutional safeguards continued to ensure a minimum or more of local European production. In the Arab region the decision to import was taken by media executives themselves, caught up in a cycle of advertising expenditure so low it would not cover the cost of local production, coupled with a perception by some in influential positions that non-­ Arab content is superior in quality and can be distributed across multiple Arab countries without any worry that what is produced in one part of the region might not succeed in another. Questions about the future dominance of animation generally and future dominance of imports on Arab screens are raised by evidence in the chapter of children’s preference for online video, their access to it

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through connected mobile devices in Europe and several affluent and middle-­income Arab countries, along with the take-up of subscription video-on-­ demand. All three trends are growing and are interlinked. SVOD and pay TV companies believe that parents are ready to pay for original or carefully curated content that children can access online and some have invested limited amounts in  local production for that purpose. Meanwhile, children’s fascination with YouTube, including the possibilities it affords for uploading short-form amateur documentarystyle content made by children for children, has demonstrated to companies—large and small—the potential for alternatives to animation. Creatives behind the Arab-­European preschool Pacca Alpaca brand, recognising a need to gain visibility through video on YouTube and reluctant to meet the high costs of full-scale animation, opted for additional lower-cost options in the form of self-shot live action footage that could be replicated for multiple languages. As views of free online sites become an increasingly important measure of audience response to new content, traditional methods of audience measurement may come to play a less important role. This could be good news for advertising spend in the Arab region, hitherto subject to downward pressure through lack of credible audience data. For the time being, however, revenue from merchandising emerges from the analysis as a crucial and continuing element in financial calculations underlying the acquisition of rights to children’s screen content. Through licenced toys and theme park experiences, narratives created elsewhere exist beyond screen culture and gain a more profound presence in both Arab and European children’s lives, reinforcing the persistent prominence of global corporations and the failure to invest in local content. In Arab countries, this is felt more acutely because of the lack of regulatory and funding structures.

References Akerman, Iain. 2018. Where Now for MBC? Arab Ad, March 14. http://arabadonline.com/details/industry-talk/where-now-for-mbc. Accessed 4 May 2019. Al-Adnani, Lina. 2018. Adam wa Mishmish. https://prezi.com/nbbwi4kelotb/ adam-wa-mishmish/. Accessed 4 May 2019. Anon. 2018. UK Specialist in Children’s Audience Research. Authors’ interview, London, July 11.

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Atia, Tarek. 2017. A Channel for Every Child: Exploring a Parallel Arab Children’s Television Universe. In Children’s TV and Digital Media in the Arab World: Childhood, Screen Culture and Education, ed. Naomi Sakr and Jeanette Steemers, 122–137. London: IB Tauris. BBC Trust. 2013. Review of the BBC’s Children’s Services: Summary Report. London: BBC Trust, September. http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/ assets/files/pdf/our_work/childrens_services/summary_report.pdf. Accessed 4 May 2019. Bisson, Guy. 2016. Kids TV and the Future of Entertainment. Ampere Analysis, Cannes: MipTV/Mipcom. https://www.audiovisual451.com/wp-content/ uploads/miptv-mipcom-ampere-analysis-kids-tv-future-of-entertainmentwhitepaper.pdf. Accessed 4 May 2019. ———. 2018. Interview with Fadel Zahreddine. Mipblog.com, August 27. https:// mipblog.com/2018/08/kids-content-in-the-future-should-allow-avatars-tobe-part-of-the-narrative-inter view-with-fadel-zahreddine-mbc-group/. Accessed 4 May 2019. Bisson, Guy, and Olivia Deane. 2018. Where Next for Kids’ TV: Predicting the Future of Children’s Content. Ampere Analysis. https://www.miptrends.com/ tv-business/where-next-for-kids-tv-predicting-the-future-of-childrens-content-exclusive-white-paper/. Accessed 4 May 2019. BroadcastProME. 2018. Moroccan Boy Crowned Winner in Latest Edition of The Voice Kids. February 4. http://broadcastprome.com/news/moroccanten-year-old-crowned-winner-latest-edition-mbcs-voice-kids/. Accessed 4 May 2019. Cartoon Network. 2014. IPSOS Kids Telemetry Study. Abu Dhabi: Cartoon Network. D’Arma, Alessandro, and Jeanette Steemers. 2012. Localisation Strategies of US owned Children’s Television Networks in Five European Markets. Journal of Children and Media 6 (2): 147–163. ———. 2013. Children’s Television: Markets and Regulation. In Private Television in Western Europe, ed. Karen Donders, Caroline Pauwels, and Jan Loisen, 123– 135. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Dickens, Andrew. 2015. Icflix Fights with Dunia on Kids Show. C21 Media, November 9. https://www.c21media.net/icflix-fights-with-dunia-on-kidsshow/?ss=Dunia. Accessed 4 May 2019. Dredge, Stuart. 2015. Little Baby Bum: How UK Couple Built World’s Fifth Biggest YouTube Channel. The Guardian, March 19. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/19/little-baby-bum-worlds-fifth-biggestyoutube-channel. Accessed 4 May 2019. Edelman Intelligence. 2018. Norton’s My First Device Report. Mount View, CA: Symantec. Ene, Laura. 2017. Media Ownership: Children’s TV Channels in Europe, Who Are the Key Players? Strasbourg: Council of Europe Mavise Database.

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Esterman, Isabel. 2016. Netflix in Egypt: The Good, the Bad and the Pixilated. Mada Masr, January 11. https://madamasr.com/en/2016/01/11/feature/ lifestyle/netflix-in-egypt-the-good-the-bad-and-the-pixilated/. Accessed 4 May 2019. Eurostat. 2018. Digital Economy and Society Statistics—Households and Individuals. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Digital_economy_and_society_statistics_-_households_and_individuals. Accessed 4 May 2019. Evans, Aled. 2018. Live Action Strikes Back: Kids TV in the Online Era. IHS Markit report for MipTV/Mipcom, October. Field, Roger. 2017. Industry Executives Lament Closure of Tview. Arabianindustry. com, March 6. https://www.arabianindustry.com/broadcast/news/2017/ mar/6/industry-executives-lament-closure-of-tview-5649787/. Accessed 4 May 2019. Flint, Joe. 2016. Netflix to Ramp Up Originals Targeting Kids. The Wall Street Journal, January 17. https://www.wsj.com/articles/netflix-to-ramp-up-originals-targeting-kids-1453058812. Accessed 4 May 2019. Franks, Nico. 2015. OTT Players Reveal Kids’ Wish Lists. C21Media. October 3. https://www.c21media.net/ott-players-reveal-kids-wish-lists/. Accessed 4 May 2019. Gelvanovska, Natalija, Michel Rogy, and Carlo Maria Rossotto. 2014. Broadband Networks in the Middle East and North Africa: Accelerating High-Speed Internet Access. Washington, DC: World Bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank. org/handle/10986/16680. Accessed 4 May 2019. Hamdan, Lubna. 2017. Netflix Saw Highest Streaming Traffic During Eid al-­ Adha. Arabian Business, December 17. https://www.arabianbusiness.com/ media/385819-netflix-saw-highest-streaming-traffic-during-eid-al-adha. Accessed 4 May 2019. Hamid, Triska. 2017. MENA Viewers Tune into P-TV. The National, May 8. https://www.thenational.ae/business/mena-viewers-tune-into-paytv-1.35076. Accessed 4 May 2019. Harb, Zahera. 2015. Antoine Choueiri: ‘President’ of Arab Advertising. In Arab Media Moguls, ed. Donatella Della Ratta, Naomi Sakr, and Jakob Skovgaard-­ Petersen, 31–47. London: IB Tauris. Hawkes, Rebecca. 2018. Mondo TV Licenses Kids’ Content to MBC. Rapid TV News, May 8. https://www.rapidtvnews.com/2018050851996/mondo-tvlicenses-kids-content-to-mbc.html#axzz5lHOfMkd6. Accessed 4 May 2019. Ma’ayeh, Suha. 2017. How a Jordanian Family Is Trying to Save the Arabic Language, One Cartoon at a Time. The National, March 19. https://www. thenational.ae/world/how-a-jordanian-family-is-trying-to-save-the-arabiclanguage-one-cartoon-at-a-time-1.57671. Accessed 4 May 2019.

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Maurell, Frederique, Ahmed Reda, and Nripendra Singh. 2018. Videonomics: Video Content Consumption, Production and Distribution in the MENA Region. EY Advisory Services. https://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/EY_-_ Videonomics:_Online_Video_Revenues/$FILE/EY-videonomics-report.pdf. Accessed 4 May 2019. McDonald, Andrew. 2018. IHS Markit: MENA Pay TV in Decline as SVOD Subs Grow 48%. digitaltveurope.com, April 24. https://www.digitaltveurope. com/2018/04/24/ihs-markit-mena-pay-tv-in-decline-as-svod-subsgrow-48/. Accessed 4 May 2019. Muhanna, Elias. 2014. Translating ‘Frozen’ into Arabic. The New Yorker, May 30. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/translating-frozen-intoarabic. Accessed 4 May 2019. Northwestern University in Qatar. 2016. Media Industries in the Middle East. Doha: Northwestern University in Qatar & Doha Film Institute. http://www. mideastmedia.org/industry/2016/tv/#s14. Accessed 4 May 2019. ———. 2018. Media Use in the Middle East, 2018: Online and Social Media. http://www.mideastmedia.org/survey/2018/chapter/online-and-socialedia/#s339. Accessed 4 May 2019. Ofcom. 2019. Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes Report 2018. London: Ofcom. Papavassilopoulos, Constantinos. 2018. The Online Video Subscription Market in MENA in 2018. IHS Markit. November 8. https://technology.ihs. com/607885/the-online-subscription-video-market-in-mena-in-2018-presentation-at-tv-connect-mena-2018-in-dubai. Accessed 4 May 2019. ———. 2019. OSN to Launch New Flexible Package and Cut Expensive Sports Programming. IHS Markit, February 22. https://technology.ihs. com/611291/osn-to-launch-new-flexible-package-and-cut-expensive-sportsprogramming. Accessed 4 May 2019. Radcliffe, Damian, and Amanda Lam. 2018. Social Media in the Middle East. The Story of 2017. Eugene, OR: University of Oregon. Roxborough, Scott. 2014. Disney Channel Germany Tops Nickelodeon in Ratings on Launch Weekend. Hollywood Reporter, January 20. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/disney-channel-germany-tops-nickelodeon672457. Accessed 4 May 2019. Sakr, Naomi. 2007. Arab Television Today. London: IB Tauris. ———. 2017. Provision, Protection or Participation? Approaches to Regulating Children’s Television in Arab Countries. Media International Australia 163 (1): 31–41. Sakr, Naomi, and Jeanette Steemers. 2016. Co-producing Content for Pan-Arab Children’s TV: State, Business, and the Workplace. In Production Studies, The Sequel! ed. Miranda Banks, Bridget Conor, and Vicki Mayer, 238–250. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.

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———. 2017. Rebranding Al-Jazeera Children’s Channel: The Qatarization Factor. In Children’s TV and Digital Media in the Arab World: Childhood, Screen Culture and Education, ed. Naomi Sakr and Jeanette Steemers, 99–121. London: IB Tauris. Sayfo, Omar. 2012. The Emergence of Children’s Media and Animation Industry in the Gulf States. Paper presented to 3rd Gulf Research Meeting, University of Cambridge, July 11–14. Schoenbach, Klaus, Marium Saeed, and Robb Wood. 2018. Audiences’ Responses to Online Video in MENA: New Favorite Genres or Just More of the Same as on Television? International Communication Gazette 80 (8): 697–713. Seymour, Nicole. 2017. Pacca Alpaca: Journey of a New Children’s Digital Global Brand. Presentation to the Casual Connect Asia Conference, Singapore, May 17. http://www.gamesauce.biz/2017/11/26/nicole-seymour-creating-highquality-content-preschoolers-casual-connect-video/. Accessed 4 May 2019.S Shakeel, Shayan. 2018. How Starz Play Plans to Grow Its Audience. arabianbusiness.com, February 6. https://www.arabianbusiness.com/media/388994how-starz-play-arabia-plans-to-grow-its-audience. Accessed 4 May 2019. Smith, Matt. 2013. Young Saudis Getting Creative on YouTube. Reuters, November 18. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-saudi-youtube/youngsaudis-getting-creative-on-youtube-idUSBRE9AH0GY20131118. Accessed 4 May 2019. Stokel-Walker, Chris, and Lucas Shaw. 2018. One of the World’s Biggest YouTube Channels Just Got Sold. Bloomberg, September 14. https://www.bloomberg. com/news/articles/2018-09-14/youtube-channel-little-baby-bum-childrens-cartoons-sold. Accessed 4 May 2019. Watson, Ryan. 2018. Discovery Takes Smighties to MENA. C21. January 24. https://www.c21media.net/discovery-takes-smighties-to-mena/.

CHAPTER 3

Towards Well-Being? Stimuli for Shared Practice on Policy and Regulation

Abstract  This chapter concerns itself with policies designed to promote children’s well-being through media. First, it looks at different ways of regulating screen media for children’s benefit, focusing on the principles of provision, protection and participation that underpin the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC)—before considering collaborative initiatives between regulatory bodies aimed at reducing disparities in European and Arab regulatory approaches. Adaptation of regulatory practices to the digital era is identified as a major challenge in both regions alongside differing interpretations and implementation of Article 17 of the CRC.  Opportunities for national and transnational policy communities are then scrutinised as a route towards knowledge exchange and shared practices, revealing resistance from Arab states to activity that might enhance children’s media rights. Keywords  Children’s media policy • Children’s media rights • Children’s media regulation • Convention on the Rights of the Child • General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) • Online regulation For children to enjoy their rights they need to access diverse media content that is age-appropriate and aimed, as Article 17 of the 1989 United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) put it, at promoting their “social, spiritual and moral well-being and physical and © The Author(s) 2019 N. Sakr, J. Steemers, Screen Media for Arab and European Children, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25658-6_3

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mental health.” The CRC’s adoption gave rise to talk of a “global consensus” on a “universally acceptable policy [for children’s television] with teeth” (Lisosky 1998, 363), as discussed periodically from 1995 at so-­called World Summits on Media for Children. But for all the worthy recommendations devised by a “world nexus of creative leaders” (Kleeman 2001, 522), policies on promoting children’s well-being and health through media are ultimately made and applied nationally. With that in mind and with the aim of locating their source and protagonists, this chapter examines actions that could bring highly disparate European and Arab national regulatory approaches to children’s screen media into closer alignment. It does so in light of wider research suggesting that the task of advancing children’s rights in the digital era should be “conceived globally and locally,” because “[w]hile the CRC is framed in universal terms … the notions of benefit, harm, resilience and wellbeing are also culturally specific” (Livingstone and Bulger 2014, 328). Since such specificities may impede attempts at cross-cultural collaboration in devising regulation, the chapter starts by reviewing some regulatory practices already adopted in diverse contexts and the impulses behind them.

Ways of Regulating Screen Media for Children’s Benefit There are a number of ways to categorise approaches to regulating children’s screen media. One option is to start with the principles of “provision, participation and protection” laid down by the CRC itself (Verhellen 2015, 49–50) and encompassed by the various elements of Article 17, as discussed below. It has been suggested that protection and participation may appear contradictory, insofar as protection makes children the beneficiaries of adult intervention while participation is based on empowering children as agents in their own right (Macenaite 2017, 767). Yet the alternative argument, put forward by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child among others (Sakr 2016, 377–78), sees the three principles as interlinked, in the sense that children have the right to participate in telling adults their views on how best they can be protected. At the same time, for children to form views and understand their consequences they need to be provided with adequate information. In relation to potentially harmful media content, children can participate in their own protection if they are supported to learn “coping and resilience” while taking advantage

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of the opportunities digital media afford (Macenaite 2017, 773; Third et al. 2014, 8). Despite the potential interdependence of the three principles, different approaches to regulation are liable to privilege one principle over the others. One reason is that “socio-cultural conceptions of childhood and child-­ adult communication vary across cultural settings” and children in many societies have “no right to express their opinions and are rather expected to readily obey parents/elders, who are considered ‘to know best’” (Ruiz-­ Casares et al. 2017, 6). The team of authors who point out these variations argue that “new models of collaborative decision-making” are needed in different cultural contexts to enable children to express their own views and preferences in ways that “contribute to their own well-­ being as well as that of their families and communities” (ibid., 7). To some extent, it is possible to match guarantees of provision, participation and protection against a classification of regulatory measures in terms of whether they are “positive” or “negative.” Positive regulation, starting from the assumption that screen media can offer benefits to children, is often geared primarily to provision. It may mandate publicly owned organisations such as public service broadcasters to entertain, inform and educate children through specified amounts, or quotas, of relevant locally produced material. Similar mandates may be enforced for commercial bodies by making operating licences conditional on fulfilment of production quotas for children’s content (Steemers and D’Arma 2012, 78–79). Positive interventions can be extended to ensure that diverse genres of children’s local programming are produced: an overview of children’s preferences across several countries, published by the UK regulator Ofcom, concluded that children, parents and teachers all preferred a variety of genres (Messenger Davies and Thornham 2007, 14). It also found that children themselves demonstrated a preference for home-grown programming, “particularly in children’s genres,” and that certain genres “such as news, live interactive magazine shows, and realistic drama” appeared to be most effective in terms of their social and cognitive benefits for children (ibid., 18). Regulation aimed at stimulating provision is usually underpinned by assumptions of market failure. In the case of children’s audiovisual media content the failure occurs not in terms of sheer quantity, since there are numerous sources showing copious amounts of cheaply acquired animation, often from North America and Asia, that is easily dubbed and repeated every few years as children grow older and younger ones take

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their place (Steemers 2017a, 300). Instead, where the market is often seen to fail is in providing sustainable amounts of both domestically produced originations and content that reflects children’s diverse lives in ways that might advance normative goals related to social cohesion, identity and citizenship, or encourage forms of positive behaviour that are beneficial to society as a whole, such as healthy eating or caring for others (ibid., 302– 03). Regulation aimed at compensating for market failure is seen as key for promoting content with “inherent value for society that extends beyond what can be measured or expressed in market terms” (Doyle 2013, 95). The reason for market failure is two-fold. First, in many countries, children represent a relatively small proportion of the overall audience and, even where that proportion is high, as in several Arab states, they are sharply differentiated by narrow age bands. What suits preschoolers is unlikely to suit a child of six or above, and content that interests a 9-year-­ old may not please a child of 15. Secondly, children have limited spending power, which means there are greater rewards for advertising-funded production aimed at adult and family audiences (Steemers and Sakr 2017, 5–6). Measures to deal with the impact of market failure exist in both Arab and European contexts, although the Arab examples are limited to Morocco and Lebanon. Morocco’s Audiovisual Communication Law, enacted in 2004, gave Al Oula and 2M, two TV stations owned by the Moroccan state broadcaster Société Nationale de Radiodiffusion et de Télévision (SNRT), the status of public service entities with an obligation (under Articles 3 and 10) to transmit at least 10 hours per week of children’s programmes, which (under Article 15) is not to be interrupted by advertising (Zaid 2009, 128–130). In Lebanon, programming quotas for children were only written into the Guidebook for Operating Conditions, not the law. As a result, a quota of 146 hours per year was set for locally made programmes aimed at children and youth (Dabbous-Sensenig 2003, 132) but was not enforced (Dabbous-Sensenig 2012, 91). In Europe, one of the strongest examples of public service provision for children is in Denmark, which, with a population of under 6 million, is comparable in size to Lebanon. Unlike Lebanon, however, which shares the Arabic language with the rest of its region, there is a deep sense in Denmark that public service funding is needed to ensure that children have access to material in their own language that is “based on Danish values” and reflects the national conversation (Steemers and Awan 2016, 51). As a result, Danish public service broadcaster DR (Danmarks Radio) runs two children’s channels: Ramasjang for preschoolers and DR Ultra for older

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children, with the latter operating online only from 2020. The UK’s BBC serves a national audience more than ten times the size of the Danish one, but it also operates two children’s channels, CBeebies for preschoolers and CBBC for children aged 6–12, as well as an on-demand app, BBC iPlayer Kids. Under its most recent Operating Licence, issued in 2017 and enforced by national regulator Ofcom, the BBC’s children’s channels are subject to annual transmission quotas. These require CBBC to allocate at least 1000 hours to drama, 675 hours to factual content and 85 hours to news, and to ensure that at least 400 hours are allocated to showing first-­ run UK originations; for CBeebies the origination quota is 100 hours (Ofcom 2017, 11, 13, 16) Commercially funded broadcasters are no longer required to meet quotas for transmitting or commissioning children’s content in either country, leaving these channels free to focus on more lucrative older audiences: the stipulation was removed in 2003  in the UK and 2013  in Denmark. However, other forms of positive regulation exist to encourage production for children, including competitive access to independent funds, subsidised from money diverted from funding public service media. In the UK, France, Ireland and a number of other European states, tax credits are also in place to attract overseas investment in domestic production, although this type of measure is more geared to satisfying industry lobbying than meeting children’s needs (Steemers 2017b; c). Arab examples of industry-focused interventions are mostly found in free zones for media that are dotted around the region, including for example Abu Dhabi’s government-owned Media Zone Authority, which has attempted to attract overseas partners to its content creation hub, twofour54, with rebates of up to 30 per cent on location and production facilities (twofour54 2013) for shows that appeal to global audiences and build local capacity. These incentives have served to stimulate production for children, although this was not their primary aim. In contrast to positive forms of regulation, negative forms, involving bans and prohibitions, are mostly presented as instruments to protect children from harm. They include restrictions or bans on advertising as well as measures to deal with inappropriate sexual, violent and over-­commercialised content, where intervention is deemed necessary because of children’s vulnerability and immaturity. However, as children have turned increasingly to online content and social media, the relevance of some bans has been undermined. For example, the ban Sweden imposes on marketing to children under 12 years on television and radio does not apply to

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­on-­ n broadcast media (Ó Cathaoir 2017, 295). Governments across Europe and the Arab world, facing the same challenge of whether and what to ban to protect children in the age of digital media, have responded differently, as discussed in the next section. In that diverse landscape, one landmark is the European Union’s (EU’s) 2018 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), based on enhanced principles of consent and privacy for digital media users. Some saw the GDPR as helping to create a “protective web” for minors (ERGA 2017, 1). It includes protection against targeted advertising and its guarantee of the “right to be forgotten” is—as noted by Recital 65 on Article 17 of the GDPR—especially relevant for children who may have given consent to their personal data being used when they were not fully aware of the risks involved and later want to have it removed. However, enforcing this provision may still be an issue, and children did not contribute to its formulation (Livingstone 2018, 20–21). A third way to classify regulation is to distinguish between what might be called “hard” and “soft” forms, where the former is unilateral and enforced by penalties while the latter is informal, consisting of self-­ regulation based on voluntary codes, or co-regulation that brings government and industry together with civil society groups and representatives of citizens and consumers. Writing at the start of the twenty-first century, Monroe Price (2002, 203) pinpointed a contrast between what he called the “consensual” and the “unilateral” in his “taxonomy of analytic approaches” to national media policies; he discerned a tendency to move from the unilaterally imposed to the consensual, negotiated and multilateral. Today, in light of various unilateral government moves to control the way social media companies interact with children (see below), it may be questioned how far the consensual trend still holds in this area. Nevertheless, it remains manifest in, among other things, the development of various multilateral forums—pan-European, pan-Mediterranean and other—in which national regulatory bodies exchange experience and discuss responses to shared challenges. For example, Europe has had the European Platform of Regulatory Authorities (EPRA) since 1995; EPRA is much wider than the EU, comprising regulators from 46 countries. It also includes, among its standing Observers, the European Audiovisual Observatory, an information hub that is part of the Council of Europe (CoE) and counts Morocco among its members, represented by Morocco’s media regulator, the Haute Autorité de la Communication Audiovisuelle (HACA). Multilateral bodies provide spaces for exploring initiatives designed to affect children’s media consumption that are not readily classified as either

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positive or negative regulation. Examples include the promotion of media literacy and content classification. The European Regulators Group for Audiovisual Media Services (ERGA), established by the European Commission in 2014 to advise it on implementation of the EU’s Audiovisual Media Services Directive, brings together heads or high-level representatives of national regulators in EU countries. ERGA has held events and produced reports based on consultations not only among regulators themselves but with industry, parental organisations and other “stakeholders.” In a report released in 2017, it summarised these stakeholders’ views about classification and rating systems for children’s content and the value of media literacy. It argued for the desirability of co-regulation, with protection of minors being a “joint effort of public authorities, all players in the value chain, classification bodies, and above all parents and educators” (ERGA 2017, 14). A pan-Mediterranean forum, the Mediterranean Network of Regulatory Authorities (MNRA), was created in 1997, 2 years after EPRA came into existence, by the broadcast regulators of France and Catalonia with the participation of their counterparts in Portugal, Greece and Italy. It is an informal vehicle, where sovereignty remains with national bodies and leverage is lacking to enforce commitments or make them binding. However, according to one analysis of the MNRA, informed by interview data with executives involved, it differs from EPRA in that its statutes “contemplate the possibility of reaching agreements or common positions” (Carniel Bugs and Crusafon 2014, 379). The Network’s 2008 Declaration on Audiovisual Content Regulation established what the analysis called the “backbone” of its work, setting out principles, including the protection of minors that would be “reinforced” by subsequent agreements (ibid., 380). Since four Arab media regulators are members in the MNRA, it is explored further in the next section, which looks at what is involved in reaching “common positions.”

Regulatory Bodies and “Common Positions” on Children and Digital Media Most contemporary theories of policy-making and regulation are linked to scholarship on countries with political systems in which citizens are enabled to change their governments at regular intervals through the ballot box. In those relatively rare situations where policy formulation involves free

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and open public consultation and deliberation, which in turn gives rise to regulation, it may not be completely fanciful to think of regulatory agencies at arm’s length from government, contriving to restrain monopolies, protect essential services and accumulate relevant expertise (Lunt and Livingstone 2012, 21). Ultimately, however, as Lunt and Livingstone note (ibid., 186), regulatory agencies are “creatures of statute”; governments not only determine the powers, responsibilities and functions of regulators but also the “nature of regulation itself,” including whether to use it to bolster the power of central government. Such a choice is “inevitably positioned” within a particular historical context (ibid., 187). There are obvious differences among European and Arab countries in their approaches to media regulation, broadly correlating with levels of public representation in their political systems. These differences affect regulation specific to digital media for children, as will be shown. European mechanisms exist to push for shared standards, including, for example, the terms of regulators’ independence from government. Since its creation, ERGA has issued repeated warnings about certain European regulatory bodies’ alleged loss of independence, such as those in Croatia, Greece and Poland. Media regulators in Arab countries have no comparable multilateral network, other than the Council of Arab Information Ministers grouped within the Arab League—an arrangement that effectively defines national media regulation as an exclusive government prerogative (Sakr 2017a, 34). Bouziane Zaid, examining the only 11 Arab broadcast regulators that are even nominally separate from government, concludes that these bodies “function as modern institutional support systems for authoritarian rule,” being entrenched in a “multilayered architecture of control” which includes unrepresentative appointments and repressive media laws (Zaid 2018, 4415). Indeed, only four Arab audiovisual regulatory authorities have joined the MNRA, where they sit alongside European regulatory bodies and where, under Article 3 of the MNRA’s Charter, they are expected to be “independent” (MNRA 2018, 69). The four are Morocco’s HACA, Lebanon’s Conseil national de l’audiovisuel (CNA), Jordan’s Media Commission and Tunisia’s Haute Autorité Indépendante de la Communication Audiovisuelle (HAICA). Of these, HAICA was deemed in 2018 to have “the most credibility as an entity” (Zaid 2018, 4409), due in part to its appointments process. In 2019, however, fears persisted that plans to replace HAICA with a new body would reverse the gains made towards independence (Article 19 2017, 3; Lafrance 2019). A 21-month project, launched in December 2018 with EU funding, twinned HAICA

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with the regulatory authority of the French Community of Belgium, the Conseil Supérieur de l’audiovisuel (CSA) and the French archiving and production entity, the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA), with the aim of strengthening moves towards independent regulation in Tunisia. The CSA was expected to help HAICA to build a research unit and develop monitoring in areas including protection of minors (EPRA 2018). It had been one of the first European institutions on the scene to provide assistance with setting up regulatory structures for media in Tunisia in 2011 after the fall of the Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (Sakr 2012, 192–194). Despite the best intentions of such collaborations, all regulatory bodies, whether focused on audiovisual media like the CSA or dealing with electronic communication more generally, like the regulators of Finland, Italy, Slovenia and the UK, face the challenge of how to regulate digital media to protect children at a time when adults often find it hard to keep track of children’s online worlds. In theory, some stimuli for shared standards in online regulation exist in agreements reached beyond the media sphere. In 2010, for example, 193 states unanimously endorsed a set of recommendations by the World Health Organisation (WHO), aimed at restricting children’s exposure to the marketing of unhealthy food and drink. In practice, however, even the EU’s Audiovisual Media Services Directive is not geared to making such restrictions a reality, since its Article 9 (4), as amended in 2018, calls only for the adoption of industry codes of conduct intended to limit audiovisual commercial communications in unhealthy food and drink in “children’s programmes.” That is to say: it has not been extended to cover social media platforms or video-sharing sites such as YouTube (Bartlett and Garde 2017, 252, 254). A large global report on advertising and marketing to children, commissioned by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in 2016, showed disparities not only between the nine EU and four Arab countries included but also among the EU and Arab countries themselves in terms of whether and how their regulation covered advertising to children (DLA Piper 2016, 7–10). When it came to restrictions on advertising aimed at children online through websites, the report found only “some provision” in the majority of EU countries, Jordan and the UAE, “no provision” in Italy, Qatar or Saudi Arabia, and full restrictions only in the UK (ibid., 8). Steps taken since the 2016 survey may not have substantially increased harmonisation of detailed regulation of advertising, the GDPR notwithstanding, but they did start to shift the balance away from reliance on

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self-regulation for online companies towards mandatory measures. Germany’s Network Enforcement Act took effect in January 2018, threatening big online operators such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube with fines of up to €50 million if they fail to remove content defined as illegal. France and the UK were still working on new legislation in early 2019. The incoming head of the French media regulator, CSA, indicated at the start of 2019 that, once a new law was drafted and approved, he would be overseeing the extension of the CSA’s remit to cover social media networks and digital platforms. Public pressure for restrictions to be imposed on social media companies mounted in the UK after a number of child suicides were linked to images of self-harm on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. Launching a 12-week consultation on a new Online Harms law in April 2019, UK officials blamed online companies for failing to take sufficient voluntary actions. A joint press release from the Department for Digital, Media, Culture and Sport and the Home Office promised that an independent regulator would be appointed to enforce “stringent new standards” and announced that the “era of self-regulation for online companies is over.” In the Arab world, meanwhile, a 2019 decision by the global subscription service Netflix to withdraw an episode of a satirical comedy show, for fear of contravening Saudi Arabia’s cybercrime law, demonstrated the potential impact of such laws, but also their limited reach given that the same material could still be seen elsewhere in the world and remained available in Saudi Arabia through YouTube (Busby 2019). “Adapting … regulatory practices and tools” to “the digital era” was the theme of a Declaration issued by the Mediterranean Network of Regulatory Authorities (MNRA) in 2017, marking its 20th anniversary. The 2017 Declaration, promising an “overhaul” of audiovisual regulation in the “digital environment,” committed member authorities to ensure that “all audiovisual communication stakeholders” would be “associated” with their work, “especially the new digital service providers” (MNRA 2017). It restated the principles of the 2008 Declaration, including the “protection of childhood and adolescence” and highlighted the place of “video-sharing platforms, social networks, and livestreaming services” in the lives of “younger generations” (ibid.). Taken together with the 2008 Declaration, which commits MNRA members to “ensure compliance” with three articles of the UN’s CRC (MNRA 2008, Art. 3) and expands on how they should do this, plus a 2009 “Declaration of Intent Concerning the Protection of Young Publics and the Fight against the Violence in the

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Media,” which also outlines specific measures (MNRA 2009; Sakr 2017a, 34–35), the 2017 Declaration brought the MNRA’s “common positions” on children and media, aimed primarily at protecting them, more up to date. The Moroccan authority HACA, vice-president of the MNRA in 2019, was due to host the Network’s Plenary Assembly later in the year. The theme of audiovisual regulation to protect children—with somewhat muted reference to provision and participation—also emerges in interactions between the CoE and the authorities in Morocco and Tunisia, under the CoE policy towards its “immediate neighbourhood” in North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. The Neighbourhood Policy is aimed at promoting dialogue and cooperation with willing countries, based on the “common values of human rights, democracy and the rule of law” (Council of Europe 2015a, 3). In matters relating to children’s rights and media, the stated purpose of exchanges has been to achieve convergence with instruments created by the CoE. For example, the 2015–17 programme for the CoE Neighbourhood Partnership with Morocco noted that the Moroccan parliament had, among other measures, ratified the CoE’s 1996 Convention on the Exercise of Children’s Rights and the 2007 Lanzarote Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse (ibid., 7). Article 12 of the former calls on parties to the Convention to encourage the “promotion” of children’s rights through national bodies, including keeping the media informed about the exercise of children’s rights, seeking the views of children and providing them with relevant information (Council of Europe 1996, 4–5). Article 9 of the Lanzarote Convention contains a clause requiring signatories to “encourage the media to provide appropriate information concerning all aspects of sexual exploitation and sexual abuse of children, with due respect for the independence of the media and freedom of the press” (Council of Europe 2007, 4). Such a commitment is significant in Morocco, where there is at least one instance, in 2008, of HACA penalising two radio stations for airing content in which a child shared a personal experience of sexual abuse (Carniel Bugs and Crusafon 2014, 388). The CoE’s programme with Morocco, renewed for 2018–21, has included direct engagement with HACA, which hosted a series of “experience sharing workshops” for its staff during the first half of 2017. At these, specialists from Portugal, Republic of Ireland, Spain and Switzerland discussed subjects including media pluralism, hate speech and cultural and linguistic diversity (Council of Europe 2017).

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CoE collaboration with Tunisia followed a format similar to the Morocco “partnership” and was also renewed for 2018–21. The CoE partnership programme relating to Tunisia for 2015–17 said that the “effective functioning” of HAICA was a CoE “priority” and repeated phrases like “convergence of Tunisian audiovisual regulations with the CoE instruments,” “awareness of European standards,” and “knowledge of CoE conventions” (Council of Europe 2015b). CoE instruments mentioned in the document include the “Strategy for the Rights of the Child,” which by 2018 was already half-way through its third phase, with “participation of all children” and “rights of the child in the digital environment” listed among its five “priority areas.” Although Jordan is the third Arab country to have a partnership programme with the CoE, this was less ambitious, with no reference to standardisation on children’s rights or audiovisual regulation. Meanwhile, special attention was paid to Lebanon’s CNA in the EU MedMedia programme for 2014–18, as part of a €17 million EU-funded programme entitled “Media and Culture for Development in the South Mediterranean.” With draft legislation before the Lebanese parliament to upgrade the CNA from a purely advisory body to one with executive powers, consultations were arranged to share expertise on pluralism in broadcast media, protection of minors in a “converging media environment,” and regulation to combat gender stereotypes in audiovisual content (EU Neighbours 2016). No change in the CNA’s status had been agreed by the time the programme ended in 2018.

Meeting International Standards Set by Article 17 of the CRC The status and functions of regulatory bodies for screen media, including their research capabilities and connections to other state agencies, matter when it comes to the exercise of children’s rights. States that have signed up to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child commit themselves to regulate in a way that complies with the Convention, including its provisions on media. All Arab and European countries are parties to the Convention, including Palestine, which, as part of declaring independent statehood, took the step of signing the CRC along with 14 other international treaties and conventions simultaneously in April 2014. Different paradigms of children’s rights are potentially at play in

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Muslim and non-­Muslim societies, in the sense that the CRC regards children as individual rights holders whereas Sharia Law is widely understood to see children’s rights in the context of families, being entangled with parents’ responsibilities and obligations (Habashi 2015, 124). However, in 2005, members of what was then called the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) signed the Rabat Declaration on Child’s Issues, Article 20 of which urged OIC member states to take all appropriate measures for the implementation of the rights recognized in the International Convention on the Rights of the Child by, inter alia, putting in place effective national legislations, policies and action plans, by strengthening governmental structures for children and ensuring adequate and systematic training in the rights of the child for professional groups working with and for children. (OIC 2005)

Several articles in the CRC have implications for media regulation, including those guaranteeing children’s right to be heard (Art 12), their right to freedom of expression (Art 13) and privacy (Art 16). Article 17, however, is special, not only within the CRC itself but also when compared with the provisions of other UN human rights treaties, because of the extent to which it elaborates on how freedom of information can be made a reality for children (ARTICLE 19 1999, 23; Sacino 2012, 5). It consists of two sentences. The first emphasises the child’s right to access media content from diverse sources. It imposes a duty of regulation on states, whereby they are obliged to “ensure” that, the child has access to information and material from a diversity of national and international sources, especially those aimed at the promotion of his or her social, spiritual and moral well-being and physical and mental health.

The second sentence, in contrast, implicitly enters the realms of self-­ regulation and co-regulation. As Sacino points out (2012, 15; 30–31), instead of insisting that the state “shall ensure,” it contains five sub-clauses that merely call on the state to “encourage” things to happen. This includes encouraging the mass media to disseminate beneficial material that accords with the spirit of the CRC’s Article 29, which directs education towards respect for human rights and freedoms. After that come sub-­clauses about encouraging international cooperation in disseminating beneficial content from diverse sources; production and dissemination of children’s books;

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mass media “regard” for minority and indigenous languages; and development of appropriate guidelines to protect children from content that is “injurious to his or her well-being, bearing in mind the provisions of articles 13 and 18.” While Article 13, as noted above, provides guarantees on the rights and responsibilities of freedom of expression, Article 18 gives parents primary responsibility for their children’s well-being. The allusion to Article 18  in reference to protecting children from injurious content seems to put responsibility on parents for supervising their children’s media use. It thus implicitly exonerates the state from regulating media in such a way as to avoid harm to children (Sacino 2012, 31), requiring it only to encourage the development of protection guidelines. Notwithstanding this mention of protection from harm, and despite OIC endorsement of the CRC in the Rabat Declaration, cited above, some Arab states have testified to their suspicion of Article 17 by placing a Reservation on it, meaning that they do not consider themselves bound by its provisions. For Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, this is part of a blanket reservation on any article of the CRC considered to be incompatible with Islamic law. For the UAE, its specific Reservation on Article 17 is related to local laws and cultural traditions and is worded as follows: While the United Arab Emirates appreciates and respects the functions assigned to the mass media by the article, it shall be bound by its provisions in the light of the requirements of domestic statues and laws and, in accordance with the recognition accorded them in the preamble to the Convention, such a manner that the country’s traditions and cultural values are not violated. (CRC Declarations and Reservations – UAE)

Algeria, which ratified the CRC in 1993, has meanwhile attached “Interpretive Declarations” on Articles 13, 16 and 17, citing what it calls the child’s “physical and mental integrity.” Instead of looking to develop guidelines to protect children from harm through the media, Algeria used its Declarations to highlight existing provisions of its Penal Code and Press Law, including the latter’s Article 26, banning any “illustration, narrative, information or insertion contrary to Islamic morality, national values or human rights” or any publicity or advertising that “may promote violence and delinquency” (CRC Declarations and Reservations – Algeria). Article 17 is nevertheless a valid focus for discussion of shared intraand inter-regional benchmarks regarding policy and regulation of

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c­ hildren’s screen media. For one thing, it puts a duty on states to give children access to diverse international, as well as national sources. For another, it specifically calls for international cooperation to be encouraged “in the production, exchange and dissemination of [information and material of social and cultural benefit to the child] from a diversity of cultural, national and international sources” (UN CRC 1989). Thirdly, Article 44 of the CRC places an obligation on signatories to report on measures they have adopted to implement it. State reports go to the treaty body, the Committee on the Rights of the Child, created under Article 43 of the CRC and comprising 18 members from around the globe who serve renewable 4-year terms in a personal capacity and whose duties include giving feedback on states’ reports. States, meanwhile, after their initial report, have a 5-yearly reporting schedule and are required, under Clause 6 of Article 44 to “make their reports widely available to the public in their own countries” (UN CRC 1989). The resulting repository of reports available through the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights offers insights into the way Article 17 is variously neglected, downplayed or misunderstood by some of those charged with documenting its implementation (Sakr 2016, 10). The Committee on the Rights of the Child has itself been found to take an uneven approach to monitoring, let alone promoting, adherence to Article 17 (Sacino 2012, 44; 53–55). This may not be surprising given the range of issues covered by the Convention as a whole and the Committee’s heavy workload. But the unevenness is contradicted by the Committee’s own periodic pronouncements on the importance of children’s access to information, in the form of General Comments or convening of Days of General Discussion (Sakr 2016, 377–378). And there are occasions when the Committee remarks specifically on issues of media regulation in its Concluding Observations on State Party reports. The Committee’s feedback to France in 2016 expressed concern at the lack of a regulatory framework to protect children from inappropriate media and digital content and stated that “many features for regulating children’s access to inappropriate information … such as parental controls are not effective in practice” (Committee on the Rights of the Child 2016). In 2011, in its Concluding Observations on Italy’s combined third and fourth periodic reports, the Committee had commented at length on media-related issues and called on the country to “promote and support the development of a children and media code that fully incorporates the provisions and aims of Article 17” (Committee on the Rights of the

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Child 2011). When Italy submitted its fifth and sixth periodic reports together in 2017, it itemised regulatory and self-regulatory actions taken in response to the Committee’s concerns (Committee on the Rights of the Child 2018a). Meanwhile, under the rolling deadlines for states to submit reports to the Committee, media-related measures continue to emerge. Tunisia submitted its fourth, fifth and sixth reports simultaneously in April 2018—the first to be compiled after the revolution that toppled Ben Ali in January 2011. Discussing implementation of Article 17, Tunisia noted that, by law, broadcast licence conditions include a guarantee relating to “children’s contribution to the information landscape” and “disseminating the culture of children’s rights” (Committee on the Rights of the Child 2018b). It mentioned “guidance activities” conducted with the Council of Europe involving HAICA, the Journalists’ Syndicate and media establishments, aimed at guaranteeing “the balance required between freedom of expression and protection of child rights” (ibid.). Palestine submitted its first report on compliance with the CRC in 2018. Its section on Article 17 highlighted provision for children organised with and by national media but omitted to consider Palestinian children’s access to information from diverse international sources (Committee on the Rights of the Child 2018c).

Building National and Transnational Policy Communities: A Work in Progress Where states’ reports on their compliance with Article 17 of the CRC have glaring omissions, this may well reflect a failure by those drafting the report to draw on the knowledge and expertise of a sufficiently diverse pool of local child’s rights activists (Sakr 2016, 385). Sometimes state submissions are not accompanied by parallel reports from local non-­ governmental organisations (NGOs) for the simple reason that, as discussed in Chap. 1 of this book, civil society is prevented from operating freely in the country in question. Pointing out the obligation the CRC places on states to cooperate with civil society, including NGOs, in planning and monitoring implementation of the Convention and its Optional Protocols—an obligation stressed in reporting guidelines issued by the Committee on the Rights of the Child itself in 2015 (cited in Chaney 2017, 8)—Paul Chaney argues that civil society organisations’ input to rights implementation is as important as the legal side of implementation,

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because it is the “key to knowledge transfer, policy responsiveness and effective practice” (Chaney 2017, 8). Policy-makers’ cooperation with civil society is captured in the idea of a policy community. Essentially such a community consists of a network of people representing different organisations and interests. For some analysts, a policy community is built around “deep core beliefs,” as a result of which the existence of a community “maintains the status quo” (Van den Bulck and Donders 2014, 28). In abstract terms, the idea of a policy community for children’s screen media amalgamates concepts from two separate bodies of literature, on policy analysis and children’s television. John Kingdon’s notion of a policy community envisages a more or less tightly knit network of officials, academics, consultants, analysts and advocates (Kingdon 2011, 116–117), while Alison Bryant’s construct of the “children’s television community” is defined as including creators and programmers of educational content and entertainment, “toy tie-in companies, advertisers, governmental bodies, advocacy groups and philanthropic organizations” and is seen as a system or network that “evolves over time based on internal dynamics and external pressures” (Bryant 2006, 35–36). With changes in the way that children consume screen content this community also now extends to online providers such as Amazon, Netflix and YouTube. Indeed, the idea of a community of pressure groups that grows along with the “scope, reach and impact of the media” is intrinsic to the “pluralist tradition of policymaking” that Amy Jordan describes in relation to policy on children’s media in the US, marked by “sharp competition for influence” on the part of industry and advocacy groups (Jordan 2008, 236). Conversely, regulation of children’s screen content has to be high enough on the national agenda for policy communities to form. Enyonam Osei-Hwere, writing about Ghana, suggests that, in societies where public resources for children’s content are lacking and private alternatives are not considered commercially viable, media advocates are left pushing for policies and regulation simply to increase production of children’s content, along with ensuring that local languages are used and children get a chance to participate in children’s programmes (Osei-Hwere 2011, 83). The implication is that the strength of a children’s screen media policy community is interdependent with the range and effectiveness of policies and regulation already in place. Certainly, policy communities have not had a chance to develop in most Arab countries, despite moments in the past few decades when children’s media projects attracted attention and brought people together. These include various Sesame

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Street co-­ productions with Gulf, Egyptian, Palestinian and Jordanian partners in the 1990s and 2000s, media efforts linked with promoting children’s rights in Egypt during the 2000s (Sakr 2017b, 50–57), Qatar’s launch of Al-Jazeera Children’s Channel in 2005, rebranded as Jeem TV in 2012, and the hosting of children’s international film festivals in Qatar, Dubai and Sharjah in the 2010s. The key role played by members of ruling elites in these initiatives left them vulnerable to political changes, which in turn interrupted the process of community formation (Sakr 2017b, 62–65; Sakr and Steemers 2016; Sakr and Steemers 2017, 110– 112). One producer, comparing work on the first and second seasons of the Abu Dhabi-based Sesame Street aired in 2015 and 2017 respectively, described the collaboration involved as “very shallow and superficial,” where the “potential” of a “little critical mass of people … could have been built on” but “fell away” (Anon 2018). Marked differences among countries in terms of their levels and types of children’s screen media regulation get in the way of transnational communities forming or putting down roots. Perhaps the earliest initiative to bring media professionals together around the goal of encouraging quality audiovisual production for and by children was the Centre international du film pour l’enfance et la jeunesse (CIFEJ). Established in Brussels in 1955 under United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) auspices, it operated from Paris from 1960 to 1990, from where, through lack of funding, its base moved to Canada, South Africa and eventually Iran. Celebrating the organisation’s 50th anniversary in Tehran in 2005, CIFEJ members agreed to upgrade their website, establish a video library of master classes and work on the “formation of national policies to create space for children’s media in each continent” (Hermans 2005). A new board in 2012 included members from Syria and Lebanon and the 2014 General Assembly, held in Beijing, reported that CIFEJ activities had included some in Arab countries, among them film workshops and board meetings in Tunisia and Dubai and a conference in Qatar (CIFEJ 2014)—the latter referring to CIFEJ participation in the Industry Forum called “Our Children First,” which was attached to Qatar’s inaugural Ajyal Children’s Film Festival in 2013. However, the Ajyal Industry Forum proved to be a one-off and Arab representation on CIFEJ ended with election of a new board at the General Assembly in India in 2017. A CIFEJ blog post at the end of 2018 indicated that the location and date of the 2019 General Assembly had not yet been fixed (Chiniforoushan 2018).

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Difficulties facing attempts to establish media policy and civil society connections in fluid contexts were also demonstrated by the EU MedMedia programme for 2014–18, mentioned earlier in this chapter. Parts of the programme specifically aimed at peer-to-peer activities intended to combine individual exchanges with “meetings of peers from the same stakeholder group” in both European and southern Mediterranean countries. For example, Tunisia’s post-revolution regulator, HAICA, was helped to develop internal policies designed to ensure transparency and accountability and to prepare the way for creating an internal research department (MedMedia 2018, 9), which could have implications for regulating children’s content, depending on whether new legislation in Tunisia consolidates HAICA’s position or reduces its independence. Other opportunities for cross-fertilisation are additionally limited because, with a couple of exceptions discussed below, events focused on children’s screen media mostly have specialised functions and do not encompass the range of policy, production, distribution, research and advocacy functions needed to build a cross-cultural community. Children’s film festivals are usually more for families or schools than policy-makers, and animation festivals (such as Annecy or the Cartoon Forum in Toulouse, France) or the Cartoons on the Bay festival of International Cross-media and Children’s Television, hosted by public broadcaster RAI in Italy, are geared mainly to buying and selling. The annual Children’s Media Conference (CMC) in Sheffield in the UK, which started life in 2004, has strands that are not specifically business-oriented, such as a platform for researchers as well as policy discussion. It hosted a panel of Arab practitioners in 2011 but in 2018 it had no delegates from the Arab world. Mip Junior in France is a major annual market for content which attracts Arab executives, programme buyers and occasionally producers, but lacks a policy or advocacy perspective. Beyond these, there was the Global Kids Media Congress (GKMC), aimed specifically at broadcasters, which took place in 2015, 2016 and 2017 in Angoulême in France. GKMC organisers tried to invite Arab participants but none came. The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has ­broadcasters as members, including stations from Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia, which are eligible because they are part of what is classified globally as the European broadcasting area. Qatar’s Al-Jazeera Children’s Channel was an associate member of the EBU until the channel’s management reshuffle of 2011. EBU activities do also bring producers together, as in the item exchanges, where makers of dramas and

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documentaries for 8–12-year-olds and preschool programmes can share their content and learn from each other’s work, with the assistance of a Europe-based executive producer nominated by the EBU. The preschool exchange is open to producers from Africa, Latin America and Asia as well as Europe, who have the chance to meet every year at an event in Erfurt, Germany, hosted by the German children’s channel KiKa. Producers from the state broadcasters of Jordan and Egypt took part in the EBU documentary exchange in the mid-2000s and gained novel experience in ways of working with and representing children (Creely 2015). After a while, however, the collaborations fell prey to broadcasters’ lack of money and the EBU’s need to collect fees, along with a sense that the principle of “make one, take all” did not really work for Arab countries with different perceptions of childhood from those prevalent in parts of Europe, making them reluctant to risk showing European films (Sakr 2015, 2–3). Nevertheless, opportunities remain for sharing production expertise, not least because efforts started in 2018 to change the system of fees and restructure the EBU’s digital video unit to foster “genre communities” that would “break open the silos” and facilitate crossover between “kids’ programming” and other genres (EBU executive 2018). For producers and broadcasters in schemes like the EBU’s to connect up with other interested parts of civil society as well as regulators requires a particular kind of initiative—the kind sometimes exemplified in the 3-yearly World Summit on Media for Children and more regularly by the Prix Jeunesse. The Prix Jeunesse, an international festival of screen content for children, held every 2 years in Munich, Germany, since 1964, has been described as a community by the very person who coined the phrase “children’s television community.” In an encyclopaedia entry, J.  Alison Bryant (2007, 673) said the purpose of the Prix Jeunesse competition for children’s film and television was threefold: to highlight exceptional work worldwide, to provide a forum for discussing important issues and to “provide an arena for global networking” among people from “industry, advocacy and academia.” The Prix Jeunesse festival in 2018 provided an occasion for producers and broadcasters from Egypt, Iraq and Jordan, along with Lebanese expatriates based in Canada and the UAE, to meet counterparts from Europe face to face. Any development of Arab-European dialogue following the 2018 Prix Jeunesse was expected to manifest itself at the 2021 World Summit on Media for Children, scheduled to be held in Dublin. The World Summit, presented on its official website as a “global movement committed to

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developing and improving quality media for children,” was first held in Australia in 1995 and has oscillated since then between highlighting first-­ world concerns and responding to the preoccupations of children’s media practitioners in the Global South. Arab contributions to the summit, led mainly by Egypt, peaked in 2007 when it was held in South Africa and was preceded by regional Arab and African meetings (Sakr 2017b, 54–55). Marion Creely, Ambassador for the Dublin summit, said in 2018 she wanted the agenda of the Dublin event to be a “truly global event,” informed and motivated by input articulated at regional pre-summit gatherings on all continents (Creely 2018).

Conclusion Examples of steps towards policy coordination between European and Arab media regulators do exist on issues relating to children and media, as this chapter shows, but they are very limited in terms of both participants and approaches to regulation. Morocco’s HACA and Tunisia’s HAICA have been the most involved: HACA through its activity within the MNRA, collaboration with the CoE under the latter’s Neighbourhood Programme and membership of the CoE’s European Audiovisual Observatory; and HAICA through collaboration with the CoE as well as its twinning with one of the Belgian regulators, the CSA. Although not specific to regulating for children, these interactions had discernible spin-­ offs for commitments in this regard, either through MNRA Declarations or CoE conventions. Underpinning the actions of all countries were their obligations to meet the same standards on media regulation, set out directly or indirectly in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and monitored by the treaty body, the Committee on the Rights of the Child. The Organization of Islamic Conference, renamed the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation in 2011, has urged its members to implement the CRC. In terms of approaches to regulation, the emphasis in collaborations identified in the chapter was primarily on broadcast media, self-regulation and on protecting children rather than providing for them or having them participate. It was only in its 2017 Declaration that the MNRA called for member authorities to overhaul their regulation for the digital environment and work with new digital service providers. At that point several European countries were lagging in extending their regulatory provisions to digital media; there was no sign of the EU’s Audiovisual Media Services

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Directive being extended beyond “children’s programmes” to cover social media platforms or video-sharing sites. Even though 2018–19 saw the governments of some big European economies lose patience with companies’ inaction regarding “online harms,” self-regulation and co-regulation remained the order of day in the official discourse of multilateral advisory bodies like ERGA.  Multilateral forums, notably the MNRA, apparently found it easy to agree in principle on protecting children from online and other harms but participation emerged as a priority only in the CoE’s Strategy for the Rights of the Child for 2016–21. The ready availability of online media seems to have taken attention away from regulating to ensure provision. Connected with a preference for self-regulation is the notion of “stakeholders” seen here in use by ERGA, MNRA and the EU MedMedia project. The term could give the impression that a children’s screen media policy community exists, whereby individuals and groups talk to each other across public-private divides, across the borders of countries and regions and across age groups. Evidence in the chapter showed how limited such interactions are, partly because of the restricted purposes of many international events and partly because of the top-down nature of regulation and production in most Arab countries, which are not open to civil society advocacy of children’s media rights. In seeking out the sources and protagonists of actions to promote regulatory convergence between neighbouring regions, this chapter found that European-led bodies took the initiative—in the CoE’s Neighbourhood Partnerships, in creating the MNRA, and in the EU’s MedMedia project. But scrutiny of the “power-­ geometry” of the resulting interconnections shows that even though countries on the southern side of the Mediterranean may have seemed to be on the “receiving end” (Massey 1993, 61), resistance by those countries’ governments to grassroots or bottom-up activity blocked the desired organic growth of a European-Arab community of children’s media specialists.

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———. 2009. Declaration of Intent Concerning the Protection of Young Publics and the Fight Against the Violence in the Media. Granada: MNRA, October 1–2. http://www.rirm.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Declarationconcerning-the-protection-of-young-publics-2009.pdf. Accessed 4 May 2019. ———. 2017. Declaration for an Overhaul of the Audiovisual Regulation in the Digital Environment. http://www.rirm.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/ Declaration-for-an-overhaul-of-the-audiovisual-regulation-in-the-digitalenvironment-2017.pdf. Accessed 4 May 2019. ———. 2018. Textes de référence et communiqués de presse des assemblées plénières. Paris: Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel. Ó Cathaoir, Katharina. 2017. Food Marketing to Children in Sweden and Denmark: A Missed Opportunity for Nordic Leadership. European Journal of Risk Regulation 8: 283–297. Ofcom. 2017. Operating Licence for the BBC’s UK Public Services. London: Ofcom. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0017/107072/ bbc-operating-licence.pdf. Accessed 4 May 2019. OIC (Organisation of the Islamic Conference). 2005. Rabat Declaration on Child’s Issues in the Member States of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference. November 8. https://www.refworld.org/docid/44eb01b84.htm. Accessed 4 May 2019. Osei-Hwere, Enyonam. 2011. Children’s Television Policy and Content Diversity in Ghana. Journal of Children and Media 5 (1): 69–85. Price, Monroe E. 2002. Media and Sovereignty: The Global Information Revolution and Its Challenge to State Power. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ruiz-Casares, Monica, Tara M.  Collins, E.  Kay M.  Tisdall, and Sonja Grover. 2017. Children’s Rights to Participation and Protection in International Development and Humanitarian Interventions: Nurturing a Dialogue. The International Journal of Human Rights 21 (1): 1–13. Sacino, Sherry Wheatley. 2012. Article 17: Access to a Diversity of Mass Media Sources. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff. Sakr, Naomi. 2012. Public Service Initiatives in Arab Media Today. In Regaining the Initiative for Public Service Media, ed. Gregory Ferrell Lowe and Jeanette Steemers, 183–198. Gӧteborg: Nordicom. ———. 2015. Experiments in Euro-Med Collaboration in Children’s Screen Media. Aula Mediterrània 23 (December). https://www.iemed.org/dossiers/dossiers-iemed/mon-arab-i-mediterrani/aula-mediterrania-20152016/23-sakr.pdf. Accessed 4 May 2019. ———. 2016. Children’s Access to Beneficial Information in Arab States: Implementation of the CRC’s Article 17 in Egypt, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates. Global Studies of Childhood 6 (4): 376–387.

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———. 2017a. Provision, Protection or Participation? Approaches to Regulating Children’s Television in Arab Countries. Media International Australia 163 (1): 31–41. ———. 2017b. Forces for Change in Official Arab Policies on Media and Children. In Children’s TV and Digital Media in the Arab World, ed. Naomi Sakr and Jeanette Steemers, 45–73. London: IB Tauris. Sakr, Naomi, and Jeanette Steemers. 2016. Co-Producing Content for Pan-Arab Children’s TV. In Production Studies: The Sequel, ed. M. Banks, B. Conor, and V. Mayer, 238–250. London: Routledge. ———. 2017. Rebranding Al-Jazeera Children’s Channel: The Qatarization Factor. In Children’s TV and Digital Media in the Arab World, ed. Naomi Sakr and Jeanette Steemers, 45–73. London: IB Tauris. Steemers, Jeanette. 2017a. Public Service Broadcasting, Children’s Television and Market Failure: The Case of the United Kingdom. International Journal of Media Management 19 (4): 298–314. ———. 2017b. Industry Engagement with Policy on Public Service Television for Children: BBC Charter Review and the Public Service Content Fund. Media Industries 4 (1): 1–16. ———. 2017c. International Perspectives on the Funding of Public Service Media Content for Children. Media International Australia 163 (1): 42–54. Steemers, Jeanette, and Feryal Awan. 2016. Policy Solutions and International Perspectives on the Funding of Public Service Media Content for Children: A Report for Stakeholders. London: University of Westminster. Steemers, Jeanette, and Alessandro D’Arma. 2012. Evaluating and Regulating the Role of Public Service Broadcasters in the Children’s Media Ecology: The Case of Home Grown Television Content. International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics 8 (1): 67–85. Steemers, Jeanette, and Naomi Sakr. 2017. Children’s Screen Content in the Arab World: An Introduction. In Children’s TV and Digital Media in the Arab World, ed. Naomi Sakr and Jeanette Steemers, 1–19. London: IB Tauris. Third, Amanda, Delphone Bellerose, and Urszula Dawkins. 2014. Children’s Rights in the Digital Age: A Download from Children Around the World. Abbotsford, BC: Young and Well Cooperative Research Centre/UNICEF. twofour54. 2013. Your Gateway to New Media Business Opportunities. Promotional pamphlet. Abu Dhabi: twofour54. UN (United Nations). 1989. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Van den Bulck, Hilde, and Karen Donders. 2014. Analysing European Media Policy: Stakeholders and Advocacy Coalitions. In The Palgrave Handbook of European Media Policy, ed. Karen Donders, Caroline Pauwels, and Jan Loisen, 19–35. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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CHAPTER 4

Face-to-Face: Cross-Cultural Collaboration in Provision and Delivery

Abstract  This chapter documents and analyses case studies of Arab-­ European collaboration in delivering video content for children. With the aim of exploring sources of cultural and financial power, it starts by citing examples of some issues that have arisen in cross-regional provision of children’s screen content, around what makes it “local,” its language, its purpose (fun, education or both) and its appropriateness in certain cultural settings. Keeping these issues in mind, the chapter then presents four case studies of European-Arab collaboration revolving around an app, a series of short educational videos for use on tablets, a digital platform and scripts under development for film and TV, from which it draws insights into the dynamics of production and sites of decision-making about what makes it to screen. Keywords  Children’s screen production • Dubbing and translation • Disney • Modern Standard Arabic • Netflix • Children’s entertainment and learning The financial landscape for children’s content creation is changing in Europe and the Arab region, with some new commissioning by over-the-­ top (OTT) providers of video-on-demand via the internet. Through co-­ productions with a few selected local companies, these providers offer a new source of investment, which has been welcomed by producers who © The Author(s) 2019 N. Sakr, J. Steemers, Screen Media for Arab and European Children, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25658-6_4

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have benefited in European countries subject to budget cuts from traditional sources, and those who hope to benefit in Arab countries that have suffered decades of what a veteran Palestinian co-producer of children’s content described in 2010 as a “famine of genuine original programming” in Arabic (quoted in Sakr and Steemers 2016, 242). Where there are stimuli for new types of production, as in the collaborations discussed in this chapter, there are questions about sources of cultural as well as financial input. With the aim of exploring those sources, the chapter starts by reviewing some of the issues that arise in relation to children’s screen content, around what makes it “local,” its language, its purpose (fun, education or both) and its appropriateness in certain cultural settings. Keeping these issues in mind, the chapter then presents four case studies of European-Arab collaboration revolving around an app, a series of short educational videos designed for use on tablets, a digital platform and scripts under development for film and TV.  It concludes by drawing together insights into the dynamics of production and sites of decision-­ making about what makes it to screen.

Ways to Map Power Relations in the Production of Cultural Meaning “Local” and “global” are readily problematised as labels for children’s screen content by any examination of financial input, production practices and content outcomes. Our research on past Qatari funding of co-­ productions for Al-Jazeera Children’s Channel (JCC) showed that, rather than developing the output of Arabs in Qatar or the wider region, the process actually favoured non-Arab companies—an approach that did little to reflect “local” culture or promote “local” professional development (Sakr and Steemers 2016, 247). Research on Majid TV, an Abu Dhabi children’s channel that went on air and online in September 2015, also showed a mismatch between the channel’s own description of its output as “home grown” and the realities of scripts and production. Majid TV set out to capitalise on brand loyalty to the long-running Majid magazine for children and its characters, showing material that would incorporate local values and complement national “educational and economic goals” (Al-Nassr and Odwan 2016, 6, 15–16; Franks 2015). However, despite receiving three successive pitches from a local studio (Anon 2018), Abu Dhabi Media Company handed production of

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nine series of 52 15-minute episodes, based on three characters, Majid, Ammouna and Kaslan, to World TV Suisse, a subsidiary of Italy’s Mondo TV, for a total production budget of US$28 million (Arabian Business 2015). Scriptwriting for the new channel was outsourced to non-Arabicspeaking scriptwriters who were known for their successful work on US shows like Curious George and Ben 10 but were quite unfamiliar with local cultures. Being asked to produce stories that would relay lessons on local customs, traditions and notions of respect, these writers created generic stories and role models that some Gulf observers saw as overlooking essential elements specific to the characters’ environment (Al-Nassr and Odwan 2016, 8, 15–16). Equally, the term “global” is unhelpful, as demonstrated by the live action remake of the film Aladdin by “global” giant Disney. In the face of growing dissatisfaction with North American and European actors playing roles from the Global South, and with Disney’s 1992 animated version of Aladdin having gained notoriety for negatively stereotyping Arabs (see Shaheen 2009, 56–57), the new film’s director, Guy Ritchie, and his team put out a casting call for Middle Eastern actors, contacted Lebanese singer Mory Hatem about the role of Aladdin, and conducted auditions in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) (Galer 2017; Arab News 2017a). The call was in line with Walt Disney Studios’ interest in maximising audience reach, as demonstrated by announcements on the company website about appointments to oversee “diversity and inclusion” and “multicultural audience engagement.” Ultimately, however, the Global North dominated the film’s line-up. It remained the output of a US-based operation filmed at UK studios, with a UK-born director, an Afro-American genie (Will Smith), a British-Indian Princess Jasmine (Naomi Scott), an Iranian-­born American helper for Princess Jasmine (Nasim Pedrad), a Cairo-born, Canada-raised Aladdin (Mena Massoud), a Netherlands-born son of Tunisian parents as Jafar (Marwan Kenzari) and a Turkish-born German as Jafar’s right-hand man (Numan Acar). Given the overlay of cultures, visual appearances, scenery and sites of decision-making, not to mention inevitable comparisons between Disney’s 2019 treatment of the Aladdin story and its other output, the 2019 Aladdin can hardly be considered a “stable” cultural object. Instead it seems apt to follow Gillian Rose’s advice (2016, 347) and attempt to “navigate” the networks involved, in all their “multiple generativity,” to understand the power dynamics of “production, circulation and modification of meaning” (ibid., 334). As Rose suggests, the power

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relations performed through spatially dispersed networks that produce digital cultural outputs call for a “richer analytical vocabulary” than that of “power” and “resistance” (ibid., 346). Power relations behind the modification of meaning raise intriguing questions in the present context, where cross-cultural engagement involves “dispersed actors,” “diverse forms of cultural power and agency” and “highly uneven distribution of different kinds of digital cultural work” (Rose 2016, 343). Who, for example, decides about transmission in Arabic? More examples from Disney, this time in its 2013 collaboration with Qatar’s JCC, owner of Jeem TV, illustrate the complexities here. First, there is the fraught choice between Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), the version of Arabic that Arab children’s channel owners prefer for economic reasons because it can travel across the whole region (see Chap. 2) and local dialects of Arabic, which children are used to speaking in their everyday lives. Although children hear MSA around them, they gradually acquire fluency in it as they get older (Alshaer 2017, 185), go through school and learn Arabic composition (insha). Thus, the use of MSA in children’s content remains controversial and Disney’s switch to it, recounted below, provoked sharp exchanges on various internet sites. Some valued MSA’s universality. Others decried the imposition of unrealistic and unwonted formality on songs and speech. Yet others argued that insensitive translations were to blame for stilted scripts, not MSA. Some pointed out that MSA is not suited to representing the diversity of fictional characters’ speech. Alongside the friction surrounding this aspect of meaning-making was a less-discussed issue of how far dubbing practices agreed for Jeem TV between JCC and Disney actually changed the meaning of original scripts. Egyptians born in the 1980–90s remember watching Disney movies like The Lion King, Toy Story and Finding Nemo voiced by famous Egyptian stars speaking or singing in the Egyptian dialect of Arabic (El-Behary 2016). In 2012, however, Disney announced it would be switching to MSA, starting with its 2012 computer-animated fantasy Brave. In 2013 it signed a deal with JCC, under which future films and series and some previously dubbed items were to be dubbed or redubbed into MSA. A sense of the ensuing outcry can be gathered from the way one commentator contrasted the American vernacular expressions in Disney’s 2014 film Frozen with their stiff rendering in MSA: “From one song to the next,” he said, “there isn’t a declensional ending dropped or an antique expression avoided, whether it is sung by a

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dancing snowman or a choir of forest trolls” (Muhanna 2014). Proponents of the switch cited MSA’s alleged educational merits as a reason for using it in children’s content (Bassel 2018). That dismayed supporters of children’s right to entertainment. One Egyptian, recalling how shocked she had been at hearing MSA in toddler voices in the Arabized Teletubbies, asked: “Why are adults allowed to watch all their entertainment programs in their native dialects while children are deprived of this simple pleasure?” (quoted in Lynx Qualey 2014). As for outright semantic alterations to Disney scripts, scholars in Qatar and Italy have scrutinised how dubbing decisions, supervised by Jeem TV’s Compliance Department, handled the incompatibility between codes of behaviour seen in much Disney content and social norms prevalent in Qatar and other parts of the Gulf. The degree of incompatibility was brought to light in 2016 when Qatar’s Supreme Educational Council ordered a private school to remove a copy of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs from its library after a parent complained that the illustrations it contained, based on the Disney film, were indecent (Sheble and Walker 2016). Kirsten Pike (2018, 77) summarises the Jeem TV approach, in line with local custom, as “downplaying” or “complete removal” of “dating and romance, including kissing, touching, and amorous looks, as well as dialogue, song lyrics, and storylines dealing with physical attraction and/ or love between two unmarried characters.” Reason is substituted for romantic attraction, so that “listen to your heart” becomes “listen to your mind” in Pocahontas II and in some cases (e.g. Mulan II) characters are voiced in the Jeem TV version as getting engaged to be married, even though in the original they have simply fallen in love (Pike 2018, 78–79). Pike notes upsides to Jeem’s efforts to project female characters with “greater dignity than the original texts” (ibid., 81). But one of the young Arab female respondents in Pike’s study cautioned that children who grow up watching shows where feelings of love are never validated might “feel like what they’re feeling isn’t normal and even wrong” (ibid., 84). Other research scrutinised the retranslation and redubbing of Cinderella (1950) and Cinderella II (2002), which were among the first films to be selected for this treatment after the Disney deal with JCC. By comparing the MSA redub of both films with the original dubbing into Egyptian Arabic, the author inferred that “specific concepts” had been the “object of thorough deletion or alteration” as a result of “guidelines imposed” on the translators in the MSA versions (Di Giovanni 2017, 11). “Among these,” she wrote, “is the very concept of ‘love,’ with all that is related to it

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(­ tenderness, kisses, heart beating, etc.). Similarly, all references to ‘dance’ are removed or replaced by something utterly different” (ibid.). The ability to impose guidelines like these highlights the “diverse forms of cultural power and agency” possessed by actors in different locations (Rose 2016, 343) and the uneven power-geometries at work in the transnational flows and interconnections (Massey 1993: 61) involved in cross-­ cultural collaborations in children’s screen content. Set against the clash over cultural norms described above, pointers to the client’s ability to determine what is acceptable become evident in statements by Studio 100 Media in Munich and its partners in Qatar regarding deals done in 2015– 16. On acquiring Studio 100’s Vic the Viking and Heidi for Jeem TV and the CGI preschool series Trains for Baraem in October 2015, JCC’s Acting Executive General Manager Saad Hudaifi spoke of “acquiring content that is entertaining, culturally appropriate and supports [children’s] learning and development” (quoted in Wolfe 2015). In April 2016, on signing a deal to create a new co-branded channel, beJunior, alongside Jeem and Baraem as part of the Qatari beIN pay TV network, Studio 100’s Patrick Elmendorff noted that the new channel would be based on the established concept of the existing Junior pay TV network serving Germany, Switzerland and Austria, “but always with special regard to the viewing habits and requirements of the audience of MENA region” (quoted in Franks 2016). Deciding what is culturally appropriate, however, is a process that is subject to constant re-negotiation across the region. For example, when Turner Broadcasting, through Cartoon Network, took on an Emirati-­ originated animation about an Emirati boy called Mansour, which ran for three seasons between 2013 and 2017, it kept it in Khaleeji (Gulf) dialect, not MSA. It also played up the element of fun. Episodes for the second and third seasons were written in English to start with, because production was spread across several countries, including Canada and Pakistan, and even in Abu Dhabi, where the core team was based, not all key personnel spoke Arabic. Adam Khwaja, creative director of Cartoon Network Studios Arabia, who worked previously at BBC Children’s Interactive, told the press in 2016 that the Arabic version of Mansour had been created by a “natural comedian” in Khaleeji dialect and that “knowing how to be humorous and entertaining in that dialect has been one of the key things we strived to do” (quoted by Field 2016). Darine El Khatib, Turner’s senior director for creative strategy and brand development in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and Turkey, revealed in April

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2018 that this approach to dialect would continue. She said Turner would be distributing Shakir the King, locally produced in Turkey, to the MENA region and would be adapting it and voicing it into regional dialects “so that the characters resonate with children across the Middle East” (quoted by Vadehra 2018). She endorsed the idea of “empower[ing] Arabic content creators” and insisted that Turner was “always looking for ways to curate and tailor content specifically for Arabic (sic) children” (ibid.). Netflix, meanwhile, chose Jordan over the UAE (Newbould 2018) as both the setting and filming location for Jinn, its first drama series to be originated in Arabic—a teen drama featuring the elements of love and romance expunged from Jeem TV translations. “Jinn” refers to a supernatural spirit that features in Middle East folklore and materialises in the drama in the form of a teenage boy who disrupts the lives of a group of teenagers. When filming started in August 2018, the Royal Film Commission Jordan, the public body tasked with developing an internationally competitive film industry in the country, described Jinn as a “coming of age” story about “friendship, love and adventure” that “follows a group of Arab teenagers as their friendships and budding romances are tested…” (Royal Film Commission Jordan 2018). Apart from the 55 Jordanian trainees and interns said to be working on the shoot in Amman, Wadi Rum and Petra, Jordanians contributing to the project included one of the six young Arab actors, Salma Malhas, playing Mira, and Amin Matalqa, writer and director of some episodes. Matalqa wrote and directed the 2008 film Captain Abu Raed, about a janitor at a Jordanian airport. Jordanian Bassel Ghandour, originally named as scriptwriter, did not feature in the final line-up (Newbould 2018), which was overseen by Elan Dassani from the US, together with his twin brother Rajeev and Lebanese director Mir-Jean Bou-Chaaya, who made his name with Kteer Kbeer (Very Big Shot) in 2015. YouTube also joined the new non-Arab patrons of Arab creativity inside the Arab region, discerning improvements in monetisation—improvements it linked with what Robert Kyncl, YouTube’s chief business officer, called “a common language that reaches the entire region, which makes it much easier to grow than in lots of other places around the world” (quoted in Halligan 2018). It opened a hub in Dubai Studio City in March 2018, its tenth hub worldwide, designed to give tens of thousands of local YouTube content creators a place where they can have free access to audio, visual and editing equipment, as well as training courses and workshops. Noting that the Dubai hub was intended to serve the whole region, and

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was “really easy to get to,” Kyncl said: “we’ve got to look at MENA as just one place; it’s just like one community because it’s so many different countries but from a business point it’s actually great for growth” (ibid.). The following sections examine four collaborations carried out between European and Arab partners, the latter including MBC3, the Egyptian Knowledge Bank and Lamsa. The fourth collaboration was initiated from within the bilateral Danish-Egyptian Dialogue Institute, based in Cairo. Underlying the analysis are considerations alluded to above, around language, purpose, cultural preferences and ideas about individual Arab countries vis-à-vis the region. Decisions about these issues have implications for the way screen content speaks to children, including for example whether the value placed on gaining their attention is economic or socio-­ cultural and whether they are addressed directly as individuals or indirectly through parents who may perceive children’s benefit differently from children themselves. Information gathering on each project included interviews and conversations with people involved, which the authors conducted between May and September 2018 and in March 2019. The analysis draws on data from these exchanges except where other sources are cited.

MBC3, Dubit and Goboz Goboz was the name chosen for the subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service MBC Group launched in March 2018 and cancelled unexpectedly a year later, apparently for financial reasons. At the end of February 2019 Goboz ceased to be a standalone application and was merged with MBC’s existing VOD platform, Shahid.net. Switching off the Goboz server ended a venture that had entailed considerable effort. The previous August, Fadel Zahreddine, MBC Group Director for Brand Management and Digital Businesses, had presented Goboz as an extension to MBC’s distribution platforms, providing a “parent-controlled kids’ video entertainment” service available in Arabic, English and French across “all major platforms” (quoted in Bisson 2018). He said that its “extensive library of animated and live action films and series” would be the “best curated,” “responsibly selected and rated” (ibid.). The version launched in March 2018 was built by Dubit, a company founded in 1999 and based in the UK city of Leeds, specialising in researching children’s media use and developing apps. Besides Leeds, Dubit has offices in London, Washington, DC, and Melbourne and counts global brands and

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start-ups among its clients. MBC Group and Dubit started collaborating on what was to become Goboz in 2014. MBC Group’s branding department came up with the name Goboz, which distinguished the children’s SVOD service from the children’s channel website, MBC3.net, and the group’s VOD service, Shahid. The word Goboz, which has no meaning in Arabic, was written in Latin letters even on the Arabic version of the service—a practice consistent with the use of Latin letters to denote MBC in the idents the group uses for most of its channels. This includes MBC3 itself, which shows the lower-case letters “mbc” and the number “3” on two sides of a green cube. The practice can be traced to MBC’s origins in London in September 1991, where its headquarters remained until it moved to Dubai in 2000–02 (Sakr 2001, 42–43; 2007, 169–172). Between then and 2019 the group grew from 200 to 2800 staff of 65 different nationalities and from a single channel to 15 (Skantzos 2019; Srinivas and Cherian 2018). But its early association with the UK and managers who did not speak Arabic was demonstrated in 1998 with the appointment of Ian Ritchie, former chief executive of the UK’s Channel 5, as managing director, along with other UK executives brought in by Ritchie and his successors (Sakr 2016, 178–179). Sam Barnett, who grew up in the UK and New Zealand and spent time in Kenya while studying for a degree at Cambridge University in the UK (Skantzos 2019), was MBC Group’s General Managing and Chief Operating Officer until he was made Chief Executive Officer in 2011. Barnett was at the helm in November 2018 when Shaikh Walid al-­Ibrahim, MBC’s founder and chairman, was held on the orders of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, Mohammed Bin Salman, for nearly 3 months at the Ritz-­ Carlton in Riyadh, together with around 350 Saudi princes and businessmen, who were released only after agreeing to hand large sums or assets to the Saudi treasury (Dolan 2018). Weeks after the Ritz-Carlton episode ended, calming international media speculation about MBC’s status (Srinivas and Cherian 2018), Goboz was launched and, according to data published by Dubit (2018), gained one million subscribers in just the first month. Four years earlier, however, the project that produced Goboz started simply with an attempt to better understand children’s internet use. MBC3, aimed at children aged 3–13, had noticed it was losing audience from its website. Given children’s extensive use of smartphones and tablets in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, this was not surprising. A study released in 2018 showed that children in these two countries were getting access to connected mobile

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devices at a relatively young age. When asked “how old was your child when they first owned” a smartphone or tablet, the average answer among more than 1000 respondents in Saudi Arabia and the UAE was 7 years (Edelman Intelligence 2018, 12). The corresponding reply in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain was 10 years, in the UK it was 9 years and 8 years in Poland and Sweden (ibid.). For children accessing content online, using an internet browser requires more clicks than the one-click opening of an app. Losing internet traffic mattered to MBC because, being an advertising-led media network, it needed to retain viewers. Abim Osayana, MBC’s UK-based head of research at the time, commissioned Dubit to provide market insights. Dubit, which had already made a game for Qatar’s JCC, recommended a multiplatform strategy that would put MBC3 content in all the places, whether online or linear TV, where children could access it. MBC’s Zahreddine, interviewed for Mipcom 2018, suggested that the group had been “way ahead of the game” in “instill[ing] a dedicated “Kids Hub” (quoted in Bisson 2018), by which he seemed to mean a concerted alignment of children’s television, digital delivery and merchandising. The next step, in Dubit’s words (2018), was to “conduct primary research across MENA to understand audience behaviours and expectations for MBC3 products, to develop a differentiated strategy for SVOD.” That description encompasses several elements that explain the time taken to launch Goboz. Dubit developer Stefan Bobev, who worked on the project between November 2015 and November 2016, wrote on his LinkedIn page that the aim of building an application that would “take the entire experience” of MBC3  in one place—“video, games, social networking, competition with real life prizes and more”—was the most challenging engineering project he had ever been part of and was also demanding from a managerial point of view. Part of the dual complexity stemmed from what some call “geo-­ commercial terms,” meaning who has the rights to air what content in what territory; which language or languages to air it in; and the number and diversity of MENA countries that can receive MBC3, each with their own telecommunications companies, their own laws and billing arrangements. Content that has been licenced for a free-to-air linear channel supported by advertising cannot automatically be shown on an SVOD platform that would give it a second revenue stream. As discussed in Chap. 2, the period 2015–17, during which Goboz was being built, was a time of intense activity on the part of pay TV and SVOD platforms in the

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MENA region seeking to acquire children’s content. In 2016 alone, beIN signed deals with six children’s channels, including CBeebies. Before that, an animation studio in Europe might have arrangements with both MBC3 for MENA rights and with CBeebies for the UK and Ireland. After the beIN deals, however, this changed because MENA rights were also needed for CBeebies content aired via beIN.  At the same time, SVOD services such as Netflix that were commissioning new content had strong reasons to deny the producers of that content the right to sell it to any other SVOD platform. Adding to the challenge were strict guidelines for images, storyline and language intended to ensure that content available on Goboz would be “safe” as defined by MBC3, which serves a religiously conservative Saudi Arabian audience—an audience accustomed to gender segregation, deference to elders, and considered to have least tolerance in the MENA region for material considered uncontentious elsewhere (Sakr 2017, 36). Anthropomorphised pigs and dogs are a regular feature of children’s content in large parts of the world, but not in the MENA region and especially not the Gulf, where Aardman’s Shaun the Sheep is shown with the pig character cut out. Dubit (2018) said there would be no risk for Goboz users of “seeing adult content,” while Zahreddine (quoted in Bisson 2018) highlighted the way children are “increasingly mobile-oriented,” which, he said, makes controlling their content a “crucial objective.” Dubbing for MBC is contracted out but double-checked by in-house editors who see the item in its original language and again after dubbing into MSA, before it is seen a third time by the channel manager. Despite this labour-intensive process, and despite the challenges of rights negotiation, there was no indication after the launch of Goboz that MBC Group would invest in local production of children’s content. This was despite its decision in 2018 to create MBC Studios, headed by UK-based Peter Smith, formerly of Cineflix Studios and NBCUniversal, to produce original material, based on local stories, for cinema, television and on-demand platforms (Franks 2018) and its deal with Germany-based Beta Films to collaborate in producing drama series featuring European and Arab countries that would interest audiences in both regions (Goodfellow 2018). While MBC Group, with an enduring UK strand to its corporate DNA, continued with its business-as-usual model of importing and modifying children’s content, Dubit modified its market research methods in order to undertake primary research in Saudi Arabia, with a view to adding it to the list of 14 countries covered by its Trends report. Instead of the usual

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online questionnaire, which parents answer on behalf of children aged 2–7 years and children answer if they are 8 or older, data were gathered in Saudi Arabia on an experimental basis during the summer of 2018 through 188 in-home interviews, conducted by a UAE-based company, with fewer questions and many fewer respondents than were possible with the online survey. A repeat operation with 500 interviews was planned for 2019.

Discovery Education and the Egyptian Knowledge Bank Discovery Education’s collaboration with Egyptian media producers to make video content for Egyptian homes and classrooms is a story of evolving objectives. Discovery Education is an arm of the US-based Discovery Inc., which describes itself as the world’s number one nonfiction media company. In 2013 Discovery bought Espresso Education, a UK leader in digital education, founded by Lewis Bronze in 1998 to supply digital content to schools and support professional development of teachers. Espresso Education then rebranded as Discovery Education while remaining based in the UK, with Bronze as its Director of Content, and Discovery making clear that it was not looking to “Americanise the Espresso service” (quoted in Steel 2013). In November 2015 Discovery Education became one of a long list of international publishers who signed 4-year licences to make all or some of their content available to the Egyptian Knowledge Bank (EKB), a free online repository launched in January 2016 exclusively for users with an Egyptian IP address. One of the EKB’s four portals was dedicated to children, the others being for researchers, students and general readers. For Discovery Education, the EKB arrangement relating to educational digital video developed into something larger, involving it in a wholesale change to the school curriculum. In 2019 the company’s website noted that its business with educators in more than 50 countries included “a unique nationwide learning initiative in collaboration with the Government of Egypt.” Discovery’s relationship with the Egyptian government developed in parallel with the 2015–18 career progression of Tarek Shawki, an Egyptian academic who was appointed dean of the School of Science and Engineering at the American University in Cairo in 2012 after researching and teaching for many years in the US and directing the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) Regional Bureau for Sciences in

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the Arab States. Abdel-Fatah el-Sisi, after ousting the previous Egyptian president in a coup in 2013 and becoming president himself in 2014, set up a Specialised Council for Education and Scientific Research to operate alongside various existing government bodies responsible for the same things. Shawki chaired this council and introduced two initiatives: the EKB and a programme aimed at training teachers to use ICT techniques in education (Mada Masr 2017). He was then promoted to education minister in February 2017, from which vantage point he ordered the roll-out of a new educational system, beginning with children entering the first year of schooling from the start of the 2018–19 academic year. A World Bank press release in April 2018 announced that it had agreed to provide US$500 million towards the supply of digital learning resources to 1.5 million Egyptian students and teachers (World Bank 2018). Shawki explained repeatedly on Egyptian television talk shows in 2017– 18 (e.g. Shawki 2017) that the new system was designed to stop children and their parents thinking of education as a chore rewarded with certificates, to start learning by understanding rather than memorising, and to enjoy the process. He said they could rely on EKB resources rather than paying out for textbooks and would have access to a tablet thanks to several hundred thousand tablets being provided by the state, with 2500 schools benefiting from high-speed optic fibre internet connections. Against the backdrop of a political system becoming increasingly intolerant to free speech under President Sisi, Shawki was quoted in the April 2018 World Bank press release as saying: “our goal is to provide our students with the competencies they need to create a society that learns, thinks and innovates”—the latter trio of verbs echoing a headline in Discovery’s own promotional material (Discovery Education EKB 2016). It was an ambitious goal. The Arab World Competitiveness Report 2018, the first set of indicators compiled for the region by the World Economic Forum since 2013, placed Egypt 133rd out of 137 countries worldwide for the quality of its primary education, based on the assessment of local executives who gave it a score of 2.4 out of a possible 7 (World Economic Forum 2018, 93, 105). Independent local education experts, commenting on the country’s school system in 2013, had been unanimous in condemning its failure to equip pupils with essentials like critical thinking, collective decision-making and self-expression, saying that the system had “nursed blind obedience to political and religious authorities” (Egypt Today 2013). They said teachers were not adequately educated about

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child development or age-appropriate teaching methods and were too poorly paid to be expected to upgrade their skills (ibid.). How quickly the EKB, with its 4-year licences for foreign material, would contribute to improving performance in education was questioned, not least because, as Shawki himself confirmed, 70–80 per cent of the content supplied initially would be in English (ElSabry 2016). In the same interview, however, he also mentioned that the package included “Discovery films dubbed in Arabic” (Shawki 2015). Discovery Education confirmed that, having been selected as a “primary partner” of the Egyptian government for providing educational media content on science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) subjects for primary, preparatory and secondary school students and teachers, it would provide “thousands of educational videos, in both English and Arabic,” along with online video and other “vetted and approved” resources aligned with the national curriculum and professional development training for principals and teachers (Discovery Education EKB 2016). On the ground in Egypt this translated into a plan to commission local production of 240 short video clips as teaching materials but also for teacher training and promotional and motivational purposes. These were to be originated in Arabic and dubbed in English (Alaa El-Din 2017). A UK producer recruited by Discovery helped select Egyptian production companies based on a tendering process. The four chosen were Big Productions, OUT Productions, Planet and Team One. Shooting started in 2017 and the target was met in 2018, after which a further round of filming started, to create video resources for the new national curriculum. At that point, however, it also emerged that Discovery Education intended to shift the production hub for its Arabic output to India and that animation would replace live action in future videos. Collaborating in making clips for the EKB showed both sides that they had different ways of working, reflected in such things as the speed of production, length of clips produced, keeping to budgets and willingness to bring in staff familiar with children’s needs. There was some differentiation on these criteria among the Egyptian partners, but sometimes Discovery appreciated innovations the Egyptian producers introduced. Out of the 240 clips, 136 were made by OUT Productions, with the remainder spread among Planet (40), Big Productions (36) and Team One (33). OUT, to which Discovery Education originally assigned just 20 clips for primary science, created and delivered content in ways that were conducive to them being asked to make more. Staff at OUT had e­ xperience

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of working with Karma Productions, the Egyptian company that co-­ produced ten seasons of Alam Simsim, the Egyptian version of the preschool show Sesame Street, with Sesame Workshop in the 2000s. Their approach to making the science clips used storytelling and drama, in contrast to Discovery’s usually more instructional approach. In one series of clips OUT had a grandfather using items in his workshop to explain concepts to his granddaughter. Another series featured a Stone Age mother and her two children using resources from a forest; in a third, the characters and props included two children, a robot and a spaceship. Given the array of permits needed to shoot a film in public places in Egypt (Elkashef 2015), OUT needed their UK partner from Discovery to understand local constraints, while also being sufficiently involved in shooting to ensure that the videos, while sitting comfortably with Egyptian teaching practices, also met the pre-set learning objectives. When it came to choosing between Egyptian dialect and literary Arabic, this involved Arabic language editors working for Discovery in the UK, education experts in Egypt, the local production companies and the education minister. Again, local producers approached the commission differently, depending on the age group targeted by their video clips and the topic. OUT, being focused on primary school years 1–6, argued strongly for dialect because of its accessibility to young children. Big Productions used MSA. It was Tarek Shawki who, after disagreements between local producers and local experts, ultimately approved the decision to use dialect for clips intended for the mostly integrated curriculum introduced for Primary 1 pupils in September 2018.

Lamsa and Kokoa There could hardly be two approaches to children’s schooling more different from each other than the method traditionally adopted in most Arab countries and the one familiar in Finland. As discussed in the previous section, memorising has long been a dominant feature of Egyptian education and the same applies in other parts of the region. Badr Ward, the Palestinian entrepreneur who launched Lamsa as a digital learning and entertainment platform for children aged 1–6 years, explained the teaching problem in 2016 as one of culture and creativity. Arguing that “a culture must understand that exploration, innovation and creativity are vital to a child’s development,” he said: “Our education system places so much emphasis on writing and repetition that it creates negative

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c­onnotations with the word learn in children’s minds” (quoted in Anderson 2016). In contrast, Finnish ways of teaching are recognised worldwide for giving children lots of time to play, explore and be creative before they learn how to read and write. Teaching is such a prestigious and desirable profession in Finland that the application process is highly competitive, with competition being decided not only by academic scores but also by evidence of a passion for teaching (Sahlberg 2015). In 2016, after meeting them at an educational technology (edtech) trade fair in London, Lamsa teamed up with a recently formed Finnish company, Kokoa, as a way to strengthen the quality of content on its platform. The Kokoa Standard draws on the expertise of a pool of 30 Finnish teachers and the Kokoa team’s own experience of the games industry and educational technology to evaluate and certify the quality of learning products. Lamsa’s name means “touch,” reflecting the way children can access content by touching a button on a device. Badr Ward launched it in 2013, after watching his own two young children using various devices, to fill a gap that he, like many other Arabic-speaking parents, found in the availability of high quality, entertaining, educational content for children in their own language. He later told a reporter that he wanted to bring “a love and natural appreciation of Arabic back to this new generation,” cultivating “a pride in the language in a fun, exciting and engaging manner, but also with the purpose of educating” (Khalaf 2016). Ward had a background in entrepreneurship, having gained a degree in information technology from the American University in Dubai in 2003 and founded two companies as well as serving as managing director of a telecom company in Saudi Arabia (World Summit Awards n.d.) that was later bought by Saudi Telecom. In 2014, Lamsa relocated all its content and management activities from offices in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Lebanon to Abu Dhabi, where it partnered with twofour54, the commercial arm of the Abu Dhabi Media Zone Authority (Khalaf 2016). By then, twofour54 could point to various ways in which it had fostered local Abu Dhabi and Emirati involvement in producing innovative children’s content, from an Arabic version of Driver Dan’s Story Train (Sakr and Steemers 2016, 238) to supporting Bidaya Media, the company created by US-based Sesame Workshop and Abu Dhabi state investment company Mubadala in 2013, to produce Iftah ya Simsim (Open Sesame), a version of Sesame Street aimed at Gulf children that first aired in 2015 (Sakr 2018, 21). Bidaya Media formed its own partnership with Lamsa to feature Iftah ya Simsim on the Lamsa platform. Other UAE-based

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i­nitiatives did likewise, including the animated series Karim wa Noor, created by Blink Studios in Dubai, and Kalimat Group, the UAE’s first publisher of Arabic books for children, founded by Sheikha Bodour, daughter of the ruler of Sharjah, one of the seven emirates that make up the UAE. The year 2016 was named “Year of Reading” in the UAE, during which the state provided cash incentives to get children into the reading habit, to redress a dramatic disparity, as calculated by the Arab Thought Forum, between the average amount of reading done by Arab children compared with their counterparts elsewhere. Lamsa’s contribution was to redesign the app to look like a book, whose pages take the child to videos, games, songs, colouring pages, worksheets and stories, some of them with an augmented reality feature, which allows a child to bring characters to life by pointing a phone or tablet at the hard copy version of a book stored as an e-book on the app. Content on Lamsa was expanded to suit children aged up to 12 (Entrepreneur Middle East 2018), with a growing in-house team of more than 50 people at twofour54 creating content alongside that supplied through partnerships. Set in its regional context, however, developing the kind of platform represented by Lamsa and other edtech platforms for young children, such as Amman-based Little Thinking Minds, remained an uphill process. For one thing, whereas learning technology firms globally received over US$9.52 billion of funding in 2017, according to Forbes, only US$1.26 million of investment was recorded in the Middle East (D’Cunha 2018). Lamsa’s string of accolades, from the UN’s World Summit Awards, Etisalat, Apple and Google, and its 10 million users across the region by end-2017 (Arab News 2017b), brought benefits, including a deal whereby the pay TV provider OSN agreed to facilitate a 1-year free subscription to Lamsa as part of selected OSN subscription packages (ibid.). In 2018 it received a loan from the Mohamed Bin Rashed Innovation Fund, which Ward said would be used to boost collaboration with child development experts across the region and globally to “develop its proprietary technology that’s adapted to Arabic” (quoted in Entrepreneur Middle East 2018). Such collaboration offered a way to meet the challenge of highlighting particular features of the platform. As a MENA edtech specialist told Forbes, “there is a steep learning curve around creating educated demand that appreciates the value of the features being developed” (quoted in D’Cunha 2018). Working with Finnish specialists in Kokoa was intended to guide the design of learning content and eventually certify its quality.

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That process was facilitated by the fact that, despite Lamsa’s stress on Arabic, pre-production of its own educational games and other content was taking place in English because of the international backgrounds (Khalaf 2016) of the production team in Abu Dhabi. In interviews, Ward expressed a relaxed view as to the level of difficulty children should encounter in Arabic on Lamsa, pointing out that diverse writing styles, from classical Arabic to everyday dialects, were “more likely to grab” the attention of diverse groups of children and that Lamsa specialists were seeking to address children in a version of Arabic close to their “everyday language without compromising on the richness Arabic has to offer” (quoted in Anderson 2016). Before moving to production in Arabic, however, and before being ready to submit material for certification under the Kokoa Standard, Lamsa staff had first to define categories for different learning goals, whether for kindergarten teaching plans, which are relatively straightforward in terms of pedagogy, or interactive games, which, being more complex, require more ingenuity and patience in terms of certification. Over the years after their first meeting in London in 2016, Kokoa and Lamsa established a collaboration built on face-to-face workshops in Abu Dhabi and periodic contacts by phone. One choice eventually facing Lamsa was which curriculum to adopt to enable its content to be evaluated in terms of learning goals. For other clients, Kokoa had already approved use of the English national curriculum because its detailed definitions of learning goals facilitate standardised evaluation.

The DEDI Scriptwriting Project DEDI, the Danish-Egyptian Dialogue Institute, created in 2004, is run jointly by the Danish and Egyptian governments under the 20-year Danish Arab Partnership Programme (DAPP), which started in 2003 to support initiatives aimed at good governance and economic opportunities, especially for women and young people, in Egypt and the wider region. The foreign affairs ministries of Egypt and Denmark take turns every 2 years to choose a chair of the six-member DEDI board, made up equally of Egyptians and Danes. DEDI directors, all of whom have been Danes, are appointed by the board. The director during the first round of the project to create Egyptian film or television drama scripts for child audiences and bring them to production was Hans-Christian Nielsen, who came to the job in 2015 having previously directed the Danish Institute in Damascus from 2007 to 2010.

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During Nielsen’s time in Syria, the Danish Institute there hosted “Film-X on the Road,” a mobile studio created by the Danish Film Institute (DFI) in Copenhagen in 2008 to give children abroad a chance to use a filmmaking facility already enjoyed by those in Denmark (Hjort 2015, 60, 62). By providing access to virtual sets, backdrops, green screens and rear projection, the Film-X studio enables children to shoot and star in their own short films and thereby test out their talents in the various creative skills and teamwork involved. “Film-X on the Road” ran for 10 days in Damascus in 2009, hosting children from schools all over the city (Nielsen 2017) and supervised by two Syrian stars of documentary-­ making, Orwa Nyrabia and Diana El-Jeiroudi. A decade later, after Nyrabia was detained by Syrian military forces in 2012 and freed following an international outcry, both were active in Europe—Nyrabia as artistic director of the International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam from 2018 and El-Jeiroudi as one of the founders of the Documentary Convention, a mainly Arab and European initiative that had its first two annual gatherings in Leipzig in 2018 and 2019. Nielsen admired what the couple achieved with Film-X for Syrian children. He believes that Danish experience in making screen content for children, having been accumulated through years of statutory public spending on this activity (Steemers et al. 2018, 33) should be shared (Nielsen 2017). This is not to say the DEDI scriptwriting project was essentially Nielsen’s idea. DEDI exists within the DAPP framework but its three established priority areas are civic engagement, arts and culture, and media (DEDI n.d.). It so happened that unused funds became available to DEDI from the Danish Centre for Kultur og Udvikling (CKU, Centre for Culture and Development), which was wound up by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2016 after operating since 1998  in 13 African, Asian and Middle Eastern countries (Kabanda 2018, 114), including Egypt. Mohamed Abotera, arts and culture programme manager at DEDI since 2014 (Abotera n.d.), consulted DFI Special Advisor Charlotte Giese about how to use it. Giese, head of the DFI’s Children and Film Unit from 1998 to 2014, with long experience of overseas collaborations in children’s film (e.g. Hjort 2015, 60), suggested a project that would address the scarcity of children’s screen content originations in Arab countries. So DEDI issued an invitation, through its Facebook page and contacts, for aspiring children’s scriptwriters to take part in a 5-day writing workshop in April 2018 with a view to the most successful attending a second workshop in June and, depending on performance, the chance to pitch the script at a

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film festival due to be held under the patronage of Egyptian telecoms mogul Naguib Sawiris at the Red Sea resort of El-Gouna in September 2018, where they were able to use the facilities of the Technical University of Berlin’s El-Gouna Campus. Around 50 people applied to the scriptwriting workshop and 12 were selected. Five of the 12 went through to the 3-day workshop in June. The pitching process then became more serious. Besides practising in El-Gouna, DEDI gave writers the opportunity to attend a pitching workshop in Cairo in January 2019, after which two took part in the annual Financing Forum for Kids Content, which takes place every March in the Swedish city of Malmӧ. One went to Malmӧ with her own producer to pitch. The other attended as an observer. Who made it through the whole process and who decided their ideas were worthy of support? The first filter on selection was that applicants needed to be able to benefit from a workshop conducted in English, since one of the two facilitators had no Arabic. She was Lotte Svendsen, prize-­ winning writer-director and graduate of Denmark’s National Film School, known in particular for the children’s television series Max and its film spin-offs about Max and his embarrassing mother. In September 2018 Svendsen took over as DFI Film Commissioner for Children and Youth. The Egyptian facilitator, Hala Galal, graduate of Egypt’s Higher Institute of Cinema and artistic director of the Aswan International Women’s Film Festival in 2019, is also a prize-winning film director and producer, known especially for her documentaries, including Dardasha Nisa’iyat (Women’s Chitchat). In 2006 Galal directed a weekly children’s show on the Nile Family and Children Channel called Beit el-Mawhoubin (Home of the Talented) in which children were encouraged to draw, paint, sing or play music—activities that gain little formal encouragement in the curriculum of Egypt’s state schools. Galal was consultant on the DEDI scriptwriting selection process, which did not require submission of sample scripts but was based instead mainly on personal statements. When it came to evaluating writing potential, Galal and Svendsen, from their respective positions vis-à-vis Egyptian culture, inevitably relied on different verbal and non-­ verbal cues. A year after the first workshop, plans for bringing outputs from the project to film or television screens were still a work in progress. But three of the original participants, all with some prior experience of screen production, had developed their scripts. Their ideas reflected an openness to fun and comedy which, according to recollections of those involved, was something Svendsen encouraged. Of the three, one was an animation

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about a fly and one a live action film. The other, written by a children’s novelist, was envisaged as a television series featuring a brother and sister who in each episode outwit the grandmother looking after them. In 2019 it seemed DEDI would proceed with a second round of workshops, ensuring that any future Cairo pitching workshop would precede pitching to possible backers at a festival or forum. In the meantime, Abotera and his team reinforced the DEDI commitment to children’s content by curating a collection of Danish films obtained from the DFI and through THE WHY, a Copenhagen-based foundation created in 2004 by documentary specialists from the Danish and British public service broadcasters, and arranging with civil society groups to get them screened in Egypt.

Conclusion Collaborations referred to in this chapter include examples involving Disney and JCC, Netflix and the Royal Film Commission Jordan, and YouTube and the patrons of its Dubai hub, as well as the four case studies. Each one revealed a multiplicity of players across countries and regions who contributed in some way to how things turned out. In the case studies, these contributions reflected a network of complex relations that diluted the input of either side of the pairing featured in each case. For example, any account of the construction of Goboz has to encompass the many non-Arab content providers from whom MBC Group needed to obtain rights for SVOD screening, or MBC’s competitors in purchasing such rights. Likewise, the Lamsa platform was seen to exist in a mutual relationship with content creators, as well as the Emirati bodies housing its large multinational staff and helping to finance its development, plus the big global players, Google and Apple, that testified to its popularity. The Egyptian Knowledge Bank was built to depend on an array of foreign publishers, while Discovery Education, in creating video for the EKB and new curriculum, dealt with multiple production houses besides its own staff in the UK and US. The DEDI scriptwriting project built on the input and experience of Danish entities working in children’s film and played out through cooperation with bodies and individuals in Malmӧ and El-Gouna, in the hope of attracting Egyptian distributors for the scripts produced. In all four cases the lingua franca of collaboration and pre-­ production was English. The very multiplicity and dispersed nature of actors in each case, and the varying nature of their contributions, testifies to the need identified by

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Rose (2016, 346) for a “richer analytical vocabulary” than that of “power” and “resistance.” Here the analysis focused on decisions about attracting child audiences and about their right to enjoyment. It revealed that financial imperatives shaped MBC’s relationship with the designer of Goboz and content providers, causing it to treat child audiences as a market segment and not to originate children’s content locally. For Lamsa, in contrast, support provided under UAE state priorities enabled it to experiment not only with a mix of games and learning materials but with external certification that encompassed the learning content of games. In Egypt, Discovery, backed by ministerial patronage, accommodated a stylistic innovation for its educational videos aimed at young children when a local company volunteered a storytelling approach in local dialect. The DEDI scriptwriting project afforded Egyptian writers a motive, context and ethos modelled on experience gained through Danish practice of statutory funding for children’s film. Key decisions in each collaboration, including whether to end, change or continue the project, were taken by executives on the side investing funds. But examining influences and exchanges at a micro level uncovers dynamics of wider, pre-existing networks that straddle Arab, European and other geopolitical boundaries and steer cultural output.

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Anon. 2018. Independent producer based in Abu Dhabi. Authors’ interview. Munich, May 28. Arab News. 2017a. Lebanese Star Mory Hatem Auditions for Disney’s Aladdin. Arab News, March 29. http://www.arabnews.com/node/1076246/offbeat. Accessed 4 May 2019. ———. 2017b. OSN Partners with Leading Arabic Children’s Edutainment Platform, Lamsa. Arab News, December 23. http://www.arabnews.com/ node/1213166/corporate-news. Accessed 4 May 2019. Arabian Business. 2015. Mondo, Abu Dhabi Media Co Ink Deal for New TV Animated Series. arabianbusiness.com, February 6. https://www.arabianbusiness.com/mondo-abu-dhabi-media-co-ink-deal-for-new-tv-animatedseries-581218.html#. Accessed 4 May 2019. Bassel, Mona. 2018. The Dubbing Dilemma: Disney Cartoons Spark Controversy Across the Arab World. Community Times, September 24. https://communitytimes.me/2018/09/24/disney-in-arabic-by-mona-bassel/. Accessed 4 May 2019. Bisson, Guy. 2018. Interview with Fadel Zahreddine. Mipblog.com, August 27. https://mipblog.com/2018/08/kids-content-in-the-future-should-allowavatars-to-be-part-of-the-narrative-interview-with-fadel-zahreddine-mbcgroup/. Accessed 4 May 2019. D’Cunha, Suparna Dutt. 2018. Why the Middle East’s Booming Student Population Makes It a Perfect Site for Education Tech Startups. Forbes, March 19. https://www.forbes.com/sites/suparnadutt/2018/03/19/edtech-startups-ar e-plugging-an-innovation-gap-in-education-in-the-middleeast/#6222bbb84fa4. Accessed 4 May 2019. DEDI. n.d. Danish Egyptian Dialogue Institute: “About Us.” https://www.dedi. org.eg/about-dedi/. Accessed 23 April 2019. Di Giovanni, Elena. 2017. New Imperialism in (Re)-Translation: Disney in the Arab world. Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice 25 (1): 4–17. Discovery Education EKB. 2016. Helping to Create a Society that Can Learn, Think and Innovate. About Us. https://en.discoveryeducation.ekb.eg/ about/. Accessed 4 May 2019. Dolan, Kerry A. 2018. Why No Saudi Arabians Made the Forbes Billionaires List this Year. Forbes, March. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/ 2018/03/06/no-saudi-arabian-billionaires-forbes-list-2018-alwaleedalamoudi/#4e0d23f01d42. Accessed 4 May 2019. Dubit. 2018. Goboz: Strategy and Digital Development of the Largest SVOD Across EMEA.  Dubit website. https://www.dubitlimited.com/project/ goboz. Accessed 23 April 2019. Edelman Intelligence. 2018. Norton’s My First Device Report. Mount View, CA: Symantec. http://now.symassets.com/content/dam/norton/global/pdfs/ reports/Norton_My_First_Device_Report_Oct_2018_Final.pdf. Accessed 4 May 2019.

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Egypt Today. 2013. Unlearning Our Lessons. Egypt Today, September 12. http://www.egypttoday.com/Article/10/4/Unlearning-Our-Lessons. Accessed 4 May 2019. El-Behary, Hend. 2016. Egyptian Animation Fans Press for Return of Beloved Egyptian Dialect. Egypt Independent, May 4. https://ww.egyptindependent. com/disney-animation-fans-press-return-beloved-egyptian-dialect/. Accessed 4 May 2019. Elkashef, Aida. 2015. Legally or Illegally? How to Make a Film in Egypt. Mada Masr, April 19. https://madamasr.com/en/2015/04/19/feature/culture/ legally-or-illegally-how-to-make-a-film-in-egypt/. Accessed 4 May 2019. ElSabry, ElHassan. 2016. Some Thoughts on the ‘Egyptian Knowledge Bank’. Society for Social Studies of Science 4S. blog, February 14. http://www.4sonline. org/blog/post/some_thoughts_on_the_egyptian_knowledge_bank. Accessed 4 May 2019. Entrepreneur Middle East. 2018. UAE Edtech Startup Lamsa World Secures Investment from MBRIF. Entrepreneur Media, July 3. https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/316099. Accessed 4 May 2019. Field, Roger. 2016. Passion for Animation. digitalstudiome.com, August 15. https://www.digitalstudiome.com/article-10283-passion-for-animation. Accessed 4 May 2019. Accessed 4 May 2019. Franks, Nico. 2015. Page to Screen. C21 Media, August 9. https://www.c21media.net/page-to-screen/?ss=Majid. Accessed 4 May 2019. ———. 2016. BeIN, Studio 100 Partner on Kids Channel. C21Media, April 1. https://www.c21media.net/bein-studio-100-partner-on-kids-channel/. Accessed 4 May 2019. ———. 2018. MBC Taps Antenna’s Smith for Studio Role. C21 Media, September 18. http://www.c21media.net/mbc-taps-antennas-smith-for-studio-role/. Accessed 4 May 2019. Galer, Sophie Smith. 2017. The Aladdin Controversy Disney Can’t Escape. BBC Online, July 14. http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170714-the-aladdin-controversy-disney-cant-escape. Accessed 4 May 2019. Goodfellow, Melanie. 2018. Beta, MBC Sign Major Deal to Co-produce Pan-­ Arab, European Drama Series. Screen Daily, April 11. https://www.screendaily.com/news/beta-mbc-sign-major-deal-to-co-produce-pan-arabeuropean-drama-series/5128190.article. Accessed 4 May 2019. Halligan, Neil. 2018. How YouTube Plans to Stay Ahead in the Middle East. Arabian Business, July 15. https://www.arabianbusiness.com/media/400686how-youtube-plans-to-stay-ahead-in-the-middle-east. Accessed 4 May 2019. Hjort, Mette. 2015. The Risk Environment of Small-Nation Filmmaking. In European Visions: Small Cinemas in Transition, ed. Janelle Blankenship and Tobias Nagl, 49–64. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Kabanda, Patrick. 2018. The Creative Wealth of Nations: Can the Arts Advance Development? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Khalaf, Hala. 2016. Arabic-Language App Lamsa Leads the Way in Digital Learning for Kids. The National. January 26. https://www.thenational.ae/ lifestyle/family/arabic-language-app-lamsa-leads-the-way-in-digital-learningfor-kids-1.221923. Accessed 4 May 2019. Lynx Qualey, Marcia. 2014. Can’t ‘Let It Go’: The Role of Colloquial and Modern Standard Arabic in Children’s Literature and Entertainment. ArabLit, June 4. https://arablit.org/2014/06/04/cant-let-it-go-the-role-of-colloquial-andmodern-standard-arabic-in-childrens-literature-and-entertainment/. Accessed 6 May 2019. Mada Masr. 2017. New Education Minister Raises Hopes for Future of Education in Egypt. Mada Masr, February 17. https://madamasr.com/en/2017/02/17/ news/u/new-education-minister-raises-hopes-for-future-of-education-inegypt/. Accessed 4 May 2019. Massey, Doreen. 1993. Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place. In Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, ed. Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, George Robertson, and Lisa Tickner, 59–69. London: Routledge. Muhanna, Elias. 2014. Translating ‘Frozen’ into Arabic. The New Yorker, May 30. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/translating-frozen-intoarabic. Accessed 4 May 2019. Newbould, Chris. 2018. Netflix’s Debut Arabic Original ‘Jinn’ Begins Shooting in Jordan. The National, August 13. https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/ film/netflix-s-debut-arabic-original-jinn-begins-shooting-in-jordan-1.759568. Accessed 4 May 2019. Nielsen, Hans-Christian. 2017. Interview with Naomi Sakr, Denmark-London by Skype, December 22. Pike, Kirsten. 2018. Disney in Doha: Arab Girls Negotiate Global and Local Versions of Disney. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communications 11 (1): 72–90. Rose, Gillian. 2016. Rethinking the Geographies of Cultural ‘Objects’ Through Digital Technologies: Interface, Network and Friction. Progress in Human Geography 40 (3): 334–351. Royal Film Commission Jordan. 2018. ‘Jinn’, First Netflix Arabic Original Series Filmed in Jordan, Started Principal Photography. Online press release August 13. http://www.film.jo/NewsView.aspx?NewsID=165. Accessed 4 May 2019. Sahlberg, Pasi. 2015. Q: What Makes Finnish Teachers So Special? A: It’s Not Brains. The Guardian, March 31. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/mar/31/finnish-teachers-special-train-teach. Accessed 4 May 2019. Sakr, Naomi. 2001. Satellite Realms: Transnational Television, Globalization and the Middle East. London: IB Tauris. ———. 2007. Arab Television Today. London: IB Tauris.

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———. 2016. Media ‘Globalization’ as Survival Strategy for Authoritarian Regimes in the Arab Middle East. In Global Media and National Policies: The Return of the State, ed. Terry Flew, Petros Iosifidis, and Jeanette Steemers, 173–189. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2017. Provision, Protection or Participation? Approaches to Regulating Children’s Television in Arab Countries. Media International Australia 163 (1): 31–41. ———. 2018. ‘Smarter, Stronger, Kinder’: Interests at Stake in the Remaking of Iftah ya Simsim for Gulf Children. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 11 (1): 9–28. Sakr, Naomi, and Jeanette Steemers. 2016. Co-producing Content for Pan-Arab Children’s TV: State, Business, and the Workplace. In Production Studies, The Sequel! ed. Miranda Banks, Bridget Conor, and Vicki Mayer, 238–250. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Shaheen, Jack. 2009. Reel Bad Arabs. How Hollywood Vilifies a People. 2nd ed. Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press. Shawki, Tarek. 2015. Interviewed by Amr Khalil for CBC TV talk show Mumkin [It’s Possible]. Cairo, November 18. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0 H2SGHkric&feature=youtu.be&t=4212. Accessed 4 May 2019. ———. 2017. Interviewed by Rami Radwan for DMC TV talk show 8 El-Sobh (8am). Cairo. December 17. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_ continue=22&v=DKNYiokQCuk. Accessed 4 May 2019. Sheble, Riham, and Lesley Walker. 2016. Qatar School Pulls Snow White Book for Being ‘Inappropriate’. Doha News, January 21. https://dohanews.co/qatarschool-pulls-snow-white-book-for-being-inappropriate/. Accessed 4 May 2019. Skantzos, Kathy. 2019. A Beacon of Quality: Sam Barnett. CEO Magazine, January 24. https://www.theceomagazine.com/executive-interviews/mediapublishing/sam-barnett/. Accessed 4 May 2019. Srinivas, Supriya, and Vijaya Cherian. 2018. MBC CEO Barnett on Surviving Against the Odds. BroadcastProME, March 4. http://broadcastprome.com/ interviews/mbc-ceo-thriving-odds/. Accessed 4 May 2019. Steel, Emily. 2013. Discovery Invests in Digital Learning with Espresso Deal. Financial Times, November 7. https://www.ft.com/content/85bd80204736-11e3-b4d3-00144feabdc0. Accessed 4 May 2019. Steemers, Jeanette, Naomi Sakr, and Christine Singer. 2018. Facilitating Arab-­ European Dialogue: Consolidated Report on an AHRC Project for Impact and Engagement: Children’s Screen Content in an Era of Forced Migration. London: King’s College London. https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/files/102210294/ Consolidated_Report_FinalSV_221018.pdf. Accessed 4 May 2019. Vadehra, Pranav. 2018. Interview with Darine El Khatib. digitalstudiome.com, April 2. https://www.digitalstudiome.com/broadcast/broadcast-business/ 29512-interview-with-darine-el-khatib. Accessed 4 May 2019.

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Wolfe, Jennifer. 2015. Studio 100 Signs Deal with Jeem TV. Animation World Network, October 6. https://www.awn.com/news/studio-100-media-signsdeal-jeem-tv. Accessed 4 May 2019. World Bank. 2018. World Bank and Egypt Sign US$500 Million Project to Bring Learning Back to Public Schools. Press Release. April 21. Washington: World Bank. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2018/04/21/ world-bank-and-egypt-sign-us500-million-project-to-bring-learning-back-topublic-schools. Accessed 23 April 2019. World Economic Forum. 2018. The Arab World Competitiveness Report 2018. Geneva: World Economic Forum. http://www3.weforum.org/docs/ArabWorld-Competitiveness-Report-2018/AWCR%202018.0724_1342.pdf. Accessed 23 April 2019. World Summit Awards. n.d. Jurors. https://www.worldsummitawards.org/person/3621/. Accessed 23 April 2019.

CHAPTER 5

Arab Children in Europe: Managing Diversity on Children’s Television

Abstract  This chapter explores issues around diversity and forced migration, based on input from a 2017–18 project in which samples of European screen content for children were discussed by European and Arab practitioners. It starts by considering studies of how European media institutions deal with issues around multiculturalism and “diversity within diversity,” before contemplating the significance of the dialogue process initiated through the workshops. It goes on to look at the production contexts in which awareness of diversity in and around children’s content is managed by broadcasters and producers. Bearing in mind that diversity in children’s programmes also raises issues around representation of children and children’s own participation, the chapter then considers the content in terms of how much children genuinely participated in creating it. Keywords  Children and media participation • Child ethnic minorities • Children’s television programmes • Public service broadcasting • Screen content distribution • Super-diversity and diversity When civil war erupted in Syria in 2011, European broadcasters and producers were ill-equipped to meet the media needs of thousands of refugee children, mainly from Syria, who began arriving with their families, or sometimes alone, in their thousands. By January 2017 there were 577,300 Syrians in Germany, 116,400  in Sweden, 51,400  in the Netherlands, © The Author(s) 2019 N. Sakr, J. Steemers, Screen Media for Arab and European Children, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25658-6_5

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31,000 in Denmark and 11,500 in Bulgaria (Eurostat 2017), with under-­ 18s potentially accounting for 44 per cent of new arrivals and 11 per cent of the under-5s, based on United Nations Children’s Fund estimates (2017, 176) of Syrian demographics in 2016. Faced with disturbing news reports documenting the refugees’ flight, some European children’s producers felt they had to explain what was happening to young European-­ born audiences as well as reach out to the new arrivals. For producers and broadcasters who might have hitherto struggled to reflect their own society’s ethnic diversity, either on or off the screen, the refugee crisis underscored long-standing questions about how best to achieve better ethnocultural diversity on European screens, alongside the perennial challenges of simply getting European children’s content commissioned and funded in the first place. This chapter explores those questions and challenges, based on input from a recent project in which the authors collated samples of European screen content portraying migration and diversity issues for young children and discussed them with producers of this content and Arab expert commentators in workshops, interviews and a symposium between December 2017 and September 2018. The chapter starts by considering existing studies of how media practitioners in Europe view issues around multiculturalism and cultural diversity. It then contemplates the significance of the dialogue process initiated through the workshops, in terms of its relevance to those involved and its situation within the various layers of decision-making that underlie production of screen content for children. It goes on to look at the production contexts in which awareness of diversity in and around children’s content is managed by broadcast commissioners and producers. Bearing in mind that diversity in children’s programmes also raises issues around representation of children and children’s own participation, the chapter then considers the content viewed in the workshops in terms of how much children genuinely participated in creating it.

Immigration, Diversity and Policies on Representation Policies developed by some European public service broadcasters (PSBs) within a framework of cultural diversity were tested when Arab refugees started to arrive in large numbers from 2015. There have been changing approaches to diversity over the years (Cottle 2000; Horsti et al. 2014;

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Leurdijk 2006; Malik 2013). Panis et al. (2019, 15) note that “media, and particularly PSM, are increasingly aware of the problems of under-­ representation, stereotypical portrayal and white normativity in media coverage on ethnic minorities,” and that they have responded to these issues through “efforts to pay more attention to ‘diversity within diversity.’” For that reason, Panis and his co-authors adopt Vertovec’s framework of super-diversity (2007, 1048) which “accepts and emphasises the cultural heterogeneity and voice plurality within and among ethnic minority communities” (Panis et al. 2019, 15) including intersections with other facets of identity involving, but not limited to sexual orientation, religious affiliation, immigration status, age, class and gender. They note that super-­ diversity requires public service broadcasters to move beyond simply acknowledging the multicultural nature of society “towards an increased awareness that ethnocultural diversity needs to be managed” (ibid., 15) if it is to become an integral part of institutional norms and work practices. In this sense managing diversity goes beyond simply ensuring ethnic minority “access to and presence in TV programmes” (ibid., 15). It also means developing better understanding of diversity within diversity during the process of production and of how representations are determined by practitioners, whose decisions are shaped by institutional production contexts and conventions. The scholarly literature on managing diversity in the sense intended by Panis and his co-authors remains quite limited, but professional advice on the subject is not lacking. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) handbook on best practice in public service broadcasting (PSB) (Banerjee and Seneviratne 2005), diversity is one of four key characteristics of the public service mandate. Diversity complements universality by requiring PSBs to offer something for everyone over time in terms of range of genres, audiences targeted and subjects discussed (ibid., 15–16). Various measures have been devised to encourage European public service media (PSM) to achieve diversity in relation to those making up ethnic and cultural minorities. In 2007 the European Union (EU) Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) included a diversity checklist in its Diversity Toolkit for Factual Programmes in Public Service Television (FRA 2008, 61), compiled by television practitioners in the European Broadcasting Union’s (EBU’s) Intercultural and Diversity Group (ibid., 9). In 2012 a Policy Brief issued by a research project on Media for Diversity and Migrant Integration (MEDIVA), part sponsored by the European Fund for Integration of Third-Country Nationals, set out

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four sets of indicators for assessing the media’s capacity “to reflect migration related diversity and promote migrant integration” in relation to “fair and polyphonic representation” of migrants in news content, news-making and news-gathering practices, recruitment and employment policies and practices, and lastly training schemes and practices (MEDIVA 2012, 1–2). After applying the indicators to 31 media outlets in six EU countries, including PSBs in Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands and the UK, the MEDIVA pilot study found that the Netherlands performed better than the UK in awareness of migration issues (ibid., 3) and that policies for diversity in recruitment, outreach or monitoring were to be found only in large organisations in the “old migration” countries, namely the Netherlands and the UK (ibid., 6). These policies and practices create the environment within which practitioners approach the task of covering immigration issues for child audiences. Some PSM providers have been developing mandates for such coverage over a long period. Belgium’s Flemish PSB, Vlaamse Radio- en Televisieomroep (VRT), created a Diversity Charter and Diversity Unit in 2003, and its Management Contracts with the Flemish government have increased the target for including “new Flemings” in programmes made or commissioned by VRT from 5 per cent in 2012–16 (Cola et al. 2013, 88) to 7.5 per cent in 2016–20 (Panis et al. 2019, 16). The term “new Fleming” refers to someone with at least one parent born outside the pre-­ 2004 EU. The BBC also sets a numerical target—of 15 per cent—in its Diversity and Inclusion Strategy 2016–20, but this applies to “black, Asian and ethnic minorities on screen, on-air and in lead roles across all genres” and to ethnic minorities as a percentage of employees and leadership teams (BBC 2016, 4); the word “immigrant” does not feature anywhere in the strategy document. For the purposes of this chapter, what matters in these plans for diversity is that a policy background exists for PSM action, but the intersection of immigration issues and representation of children is not specifically addressed.

Dialogue Within a European-Arab Community of Producers The encounters that form the basis of this analysis of how diversity is managed in relation to children’s television took place in three pre-event workshops, each with 30–34 participants, facilitated by the authors as participant

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observers. The first workshop, attached to the Children’s Global Media Summit in Manchester, took place on 4 December 2017, the second, attached to the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (CPH:DOX), took place across two mornings, on 19 and 20 March 2018, and the third, attached to the Prix Jeunesse International children’s television festival in Munich, was held on 24 May 2018. Together with a symposium in London for 70 participants on 14 September 2018, the events formed part of a 1-year project entitled Collaborative Developments in Children’s Screen Content in an Era of Forced Migration: Facilitating Arab-European Dialogue (www.euroarabchildrensmedia.org), funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) under its grants for “Impact and Engagement.” As such, the initiative was primarily designed to share research findings with producers, broadcasters and children’s advocates from an earlier 3-year AHRC-funded project, entitled Orientations in the Development of Pan-Arab Television for Children (2013–16). However, in addition to alerting European practitioners to the media needs, wants and experiences of newly arrived Arabic-speaking children, another key project objective was simply to create space for critical reflection and dialogue between Europeans who regulate, commission, fund, produce or comment on children’s content and their Arab counterparts (Steemers et al. 2018). This chapter’s analysis of policy and production issues draws on transcriptions of exchanges at the events, supplemented by participants’ written evaluations of the workshops and 23 interviews with participants and practitioners that took place after the workshops. These are the sources of all data presented in the chapter, except where other sources are cited. Across the workshops, participants fell into four distinct groups, all of which had both European and Arab representatives. The first group comprised 34 producers, including 17 Europe-based producers whose programming was under discussion. In the second group were 18 attendees from NGOs representing advocacy positions, including two organisations— BBC Media Action and the Public Media Alliance—that partnered with us in the 1-year project, as well as European-based bodies working with refugees and/or children, and institutions fostering Arab-European relations, such as the Cairo-based Danish-Egyptian Dialogue Institute (DEDI) and Copenhagen-based International Media Support (IMS). The third group consisted of 16 participants from institutions which facilitate the production, funding and distribution of children’s content, including seven broadcasters, the Danish Film Institute (DFI), and representatives from children’s

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film festivals and professional bodies. The final group comprised eight academics, not counting the project’s three facilitators. In discussions stimulated by clips from 35 examples of European and other non-Arab content featuring children of Arab heritage and other migration backgrounds, participants from Dubai, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria used a rare opportunity to offer advice to their European colleagues. Instead of being the recipients of content, expertise or humanitarian interventions from organisations based in Europe and North America (Awan 2016; Sesame Workshop 2018), Arab participants in the workshops shared their expertise and knowledge of Arab production, policy and reception contexts. There are of course multiple Arab-­ European encounters involving acquisitions, co-productions, research consultancies, festivals and industry events or training, some of which have been alluded to in Chaps. 1, 2, 3, and 4. But all these encounters have in common one-way transfers of programming and expertise from Europe. They reinforce what Rose has labelled the “highly skewed global distribution” of expertise that favours Europe and the US (Rose 2016, 342) along with assumptions about the immaturity of local Arab industries—assumptions that are also promulgated by some Arab executives in a vicious cycle (Benzine 2009; Bisson 2018). The workshops therefore enabled cross-cultural Arab-European encounters between those who rarely meet otherwise, and an opportunity for Arab participants to present their views in ways that are not open to them in contexts where policies are determined exclusively by governing elites and authoritarian regimes (Sakr 2017). Arab practitioners may know perfectly well what is needed to support a children’s production community, but their knowledge is marginalised in their home countries in favour of overseas content, which is often more valued by Arab media companies for its perceived quality and commercial value (Bisson 2018; Sakr and Steemers 2016, 244). By contrast European practitioners at the workshops do have opportunities to express themselves as part of a children’s television community (Bryant 2007) or production ecology (Steemers 2010, 9–13); they can initiate or pursue policy and even contribute to the policy-making process nationally or at a European level. For example, the establishment of a Young Audiences Content Fund in the UK in April 2019 was preceded by a series of consultations and evidencecollecting over 4 years involving parliamentarians, regulators (Ofcom), broadcasters, civil servants, children’s advocacy groups (Children’s Media Foundation), public service advocacy groups (Voice of the Listener and

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Viewer), industry bodies (Animation UK, Pact) and individual practitioners (Steemers 2017). Within the workshop settings, participant groupings developed temporarily into something akin to Kingdon’s description of a policy community, because they identified with “one area of policy problems” (2011, 117), focused around the production and distribution contexts of content that deals with migration issues and representations of children from ethnocultural minorities. In line with Kingdon’s notion of a policy community they engaged in “interactions with each other” (2011, 117), negotiating responses from their different positions as part of the facilitated workshop themes that focused variously on ethical concerns, how best to show diversity and plurality of voice, organisational and employment issues, and approaches to commissioning and distribution. Rather than the top-down approach adopted by European and Arab regulatory bodies, debating normative aspirations around protection from harmful content, literacy or children’s rights, which might never get translated into alternative content (see Chap. 3), the workshop debates involved a bottom-­ up approach focused around provision and participation. They reflected the practical production experiences of those who make content for children at the micro level (Cottle 2003), deploying, in the words of John Corner, “production mentalities,” which revolve around their own “dispositions, values” and “practical consciousness” (1999, 71) of what is likely to work, or what Cottle (1998) calls “professional pragmatics.” These decisions are far removed from the macro-level decision-making of international governance, national regulators and state policy-makers, who set out the overarching regulatory, cultural, political and economic parameters of children’s content provision and protection, as well as policies around “assimilation, integration, pluralism, multiculturalism and/or anti-racism” that inform “regulatory frameworks and cultural climates” around diversity (Cottle 2000, 17). Practitioners’ activities are also negotiated within an intermediate or meso level of national and transnational corporate decision-making, strategic goals and editorial policy, where outcomes are determined by senior executives about what to commission, how much funding to allocate and how to distribute and promote what is commissioned. These are the production contexts in which “super-diversity” is managed. Discussions within the workshops were focused around clips from 35 shows. Of these 32 were made in European countries, coming from Belgium (1), Denmark (5), Germany (6), the Netherlands (7), Serbia (1),

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Slovenia (1), Switzerland (1) and the UK (10). The remaining three had been screened in Europe but came from Malaysia/Yemen (1), Canada (1) and the US (1). Seven were targeted at children under 6, including four animated shows. Almost two-thirds (22) were factual, including two news clips—Newsround from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Logo from Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF)/KiKa in Germany. Two were classified as infotainment targeted at a family audience. There were eight live action dramas and five examples of animated fiction. Content was sourced with the help of the EBU, Prix Jeunesse, Cinekid staff in Amsterdam, CPH:DOX, VRT and DFI, as well as through individual producers and broadcasters. The number of shows commissioned by European PSBs underlines the centrality of public service mandates for originating content that meets a range of audience needs. Nevertheless, in catering for diverse child audiences, they are almost alone. Children’s content that represents the diverse ethnicities of European countries is rarely screened on European commercial channels or US-owned transnational channels operated by Disney, Viacom (Nickelodeon) or Time Warner (see Steemers and D’Arma 2012). It is also noticeably more prevalent in wealthier European countries with a strong public service tradition and comparatively well-resourced broadcasters, such as the UK’s BBC, Germany’s KiKa children’s channel, Danmarks Radio (DR) or Dutch broadcaster Nederlandse Publieke Omroep (NPO), rather than in eastern, central and southern Europe, where financial and political support for PSB is less certain (D’Arma and Labio 2017; Lustyik 2013). In spite of efforts to locate it, French content was a significant omission from the workshops, even though France has a large population of Arab ethnicity. This could be attributable to French PSB’s focus on animation and a weaker public service remit (Azizi 2018), but it may also reflect the French practice of not tracking race and ethnic origin in population censuses, which may reduce incentives to reflect diversity (Mattelart 2014, 213–216).

Structural Limitations on Managing for Diversity Cottle, in pointing to the neglect of production within academic studies, notes its role in contributing to “the important forces that both condition and constrain, as well as facilitate and enable, ethnic minority media involvement in the production of representations” (2000, 16). These “complexities at work” (Cottle 2000, 18–22) became evident in work-

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shop dialogues and interviews as producers explained the different factors at play when bringing productions to screen that either represent or involve ethnocultural minorities. Producers were aware of the need to reflect “diversity within diversity” (Panis et  al. 2019, 15), but acknowledged that complicating factors arose from the ethnic composition of the workforce, market pressures stemming from the need to appeal to majority audiences, and the repercussions of new technologies on how content is circulated and accessed. These constraints were managed in ways that reflected the “professional pragmatics” (Cottle 1998) of producers who work within and respond to production contexts that are shaped by available resources, organisational priorities and the perceived norms and conventions of the medium (Leurdijk 2006, 35). European producers who were interviewed and attended project events were highly motivated to discuss their own practices in response to the refugee crisis, with children’s perspectives featuring strongly. For a German drama producer, the migration crisis of 2015 had been a spur to explain recent events “through the eyes of children.” A Danish producer talked about the need for children to be “the stars and tellers of the movies,” and of producing “our narrative together with the children.” The UK producer of BBC preschool series Where in the World? (CBeebies, 2017), which introduces children living in different countries, explained that a key driver was to counter disturbing news reports and children’s anxieties about global events by showing them examples of other children “living ordinary lives, just getting on with it.” A Dutch commissioning editor, interviewed about the KRO-NCRV preschool series This Is Where I Sleep (Hier slap ik), saw an opportunity “to let children see the world is bigger than your own house and your own street.” For a BBC executive the refugee stories of Coming to Britain (CBBC, 2015) and New Boys in Town (CBBC, 2017), two programmes in the CBBC factual strand, My Life, were a result of “definitely noticing that children were having new classmates in their class, who weren’t speaking the same language as them easily, and feeling the need to tell their stories.” Building on these stated ambitions to explain to European-born children what was happening, others went one step further in thinking about how representations of diversity should be managed as migrants became more settled. For a German producer interviewed from public broadcaster, Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), productions needed to reflect demographic changes in Europe, and recognise that “these children are going to be here longer term,” and that storytelling would have to change

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to reflect their continued presence. Another German producer interviewed about the ZDF reality series Berlin und Wir (ZDF-KiKa, 2016–17) which encourages friendships between German-born and refugee children, talked about tackling the “big task” of “how could integration function and how can we work it out that people feel welcome” at a time when popular and political sentiment towards refugees has become increasingly hostile across Europe. Yet, according to a BBC participant, integration may not be the whole answer because it is also “important to understand that actually these children who are brilliant at speaking your language, who are integrated in many ways, have come from a home that they’ve had to leave behind that has made them who they are,” a reminder that reinforces the idea of “diversity within diversity” (Panis et al. 2019, 15), where newly arrived children feel connected in many ways to memories of their past lives in other places, as well as their new lives in Europe (see also Sreberny 2000). One obvious strategy for managing diversity in children’s content is to pay attention to casting, particularly in children’s dramas. The producers of the CBeebies preschool drama series Apple Tree House (CBeebies, 2017–18) set on an inner-city housing estate, recruited unknown child actors from ethnic minorities, who had not attended drama school, with the deliberate intention of “subvert[ing] the stereotypes in terms of who can do what” and to achieve more authenticity. Yet casting was slow and arduous, with the series producer admitting that “less than a dozen families” had come forward for the role of a boy from a Muslim household, and that there was only a “tiny, tiny list” of female performers to play an Asian grandmother. The German producers of ZDF drama series Dschermeni (2017), who wanted to show diversity within minority ethnic communities, found it difficult to locate actors with Turkish backgrounds who were willing to take the part of the gay older brother of one of the lead characters, Rüyet. Gender was also an issue in reflecting diversity within communities. In the project sample 14 films featured boys in the main roles and only eight had girls. This is not unusual in children’s ­television (Gӧtz and Lemish 2012) but appears to have been reinforced by some Arab families’ reluctance to give permission for girls to be involved. To ensure a diverse cast in VRT’s 4eVeR (2017–), a semi-scripted multi-­ episode Flemish web series for 9–12-year olds, the producers auditioned over 400 young people to deliver largely improvised dialogue, grounded in the concerns of Flemish-speaking children, and drawing on “hot topics” identified through the children’s helpline, Awel. The cast of

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15–16-year-olds was older than the target audience, but few Muslim children attended auditions and the producers had to use a specialist agency to locate a teenage actor and parents with a Muslim Arab background who could represent “new Flemings,” as specified in broadcaster VRT’s management contract (Dhoest 2014, 109–110). In spite of the European production community’s best intentions, some producers conceded that attempts to manage ethnocultural diversity were affected by limited ethnic diversity among practitioners themselves (see also Dhoest 2014, 116; Markova and McKay 2011; Ofcom 2018). According to a Denmark-based producer of Iranian descent, minorities are oftentimes never a part of this process and all the directors and the editors, everybody that works at the different broadcasting stations that are in the position to pick and choose content actually don’t have any minority backgrounds, so the aims are becoming a little bit tricky when you’re wanting to make content that either attracts minorities or talk about minorities and you don’t have them involved in the actual creation of the material.

This lack of ethnic representation within the workforce shows how far institutions still need to go in order to manage diversity actively. It demonstrates the relevance of Massey’s concept of “power-geometries” because it underlines how some groups and individuals are “more in charge” of production “than others” with more opportunities to “initiate” content and flows, leaving others more on the “receiving end” (Massey 1993, 61). Programme-makers from a relatively privileged white background acknowledged that it is not always easy to produce and write convincingly about life experiences they are unfamiliar with. According to a Dutch producer we interviewed: “If you’re not part of that world yourself … you’re going to construct it, and it’s going to be politically correct and kids will hate it.” German producers admitted that the urgency of the refugee crisis in 2015 had left them unprepared with little time to consider the ethnicity of production teams. A UK broadcaster conceded in an interview that ethnic minority practitioners “would make things differently” and that there are “few programme makers from the cultures of the kids that we are portraying,” necessitating “opportunities for new filmmakers or writers … so that those stories are as authentic as they can be.” For example, in the case of Apple Tree House (2017–18) on preschool service CBeebies, scriptwriters based the stories on their own experiences of growing up in an ethnically diverse inner-city environment.

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Competitive pressures also affect attempts to manage diversity. European PSBs’ commitment to commission domestic children’s content varies from country to country. In Denmark 25 per cent of DFI funding is allocated to children’s content and DFI works closely with public broadcaster DR on study guides and a streaming service for schools. In other countries, such as Belgium, France and the UK, there are tax reliefs to encourage domestic production. But generally, scarcity of funding results in entertainment genres being prioritised, including large volumes of imported animation which can be acquired cheaply and repeated multiple times. While producers were keen to reach out to minority groups including refugee children, they also stressed the importance of reaching a broader audience, because of limited resources, competitive pressures from commercial rivals and political pressure from those who determine funding. Several producers stressed the need for children’s programmes to have cross-cultural appeal through the use of popular formats and subject matter that appealed to as many children as possible. The producers of VRT’s Flemish drama series, 4eVer, saw its appeal as resting on the fact that “it is not about refugees,” but about “a well-integrated family” who identify as “fully Flemish.” Drawing on their experience of making reality television for adults, one of the producers explained how the balance of social reality and well-integrated characters was crucial to the series’ popular appeal, with more challenging topics incorporated alongside less challenging ones: Imagine yourself at home. I have a tough working day and you ask me: “Will you see a programme about a refugee or will you watch something else?” […] I will choose the second one. But in that second one, maybe they can embed the story about the refugee and I will watch it. If they say it to me upfront, I will say: “Oh no, not today”. I think the children are the same; they want to see something nice […] Like a present there should be a nice label on it.

At the same time new distribution technologies, from free online platforms like YouTube to subscription video-on-demand platforms like Netflix and Amazon, have made distribution an existential issue for PSBs, which face reports of freefalls in linear viewing, including an estimated 20 per cent drop in time spent watching linear TV by 2–15-year-olds across 12 markets between 2016 and 2018 (Woodgate 2018, 5–6). While children still watch television on a TV set, they are increasingly opting to

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watch online on other devices such as phones and tablets, and this is even more true of older children (Ofcom 2019). Some European PSBs are opting to put children’s services online only in an effort to reach audiences and reduce costs. German-language Swiss public service broadcaster, SRF, moved its children’s content online in 2017, a move that will be followed in 2020 by France 4, the French children’s public channel, and the Danish children’s channel for children over 6, DR Ultra. Other PSBs are adopting new strategies to reach out to children. In the BBC’s case this involves more investment in the catch-up service, BBC iPlayer, YouTube teasers and social media influencers to “entice” children to “come back” to the BBC’s online offerings and box sets, according to one BBC executive. For a Swiss producer there were clear benefits to no longer being bound by fixed slots in a linear schedule, because, “you can produce as many minutes as the story calls for. It can be a three-minute story, but also a 15-­minute story.” In Denmark and the Netherlands, broadcasters work with national film Institutes and film festivals to maximise outreach in schools and across broadcast channels and online platforms. However, others at the workshops questioned the preponderance of one-off PSB documentaries about children’s lives, saying they are difficult to promote effectively in linear schedules and online. According to a Danish producer, they risk “living a very lonely life on some internet platform.” There were questions about who was actually watching these shows. A Scandinavian PSB executive argued that outside of educational uses, there were “few good examples of how documentaries like these work on what we call VOD [video-on-demand] which is where we meet our target group, which is children aged 7–12.” He suggested children aged 7–12 were much more interested in entertainment and animation on YouTube and commercial channels than one-off documentaries focused on refugees and diversity. Faced with these facts, a DR editor interviewed about commissioning practices talked about a shift from commissioning one-off documentaries and short series for broadcast TV to high volumes of short “snackable” episodes for daily online distribution, coordinated with social media promotion on outlets like Instagram. This was the approach taken by DR for the factual web series Hassan og Ramadanen (Hassan and Ramadan 2017), comprising 17 episodes of approximately 4–5 minutes duration about a 10-year-old boy of Iraqi heritage living in Denmark. Released on DR’s own online platform, the series also proved surprisingly popular on YouTube, racking up in excess of 200,000 YouTube views per episode by

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January 2019. The show features the religious practice of fasting during Ramadan, but Ramadan is never mentioned in online thumbnails such as the “Hassan wants to be Ronaldo” episode, referencing the famous Portuguese football star. The focus is Hassan, who has a sense of humour, is “instantly likeable” and loves football. According to the show’s commissioning editor, speaking at the London symposium, the success of the show was attributable to Hassan’s appeal to all children, because DR cannot afford to be niche. According to the commissioning editor, We don’t sell it as “Hassan has to go hungry all day”. … By making the selling point a universal child’s perspective that is fascinating for all children, we had a lot of children select these clips because they’re interested in children’s lives, and then they got a perspective on Ramadan. They would never have chosen it if we had tried to sell it as a show about Ramadan, which it wasn’t. It was about a guy like them playing football and trying Ramadan.

In spite of constraints, there are European PSBs that are managing for diversity by focusing on casting and acknowledging deficits in the ethnocultural composition of the workforce. Yet there are also clear challenges. One of the most obvious relates to growing competition and changes in the way children’s screen content is being circulated and discovered by children as more viewing shifts online. This has ramifications for commissioning and funding at a time when many PSBs are facing political and funding pressures. The second challenge relates to the lack of children’s involvement in the production process. Since this arguably constitutes an important facet of how diversity is managed, it is discussed in the next section.

From Representation to Participation Workshop participants used to producing in parts of the Arab world were surprised at the range of European content, including live action drama as well as animation, and impressed at the chance it gave children of Arab heritage to see others like them on screen. Instead of news reporting about refugees, with little information for and by them (see Gillespie et al. 2016), workshop participants recognised the potential to give children a voice. Not all representations were unproblematic, but they portrayed Arab children in ways and situations that, as shown in Chap. 2, are rare on Arab screens. However, in reality, under-representation of minorities is the

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more likely situation across European children’s television as a whole. A German producer interviewed about the WDR preschool magazine show Die Sendung mit dem Elefanten (The programme with the elephant, 2007–) recalled a kindergarten teacher of Turkish origin informing a WDR workshop: I like your programme. It’s all good. … But … my problem with it [is] I don’t see any of our kids, of our Turkish culture integrated in your show. It’s always blonde, blue-eyed, middle-class kids. … Even if I would like to suggest my kids watching your show, I don’t feel good about suggesting them watching this show because it’s not their show. Even if they’re part of Germany.

This comment raises questions about the strategies producers deploy to appeal to both minority and majority audiences. Leurdijk’s 2006 analysis of strategies used by European PSBs in multicultural programming directed at adults reveals similarities with many of the approaches deployed by children’s producers. In interview and in the workshops, four strategies identified by Leurdijk (2006, 33–35) were frequently referenced by producers. The first is the focus on “remarkable individuals” whose stories enable viewers to “relate to the programme.” Another is to concentrate on “daily life situations,” that children can “easily recognize.” Third is an emphasis on “relaxation and entertainment” to make difficult issues more accessible to a mainstream audience. This connects finally with the search for “universal emotions and experiences,” which serve to attract audiences by making those who are represented “recognizable to people with different cultural backgrounds.” The earliest European factual films from 2015 about refugee children in the Greek camps, such as the Dutch documentary Hello Salaam (NPO Zapp, 2017) and Danish documentary, Ferie på Flygtningeøen (Vacation on the refugee island, DR Ultra, 2017), were critiqued by workshop participants for showing Arab children as victims with little regard for their previous lives and the different facets of their identity shaped by what a Syrian participant summarised as “their culture … their music, their literature … their stories.” A sense of children’s agency and participation is confined to the European children who are visiting the refugee camps. In Vacation on Refugee Island, Alvin, a Danish boy, is the one filmed making contact, giving out sweets to children, and reflecting on the experience. These difficulties of both representation and participation brought to the

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fore other questions about the perceived narrowness of some portrayals, including an occasional focus on religion and certain foods as proxies for Arab culture. Participants were torn between worries about overplaying the diversity of children’s experiences, with the risk of unintentionally reinforcing a sense of “them” and “us,” and putting more focus on diverse stories. A Lebanese participant said: “I don’t think we can pretend to know what these children are feeling and thinking, but it could be better to put in context what they’re asking and wondering about…. It serves everyone to understand, whether it’s the host or the migrants.” One answer to this dilemma emerged in the workshops in the form of films about “remarkable individuals” (Leurdijk 2006, 32). All participants viewed the Dutch documentary Een Jaar zonder mijn Ouders (A year without my parents, NPO Zapp, 2017) as a sympathetic and sensitive portrayal of a Syrian boy, Tareq, in the Netherlands. Similar sentiments were expressed about Swiss documentary Ayham: Mein neues Leben (Ayham: My new life, Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen/SRF, 2016), about a 10-year-old Syrian boy, now living in Switzerland, who dreams about becoming a football player. The Dutch documentary De Kinderburgemeester (The children’s mayor, NPO Zapp, 2017) was another example, portraying “democracy in practice,” as it followed the exploits of Yassine, a Moroccan-Dutch boy, who becomes Gouda’s children’s mayor for 1 year. A Danish producer with an immigrant background said of the film: It shows that, even though you have another skin colour, you can still have dreams and be able to pursue them. When I was growing up, I was limited. If I said I wanted to do something [I was told] “why don’t you do ­something else?” I really like the perspective that he might have a dream of being there one day.

Attempts to show “diversity within diversity” (Panis et  al. 2019, 15) were foregrounded when children from different immigrant backgrounds were shown interacting with each other. The Dutch documentary Heijplaters (NPO Zapp, 2018) follows an ethnically diverse group of boys living in the Rotterdam harbour district, showing what they do together and their “friendship in times of polarisation,” rather than making an issue of their “different cultural backgrounds or beliefs,” according to director, Mirjam Marks. In the six-part German drama series, Dschermeni (ZDF, 2017) for 9–12-year olds, which follows four children from different ethnic and class backgrounds, the writers deliberately avoided narratives

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about religion and race, in favour of stories around illegal working, homosexuality, youth crime and the threat of deportation. A Syrian participant praised the series for confronting political aspects of migration and asylum as a form of “political education.” A Canadian-based producer of Lebanese heritage admired the way it shed light on the wider and intersecting nature of discrimination, which extends beyond race and religion. Workshop participants liked individual documentaries which depicted refugee children “in charge” of their lives and helping others. The Dutch film Het Haar van Ahmad (Ahmad’s hair, NPO Zapp, 2016) tells the story of a Syrian boy, now living in the Netherlands, who grows his hair to donate to a Dutch child who has lost theirs after illness. For one participant, herself a former refugee, It’s very rare that we see refugee children doing something that would be teaching the host children to do something, whether it’s as simple as kicking the ball and scoring a goal or even helping out, with helping to solve a problem. Usually what we see is victimisation…

Arab participants appreciated dramas that depicted the resourcefulness of children newly arrived in Europe, such as the one-off dramas, Nur (RTV Slovenija, 2014) from Slovenia and Swing (Radio Televizija Srbije— RTS, 2017) from Serbia, made as part of the EBU Drama Exchange for 6–9-year-olds. A Palestinian researcher noted that both depicted “strong kids,” who “want to be responsible” and “take care of themselves.” But there was little sense in many of the items that children had genuinely participated in the production process. Directors had forged good ­relationships with their subjects, but they were the ones constructing the narratives, which begs a question in relation to the idea of “diversity within diversity”: namely whether and how children can be genuinely involved in content creation, beyond speaking parts written by an adult. Although several producers stressed their desire to explain diversity and migration through the eyes of children, the idea of children’s participation was less clearly articulated. In a spectrum of participation represented by the shows viewed in the workshops, one approach is to create a story about a child without necessarily negotiating with them what will be shown. At the other end of the spectrum is an approach whereby children become actively involved in the production process, not just as actors or subjects, but collaborating with adults as part of the production team. A lack of adult collaboration with children stands in stark contrast to the online

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activities of some children, who make their own content and emerge as social media “influencers” (Evans 2018). Producers acknowledge this development, but rarely seem to reach out to children as production collaborators. This final level of participation and consultation with children was unusual and was really only reflected in two Dutch examples viewed at the workshops. The first was The One Minutes Junior films (2017), 11 Dutch films of 60 seconds duration. The second was Zara and the Magic Football Boots (Zara en de magische kicksen, 2018), a six-part drama made for the Dutch public service affiliate broadcaster, VPRO, part of NPO, in 2018. Both initiatives involved collaboration with the Amsterdam-based Cinekid children’s film festival and the Dutch Vrolijkheid Foundation, which works with children in refugee centres. In the One Minutes Junior films, children living in refugee centres took part in 1-week workshops where they were helped by filmmakers and artists to make their own films for distribution on YouTube, at the Cinekid festival in Amsterdam and instead of trailers screened with feature films at the Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam. The executive producer stressed the importance to children of “voicing out their lives,” not just on YouTube, where they might not be found, but publicly at events like the Cinekid festival because “they have to be shown to others.” The children chose their own topics, storyboards, style and format, and although some films dealt with migration, others did not, reflecting the children’s varied interests and concerns. Some workshop participants wondered whether the experience could have been more useful if the refugee children had worked together with European-born children; others wanted to know more about the extent to which adults had managed the activities. Zara and the Magic Football Boots, scripted by Dutch writers and set in a refugee centre, is about a refugee girl who wants to be part of a boys’ soccer team. Like the One Minute films, the series went beyond mere representation to invite refugee children to take on supporting roles as part of the production crew during their summer holidays and create their own animation sequences in the film. These two examples do not represent the full scope of children’s potential participation in production, and, as the workshop exchanges indicated, there are issues to be discussed about the true extent of their involvement, their labour and reward. However, as an intermediary stage between children creating and circulating their own media content online and the situation of adults producing for children, this collaborative approach might go some way towards opening up “opportunities for communication”

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between and across “generations” (Buckingham 2018, ix) allowing children’s voices to be accessed, encouraged and heard in new ways. Another intermediate form of children’s participation is seen with a shift towards infotainment formats with cross-cultural appeal in which children decide the terms of their involvement—what they choose to talk about and do. An example of this approach was evident in the Emmy Award-winning eight-part German reality series Berlin und Wir (Berlin and Us, 2016–17) from German public broadcaster ZDF. This series brought together eight German and refugee children aged 11–15 in Berlin as friends. The show was produced by Imago TV, since 2008 a Berlin-­ based subsidiary of UK broadcaster-producer, ITV Productions. Imago TV has previous experience of producing entertainment and reality TV for adult audiences. The producers made it clear in interview that the series could not have been made without the children’s active participation and agreement on how they would engage with each other through different social and sports activities during filming. The show’s independent producer explained the intention as having the production “driven by the children,” who decided what they would do together as a “kind of social experiment” to see how they would get along. According to the ZDF executive producer, this meant listening to the children, taking them “seriously” and being “respectful of all they say.” It meant allowing them to talk about difficult topics including their different religious or non-­ religious practices in order to counter prevailing trends where “everybody’s talking about the others, not with them.” The children met each other off camera without the production team to develop their friendships “without all the impact of the adults.” The crew filmed them, but the producers also used clips the children had filmed on their phones and the children chose “what they wanted to just show for themselves.” This approach shows that “diversity within diversity” can be achieved both on screen and within the production process by acknowledging that children have a role to play in deciding how they are represented. For this ZDF producer, the strategy offered opportunities to reflect diversity between and within different groups of children, both migrant and non-migrant, and hopefully encourage greater tolerance: For all of us there was a hope that if you let the kids do as they want, they grow together and then there is some real kind of integration or living together because … everybody’s respectful to the other and the kids, … because they had the same projects, the same things they did together, then you see, “Oh, you can let everybody be him or herself and with a little bit of

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tolerance and a little bit of curiosity, there’s possibility to live together and everybody feels comfortable.” That’s what we wanted to show and I think kids who watch it can identify with those kids we saw.

The producers felt their approach was validated by online feedback from refugee children on ZDF’s website to the effect that this was one of the first programmes they could identify with, because somebody was telling “their story.” A further type of intermediate response to children’s participation in the production process is practised by the Danish channel, DR Ultra, in its imminent move to online-only distribution in 2020. According to a DR executive, this has led to adjustments in the production process to actively involve children as “junior editors,” inviting their feedback and participation on scripts and character development as an example of “interaction, cooperation and co-ownership” and a “reality check.” Again, the practice raises questions about the terms of children’s participation and labour but does offer opportunities for further exploration. A DR commissioning editor, speaking at the London symposium, justified the approach as a way of understanding young Danish audiences and drawing them in to watch, because although we are really good at producing TV and making it entertaining, … we are really not good at understanding how a child thinks… I still can only be an expert on how my own life was as a child. So good advice is to take [children’s contribution] seriously from the start and allocate resources.

Conclusion This chapter examined responses to the refugee crisis from European children’s producers and broadcasters through interviews and a set of cross-­ cultural workshop encounters between Arab and European practitioners, who watched examples of European screen content for children dealing with issues around migration and diversity. In this way it gained insights into how diversity is managed in children’s content, the constraints that affect this management process and the opportunities that exist for promoting greater diversity in children’s content. Through the lens of managing “diversity within diversity” (Panis et al. 2019), it explored how the “professional pragmatics” (Cottle 1998) of practitioners in relation to the practical contexts of production, distribution and reception affect responses. It considered children’s own participation in the production

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process as a possible route to more equitable representation that recognises children’s role as stakeholders in the production community, both on their own terms and in collaboration with adults. Although the workshops unearthed a wide variety of European content, they also revealed considerable hurdles in representing the growing ethnocultural diversity of Europe’s children in the face of the diminishing role of PSB, pressures on funding, lack of diversity within the workforce, and the rapidly changing dynamics of content distribution which reflect shifting power-geometries within the industry away from traditional broadcasting towards online provision. Despite some differences of opinion about the best way to represent children from migrant backgrounds, there were many shared expectations among Arab and European participants about the best way to represent diversity and forced migration, how to tackle institutional weaknesses, as well as finding better ways of responding to and engaging with children’s own articulated needs and knowledge. Nevertheless, in parallel with a general lack of studies of minority ethnic audiences, few of the films and TV series were made with a view to having children participate in the production process to establish what they “might think, want, or say about media representations” (Cottle 2000, 24). European producers were keen to highlight diversity within children’s content but there was less certainty about children’s participation in production, whether in the form of limited consultation or more concerted efforts to involve them behind the camera and actually act on what they have to say. Except for a few limited initiatives from the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany, most productions are still shaped by adult priorities, a feature that European practitioners share with their Arab colleagues. While the qualitative nature of information from the workshops does not allow for generalisations, it does point to avenues for developing diversity by getting children more involved. For example, in contrast to one-off documentaries about refugees’ arrival and their “new” lives, which may have limited viewership and appeal in the face of transformations in the distribution and signposting of children’s content, there was more enthusiasm for series, either drama or factual, which go beyond issues of cultural difference or hardship and show children with their own clear sense of identity, who are likeable and with whom all children can identify. Even then the YouTube challenge remains, since older children are already creating their own programming. This makes it urgent for producers to find the resources and insights to engage children as “stakeholders” more effectively.

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References Awan, Feryal. 2016. Occupied Childhoods: Discourses and Politics of Childhood and Their Place in Palestinian and Pan-Arab Screen Content for Children. PhD diss., University of Westminster. Azizi, Asmaa. 2018. Arab Perspectives on Media, Children, Forced Migration and Diversity. Paper presented to Invisible Children: Children’s Media, Diversity, and Forced Migration Symposium, King’s College London, September 13. Banerjee, Indrajit, and Kalinga Seneviratne. 2005. Public Service Broadcasting: A Best Practices Sourcebook. Paris: UNESCO. BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation). 2016. Diversity and Inclusion Strategy 2016–2020. London: BBC. Benzine, Adam. 2009. Al Jazeera: Arab Production ‘Immature’. C21 Media, October 4. https://www.c21media.net/al-jazeera-arab-production-immature/ ?ss=Bouneb. Accessed 4 May 2019. Bisson, Guy. 2018. Interview with Fadel Zahreddine, MBC Group. Miptrends Mipblog.com, August 27. https://mipblog.com/2018/08/kids-content-inthe-future-should-allow-avatars-to-be-part-of-the-narrative-interview-withfadel-zahreddine-mbc-group/. Accessed 19 April 2019. Bryant, J.  Alison. 2007. Understanding the Children’s Television Community from an Organizational Network Perspective. In The Children’s Television Community, ed. J.  Alison Bryant, 35–56. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Buckingham, David. 2018. Forward. In Researching Everyday Childhoods: Time, Technology and Documentation in a Digital Age, ed. Rachel Thomson, Liam Berriman, and Sara Bragg, vii–vxi. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Cola, Marta, Maarina Nikunen, Alexander Dhoest, and Gavan Titley. 2013. Lost in Mainstreaming? Ethnic Minority Audiences for Public and Private Television Broadcasting. In Audience Transformations: Shifting Audience Positions in Late Modernity, ed. Nico Carpentier, Kim Christian Schrøder, and Lawrie Hallett, 82–100. Abingdon: Routledge. Corner, John. 1999. Critical Ideas in Television Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cottle, Simon. 1998. Making Ethnic Minority Programmes Inside the BBC: Professional Pragmatics and Cultural Containment. Media, Culture and Society 20 (2): 295–371. ———. 2000. Media Research and Ethnic Minorities: Mapping the Field. In Ethnic Minorities and the Media, ed. Simon Cottle, 1–31. Buckingham: Open University Press. ———. 2003. Media Organisation and Production: Mapping the Field. In Media Organisation and Production, ed. Simon Cottle, 3–24. London: Sage.

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D’Arma, Alessandro, and A.  Labio. 2017. Making a Difference? Public Service Broadcasting, Distinctiveness and Children’s Provision in Italy and Spain. International Journal of Digital Television 8 (2): 183–199. Dhoest, Alexander. 2014. Struggling with Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity in Flemish Public Broadcasting Policies and Programming. In National Conversations: Public Service Media and Cultural Diversity in Europe, ed. Karina Horsti, Gunilla Hultén, and Gavan Titley, 105–124. Bristol: Intellect. Eurostat. 2017. Main Countries of Citizenship and Birth of the Foreign Born-­ Born Population, January 1. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statisticsexplained/index.php?title=File:Main_countries_of_citizenship_and_birth_ of_the_foreign_foreign-born_population,_1_January_2017_(in_absolute_ numbers_and_as_a_percentage_of_the_total_foreign_foreign-born_population).png#file. Accessed 1 April 2019. Evans, Aled. 2018. Live Action Strikes Back: Kids TV in the Online Era. IHS Markit report for MipTV/Mipcom, October. https://www.miptrends.com/tv-business/kids-live-action-tv-strikes-back-in-the-online-age/. Accessed 5 May 2019. FRA—European Agency for Fundamental Rights. 2008. A Diversity Toolkit for Factual Programmes in Public Service Television. Brussels: EU Agency for Fundamental Rights. https://fra.europa.eu/en/publication/2008/diversitytoolkit-factual-programmes-public-service-television. Accessed 4 May 2019. Gillespie, Marie, Lawrence Ampofo, and Margaret Cheesman. 2016. Mapping Syrian Refugee Media Journeys: Smartphones and Social Media Networks, The Open University and France Médias Monde, May. http://www.open.ac.uk/ ccig/research/projects/mapping-refugee-media-journeys. Accessed 6 May 2019. Gӧtz, Maya, and Dafna Lemish. 2012. Sexy Girls, Heroes and Funny Losers: Gender Representations in Children’s TV Around the World. New York: Peter Lang. Horsti, Karina, Gunilla Hultén, and Gavan Titley. 2014. National Conversations: Public Service Media and Cultural Diversity in Europe. In National Conversations: Public Service Media and Cultural Diversity in Europe, ed. Karina Horsti, Gunilla Hultén, and Gavan Titley, 1–20. Bristol: Intellect. Kingdon, John W. 2011. Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies. 2nd ed. Glenview, IL: Longman. Leurdijk, Andra. 2006. In Search of Common Ground: Strategies of Multicultural Television Producers in Europe. European Journal of Cultural Studies 9 (1): 25–46. Lustyik, Katalin. 2013. From a Socialist Endeavour to a Commercial Enterprise: Children’s Television in East-Central Europe. In Popular Television in Eastern Europe During and Since Socialism, ed. Aniko Imre, Tim Havens, and Katalin Lustyik, 105–122. London: Routledge. Malik, Sarita. 2013. ‘Creative Diversity’: UK Public Service Broadcasting After Multiculturalism. Popular Communication 11 (3): 227–241.

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Markova, Eugenia, and Sonia McKay. 2011. Media Recruitment and Employment Practices. Florence: Mediva: Media for Diversity and Migrant Integration. http://cadmus.eui.eu//handle/1814/19731. Accessed 4 May 2019. Massey, Doreen. 1993. Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place. In Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, ed. Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, George Robertson, and Lisa Tickner, 59–69. London: Routledge. Mattelart, Tristan. 2014. Entre intégration et sécurité intérieure, les politiques de la ‘diversité’ à la television française. In Médias et migrations dans l’espace euro-­ méditerranéan, ed. Tristan Mattelart, 209–236. Paris: Editions Mare et Martin. MEDIVA. 2012. Policy Brief. Florence: European University Institute. https:// www.eui.eu/Projects/MEDIVA/Documents/PolicyBrief/Migrant IntegrationinEuropeWhatroleforthemedia.pdf. Accessed 4 May 2019. Ofcom. 2018. Diversity and Equal Opportunities in Television. London: Ofcom. ———. 2019. Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes Report 2018. London: Ofcom. Panis, Koen, Steve Paulussen, and Alexander Dhoest. 2019. Managing Super-­ Diversity on Television: The Representation of Ethnic Minorities in Flemish Non-Fiction Programmes. Cogitatio. Media and Communication 7 (1): 13–21. Rose, Gillian. 2016. Rethinking the Geographies of Cultural ‘Objects’ Through Digital Technologies: Interface, Network and Friction. Progress in Human Geography 40 (3): 334–351. Sakr, Naomi. 2017. Forces for Change in Official Arab Policies on Media and Children. In Children’s TV and Digital Media in the Arab World, ed. Naomi Sakr and Jeanette Steemers, 45–73. London: IB Tauris. Sakr, Naomi, and Jeanette Steemers. 2016. Co-producing Content for Pan-Arab Children’s TV. In Production Studies: The Sequel, ed. Miranda Banks, Bridget Conor, and Vicki Mayer, 238–250. New York and London: Routledge. Sesame Workshop. 2018. The LEGO Foundation Awards $100 million to Sesame Workshop to Bring the Power of Learning Through Play to Children Affected by the Rohingya and Syrian Refugee Crises. Press Release. December 5. https://www.sesameworkshop.org/press-room/press-releases/lego-foundation-awards-100-million-sesame-workshop-bring-power-learning. Accessed 17 April 2019. Sreberny, Annabelle. 2000. Media and Diasporic Consciousness. In Ethnic Minorities and the Media, ed. Simon Cottle, 179–196. Buckingham: Open University Press. Steemers, Jeanette. 2010. Creating Preschool Television. Basingstoke: Palgrave. ———. 2017. Industry Engagement with Policy on Public Service Television for Children: BBC Charter Review and the Public Service Content Fund. Media Industries 4 (1): 1–16. Steemers, Jeanette, and Alessandro D’Arma. 2012. Evaluating and Regulating the Role of Public Broadcasters in the Children’s Media Ecology: The Case of

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Home-Grown Television Content. International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics 8 (1): 67–85. Steemers, Jeanette, Naomi Sakr, and Christine Singer. 2018. Facilitating Arab-­ European Dialogue: Consolidated Report on an AHRC Project for Impact and Engagement: Children’s Screen Content in an Era of Forced Migration—8 October 2017 to 3 November 2018. London: King’s College London. https:// kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/por tal/files/102210294/Consolidated_Repor t_ FinalSV_221018.pdf. Accessed 4 May 2019. UNICEF. 2017. Children in a Digital World. New  York: United Nations Children’s Fund. https://www.unicef.org/publications/files/SOWC_2017_ ENG_WEB.pdf. Accessed 4 May 2019. Vertovec, Steven. 2007. Super-Diversity and Its Implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies 30 (6): 1024–1054. Woodgate, Jonathan. 2018. Is Kids’ Preferred TV Content Changing. MIPTV Trends/Dubit. https://www.miptrends.com/tv-business/kids-preferred-tvcontent-changing/. Accessed 4 May 2019.

CHAPTER 6

Children’s Visibility as Stakeholders: From Provision to Participation

Abstract  As the present work is prompted in part by the scale of children’s displacement across the Arab region and demographic change in Europe, we start the final chapter by comparing theory and practice in the use of screen media to provide visibility for children experiencing disruption and uncertainty. We consider two documented projects designed to promote refugee and migrant children’s participation in media-making, in the context of ideas about children’s participation generally. We then go on to sum up the book’s findings about the cross-regional encounters it explored in relation to provision of screen media for children, its production and the policies behind it, and how recognising that children are stakeholders in production processes and decision-making could improve media visibility for all children. Keywords  Children and media participation • Children and migration • Children as stakeholders • Child ethnic minorities • Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) • Participatory media-making Today the trope of invisibility is evoked quite often in relation to children and media. Certain children are said to be invisible in screen content aimed at child audiences for all sorts of reasons: their ethnic background, socioeconomic status, ambiguous age between obvious “child” status and young adulthood, or simply because imported animation is cheaper than © The Author(s) 2019 N. Sakr, J. Steemers, Screen Media for Arab and European Children, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25658-6_6

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making local live action content that would represent local children in all their diversity (Steemers 2019, 180–84). At the same time “great swaths of the child population” are said to be “invisible” in research on children and media, perhaps because they are poor, displaced, undocumented, absent from school, disabled, or simply because they live outside Europe and North America (Jordan and Prendella 2019, 235–36). Clearly, marginalisation and invisibility go together almost by definition. Yet, if visibility is part of what is needed to end marginalisation, it matters that children are still deemed invisible for so many different reasons. As the present work is prompted in part by the scale of children’s displacement across the Arab region and demographic change in Europe, we start the final chapter by comparing theory and practice in the use of screen media to provide visibility for children experiencing disruption and uncertainty. The chapter goes on to sum up the book’s findings about the cross-regional encounters it explored in relation to provision of screen media for children, its production and the policies behind it.

Theory and Practice in Combining Participation with Provision The book, in keeping with its title, has focused mainly on what screen content is provided for Arab and European children through separate and collaborative policy and production mechanisms. As noted in Chap. 1, children have a distinct interest in the resulting policy and production outcomes and, as such, can confidently be classed as stakeholders. One question for the book, also indicated in Chap. 1, was whether provision of screen content for children is sometimes combined with children’s participation in that provision. That is, whether children sometimes influence the outcomes as “policy actors” (Van den Bulck and Donders 2014, 20–21) or producers as well as stakeholders. Before summarising some answers to that question as part of the next section, it makes sense to review two documented projects designed to promote refugee and migrant children’s participation in media-making, in the context of ideas about children’s participation generally, to discover the projects’ findings about the benefits and challenges and to compare them in terms of target age groups and scale with initiatives examined in this book. Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is the article most often cited as underpinning children’s

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right to participation and is “arguably the convention provision with the most potential to raise the visibility of children worldwide” (Parkes 2013, 264). It guarantees the child “who is capable of forming his or her own views” the right “to express those views freely” and “to be heard” “in all matters affecting” them. The Committee on the Rights of the Child, the body that oversees implementation of the CRC (see Chap. 3), asserts that the capacity to form views is not limited by age and applies to younger as well as older children; it stated in General Comment No 7 in 2005 that young children “make choices and communicate their feelings, ideas and wishes in numerous ways, long before they are able to communicate through the conventions of spoken or written language” (quoted in Parkes 2013, 32). Many specialists judge that this right to “have a voice” has been “an extremely important benchmark in the growth of children’s right to protect themselves from abuse or neglect” in both majority world countries and the rich countries of Europe and North America (Hart 2009, 9). In this respect, Article 12 is linked to Article 13, on freedom of expression, which includes the right to “impart information and ideas of all kinds … in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child’s choice.” As Hart points out, several other articles in the Convention also have “important implications for children’s social participation in their communities” (ibid., 9). Among them is Article 31, according to which states “shall respect and promote the right of the child to participate fully in cultural and artistic life.” There is wide consensus that major challenges remain in making children’s participation a reality in key areas of life, and that their participation, both political and economic, may be manifest in different forms across the majority and minority worlds (Liebel and Saadi 2012, 179–80). Against that background the media sector seems to offer promising opportunities for children’s participatory engagement with adults and for their voices to be heard on all sorts of topics. Yet participation of marginalised children through media-making has most often been small scale: it takes place mainly among peers or with a small number of concerned adults and is not intended to contribute to providing mainstream content aimed at children in other communities. In 2001–04 a research project took place with European Union funding under the title Children in Communication about Migration (CHICAM). Research partners in Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Greece and the UK set up media-making clubs in each country, where children aged 10–14 who were recent migrants or refugees met

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regularly to create and share short videotapes with each other and the other clubs (de Block and Buckingham 2007, ix–x). The CHICAM project took place before the rise of digital video, at a time when television was the “dominant medium” for pre-teenagers (ibid., 69, 98). It demonstrated that the “media can play a vital role in facilitating communication between migrants and the new cultures to which they have come, as well as sustaining global and transnational connections” (ibid., 198) and that migrant children, just like others, were already using many communication media in their everyday lives (ibid., 155). But it also showed that, while providing possibilities for self-expression that were “less easily available” by other means, especially for children “typically rendered invisible … in the public media,” giving children access to media production didn’t “magically empower them or enable their voices to be heard” (ibid., 176, 155). Questions remained, even in the clubs, about who ultimately defines children’s interests and it was also apparent that “education and educators” need to “assist those who have not migrated to be able to live in a globalising world” (ibid., 199). The researchers called for educational and cultural policies that would explicitly support the use of media to facilitate “equality of access and representation for marginalised groups” (ibid., 198–199). One such policy was put in place in the Netherlands, starting with a 1-year project at a school in Utrecht in 2012–13, which was repeated in 2016 with the school’s own funding and later funded to 2019 by the Dutch National Research Agenda (Leurs et  al. 2018, 432). The programme came about through the initiative of teachers at a school where a majority of students were refugees or from migrant backgrounds at the time of the project, taking part in a special course of 2–3 years aimed at preparing young newcomers to the Netherlands between the ages of 12 and 18 to enrol in regular Dutch secondary education or vocational training. Called Media Literacy Through Making Media (MMM), it started because teachers were conscious that their students had specific needs and capabilities and thought they would not benefit from existing schemes. The project was not aimed at engaging with wider media, but at offering “counterpoints to dominant representations” of victimhood and despair (ibid., 429). It found that “making media and showing it to peers can become an act of civic engagement, agency and empowerment, which is important for self-development, identity and belonging” (ibid., 447). It concluded that refugee and migrant children have plenty in common with “fellow Dutch teenagers,” being “socialized in a global and national youth

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culture which revolves around rap/hip-hop, taking selfies and vlogging.” Yet teachers involved with the project realised that the national and transnational media landscape has a “distinct impact” on these children’s daily lives; students from Syria, for example, received a “near-constant stream” of reports about “bombings, atrocities and violence” from places they had fled (ibid., 434). The purpose and outcomes of participatory media-making projects like CHICAM and MMM give perspective to projects that are similar in intent but bring the voices of younger refugee and migrant children to a national audience through public service media platforms, including dedicated YouTube channels. Chapter 5 highlighted examples of marginalised children taking part in production of mainstream screen media aimed at children, as producers, actors in unscripted and semi-scripted shows and advisors. Such examples remain relatively rare, but their existence is instructive in light of the benefits of such engagement for those in front of the screen as well as those behind it, and in view of the challenge of avoiding tokenism, adult-centrism and the mimicking of adult procedures in activities in which children are assumed to participate. For, just as it is necessary to draw attention to children’s right to participate, it is also important, as David Buckingham points out (Buckingham 2018, ix) not to romanticise children’s “apparently spontaneous competence” with digital media, and thereby “ignore the increasingly complex demands that children have to negotiate, and the learning that this requires.” Even if children are “communicating in new ways, that does not necessarily mean they have greater agency or social power” (Buckingham 2018, x). Indeed, it has been argued that, since agency is “produced in relationships,” children’s agency is not something they possess by nature but is “produced in conjunction with a whole network of different human and non-human actors, and is distributed among these” (Esser et al. 2016, 9).

Concluding Overview Recognising that agency comes about through interactions and relationships brings us back to questions about who makes decisions and where they get made. In attempting to map in this book the multiple connections that exist between Arab and European countries in respect of screen media for children, we found links, relationships and collaborations that were not always apparent before. We started out wanting to give more

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v­ isibility to the needs and experiences of Arab children through the lens of screen media production and policy encounters that connect them to their European-born counterparts. One aim was to counter the “industry lore” (Havens 2007) that privileges North American and European accounts of how the industry works and how it should respond to the challenges of multiplatform distribution, since those responses are just as relevant to children in Morocco or Saudi Arabia as they are to children in the Netherlands or the UK. But the deeper we looked, the more the overarching issue of children’s participation—not only in production initiatives but also children’s rights and status as stakeholders in policy decisions— became a more salient component of our analysis. While children’s participation at policy levels is barely visible, visibility is increasing around their participation in terms of choosing the screen content they access. Despite persistent inequalities in government and industry responses to children’s media needs, Chap. 2 revealed huge similarities in what children watch across Europe, the Gulf and North Africa, because—alongside European content—so much of it comes from the US. European governments give marginal attention to children’s content through public service broadcaster mandates, albeit increasingly grudgingly. This does mean that some local programming is produced and shown, and US transnationals have localised their different services through separate language feeds. By contrast the pan-Arab approach adopted by US transnationals, Arab pay TV operators and broadcasters based primarily in the region’s most affluent states militates against recognising or celebrating the diversity of children across the majority of Arabic-­ speaking countries. Against this background of disparate approaches to provision, children in both regions are increasingly challenging constraints on their choices, by watching content online, mainly on YouTube. What they see there may not be professionally produced, but it connects them to their peers and means they can engage with children and young people who look like them. However, this form of participation needs to be evaluated in the light of divergences in income levels, government investment in infrastructure and children’s limited access to broadband internet in many contexts, including poorer parts of the Arab world, since this is a prerequisite to watching video online. Wealth and access to online media constitute constraints on children’s participation but these factors are not always acknowledged in industry or academic accounts. To guarantee provision and participation in screen content requires policies and, crucially, the regulatory interventions that stem from them to

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ensure that children do have access to content and can exercise their communications rights as stakeholders. Overall, Arab and European countries appear to pay lip service to children’s communications rights, which are rarely taken seriously or enforced. Commercial companies and some regulators research children’s media habits to understand the market, but children’s views on their cultural experiences and interactions with screen media are rarely elicited or analysed and are always filtered through adult interpretations and frames. Chapter 3 showed how slowly both Arab and European countries have responded to the challenges of online media and how much more emphasis there has been on talking about protection from online harms rather than seriously investigating, jointly with children, how to achieve it. Regulatory responses at a pan-European and national level have been underpinned by self- and co-regulation, rather than interventions that could hold powerful US tech companies to account. Children are rarely acknowledged as stakeholders in macro-level policy discussions. Instead, adults in charge of policy are usually more interested in securing conditions to enable the industry to thrive, through measures such as tax breaks or quotas. Advocates may speak for children in terms of provision and protection, defining what is best for them. But, when adults always call the shots internationally and nationally, they risk obscuring much-needed innovations that might come from working with children. Moving away from the macro level of policymaking to the more intermediate and micro levels of production and distribution, Chap. 4 explored cross-cultural collaborations on a much broader spectrum of screen-based outputs than television programmes, covering a subscription video-on-­ demand app, educational video, a digital platform and film scriptwriting and pitching. In looking into specific partnerships, the analysis highlighted issues that recur in such contexts, around local cultural norms, whether to prioritise “learning” or “fun” and the related question of whether to address children in their everyday local dialects or use a more demanding standardised literary form of Arabic that can work for the region as a whole. But the case studies also looked outwards, viewing each collaboration as part of a wider productive network involving a multiplicity of dispersed players, each with their own agenda, background and imperatives. The dynamics of these networks complicate attempts to pinpoint decision-­ making processes. Yet exploring them uncovered pre-existing relationships—like MBC’s UK links, Discovery’s global connections, Lamsa’s position in a nascent regional educational technology sector, and contacts

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established through the Danish-Egyptian Dialogue Institute (DEDI) project’s antecedents in Syria. Importantly, these relationships already straddled geopolitical boundaries before the specific partnerships came about, reflecting the deeper, long-term influences of cross-regional dynamics. Those dynamics did not involve consultation with children. Dialogues that took place between Arab and European practitioners in 2017–18 in a series of events around the creation of European content for the continent’s refugee and immigrant children provided insights into industry responses to the increasing diversity of Europe’s child audiences following forced migration from Syria and elsewhere. These in turn revealed obstacles to more diverse representation, which arise through trends affecting funding, recruitment and the move to online distribution. European producers say they are keen to represent immigrants in all their diversity and are backed by policies and practices developed within public service media environments. However, these do not deal specifically with immigrant children and there is some uncertainty about how to involve children in consultations about what goes on behind the camera. Experience gained from limited initiatives in the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany did offer some pointers about the need for children themselves to define the terms of their engagement rather than to do so on adult terms. This implies that faithful recognition of children’s ethnocultural diversity requires institutional management to take steps to improve adult awareness of the links between production choices and the sociocultural impacts of how children are represented on screen. Involving children more effectively and equitably in production processes and decision-making could lead to innovative responses that generate better content. It is important not to underestimate the challenges. Giving children more opportunities to make and distribute media content themselves on social media or in collaboration with adults is only likely to give them more agency or better representation if their voices are actively sought out, listened to, thought about and discussed, so that they have a say in how they are portrayed.

References de Block, Liesbeth, and David Buckingham. 2007. Global Children, Global Media: Migration, Media and Childhood. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Buckingham, David. 2018. Foreword. In Researching Everyday Childhoods: Time, Technology and Documentation in a Digital Age, ed. Rachel Thomson, Liam Berriman, and Sara Bragg, vii–vxi. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

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Esser, Florian, Meike Bader, Tanja Betz, and Beatrice Hungerland. 2016. Reconceptualising Agency and Childhood: An Introduction. In Reconceptualising Agency and Childhood: New Perspectives in Childhood Studies, ed. Florian Esser, Meike Bader, Tanja Betz, and Beatrice Hungerland, 1–16. Abingdon: Routledge. Hart, Roger. 2009. Charting Change in the Participatory Settings of Childhood. In Children, Politics and Communication: Participation at the Margins, ed. Nigel Thomas, 7–29. Bristol: The Policy Press. Havens, Timothy. 2007. Universal Childhood: The Global Trade in Children’s Television and Changing Ideals of Childhood. Global Media Journal 6/10. http://www.globalmediajournal.com/open-access/universal-childhood-theglobal-trade-in-childrens-television-and-changing-ideals-of-childhood. php?aid=35250. Accessed 23 April 2019. Jordan, Amy, and Kate Prendella. 2019. The Invisible Children of Media Research. Journal of Children and Media 13 (2): 235–240. Leurs, Koen, Ena Omerović, Hemmo Bruinenberg, and Sanne Sprenger. 2018. Critical Media Literacy Through Making Media: A Key to Participation for Young Migrants? Communications 43 (3): 427–450. Liebel, Manfred, and Iven Saadi. 2012. Cultural Variations in Constructions of Children’s Participation. In Children’s Rights From Below: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, ed. Manfred Liebel, 162–182. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Parkes, Aisling. 2013. Children and International Human Rights Law: The Right of the Child to be Heard. Abingdon: Routledge. Steemers, Jeanette. 2019. Invisible Children: Inequalities in the Provision of Screen Content for Children. In Digital Media Inequalities: Policies Against Divides, Distrust and Discrimination, ed. Josef Trappel, 179–192. Gӧteborg: Nordicom. Van den Bulck, Hilde, and Karen Donders. 2014. Analysing European Media Policy: Stakeholders and Advocacy Coalitions. In The Palgrave Handbook of European Media Policy, ed. Karen Donders, Caroline Pauwels, and Jan Loisen, 19–35. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Index

A Aardman, 32, 83 Abu Dhabi, 4, 8, 34, 35, 49, 62, 74, 78, 88, 90 Abuse, 12, 55, 129 Adam wa Mishmish, 34 Advertisers/advertising, 13, 25, 28, 29, 31, 35, 37–39, 48–50, 53, 58, 61, 82 Advocacy/advocates, 13, 14, 61, 63, 64, 66, 105, 106 Afghanistan, 6 Ajyal (Saudi Arabian channel), 31 Ajyal Children’s Film Festival (Qatar), 62 Ajyal Industry Forum, 62 Aladdin, 75 Algeria/Algerian, 10, 58, 63 Al-Jazeera Children’s Channel (JCC), 30, 62, 63, 74 Amazon Prime, 21, 23, 32, 35, 61, 112 AMC (US network), 25, 26 Animation, 8, 24, 25, 27, 29, 30, 32, 34–38, 47, 48, 63, 78, 83,

86, 92, 108, 112–114, 118, 127 See also Cartoons Apple, 35, 89, 93 Arab States Broadcasting Union (ASBU), 10 Asian Broadcasting Union (ABU), 10 Asylum, 6, 117 Augmented reality, 89 Austria, 21, 24, 78 Awel, 10, 110 B Baby Shark, 37 Bahrain, 4 Baraem, 30, 34, 78 BBC, 8, 23, 25, 27, 30, 49, 78, 104, 105, 108–110, 113 BBC iPlayer Kids, 49 BBC Media Action, 8, 105 beIN, 24, 27, 29, 30, 37, 38, 78, 83 beIN Media Group, 24 Boomerang, 24

© The Author(s) 2019 N. Sakr, J. Steemers, Screen Media for Arab and European Children, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25658-6

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Boys, 30, 110, 116, 118 Bulgaria, 20, 102 C Canada/Canadian, 23, 25, 28, 32, 35, 38, 117 Cartoon Network, 24, 27, 29, 30, 32, 38, 78 Cartoons, see Animation CBBC, 27, 49, 109 CBeebies, 25, 35, 38, 49, 83, 109–111 Centre international du film pour l’enfance et la jeunesse (CIFEJ), 62 Child Helpline International, 9 Childline, 9 Children’s agency, 115, 131 Cinekid children’s film festival, 108, 118 Civil society, 5, 50, 60, 61, 63, 64, 66, 93 Comedy, 36, 54, 92 Conseil national de l’audiovisuel (CNA), 52 Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel (CSA), 53, 54 Co-regulation, 50, 51, 57, 66, 133 Core Humanitarian Standard, 6 Council of Arab Information Ministers, 52 Council of Europe (CoE), 3, 26, 50, 55, 56, 60 Council of Europe Neighbourhood Partnership(s), 55, 66 Council of Europe Strategy for the Rights of the Child, 56, 66 Croatia, 52 D Danish-Egyptian Dialogue Institute (DEDI), 80, 90–94, 105, 134 Danish Film Institute (DFI), 91, 105

Danmarks Radio (DR), 108 The Day I Became Strong, 11 Denmark/Danish, 7, 48, 49, 90–92, 102, 107, 111–113, 121, 134 Dialect(s), 8, 28, 30, 76, 77, 79, 90, 133 Discovery, 24, 25, 32, 37, 84–87, 93, 94, 133 Discrimination, 6, 117 Disney, 24, 26–29, 31, 32, 35, 38, 75–77, 93, 108 Disneyland, 38 Diversity, 7, 55, 57, 59, 75, 76, 82, 102–104, 107–114, 116, 117, 119–121, 128, 132, 134 Documentaries, 10, 36, 64, 92, 113, 117, 121 DR Ultra, 48, 113, 115, 120 Drama, 9, 11, 23, 25, 38, 47, 49, 63, 79, 83, 87, 90, 108–110, 112, 114, 117, 118, 121 DreamWorks Animation, 25 Dubai, 21, 23–25, 27, 29, 30, 37, 62, 79, 81, 88, 89, 93, 106 Dubit, 80–84 E Education, 4, 5, 7, 57, 74, 84–87, 117, 130 Egypt/Egyptian, 6, 11, 12, 21, 22, 24, 28, 29, 62–65, 84–87, 90–94, 106 Egyptian Knowledge Bank (EKB), 80, 84–87, 93 Entertainment, 24, 37, 61, 77, 80, 87, 112, 113, 115, 119 Ethnicity, 108, 111 Etisalat, 22, 89 EU Audiovisual Media Services Directive, 51, 66 EU MedMedia programme, 56, 63

 INDEX 

European Audiovisual Observatory, 3, 50, 65 European Broadcasting Union (EBU), 3, 63, 103 European Commission, 9, 51 European Platform of Regulatory Authorities (EPRA), 50 European Union (EU), 3, 6, 20, 129 EU’s Audiovisual Media Services Directive, 53 F Facebook, 12, 33, 54, 91 Finland, 53, 87 Flanders/Flemish, 9, 104, 110, 112 Football, 114, 116 4eveR, 9 Fox Networks, 25 France/French, 4, 10, 21, 24, 25, 27, 32, 33, 49, 51, 54, 59, 63, 82, 108, 112, 113 Frozen, 28, 76 G Games, 31, 37, 82, 88–90, 94 Gaza Strip, 4 Gender, 7, 14, 56, 83, 103, 110 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), 50 Generation What, 10 Germany/German, 6, 11, 21, 24, 27, 33, 54, 64, 78, 82, 83, 101, 107, 108, 115, 121, 129, 134 Girls, 6, 30, 110 Goboz, 80–84, 93, 94 Google, 89, 93 Greece, 51, 52, 129 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), 4 Gulli, 25

139

H Hasbro Studios, 32 Haute Autorité de la Communication Audiovisuelle (HACA), 50 Haute Autorité Indépendante de la Communication Audiovisuelle (HAICA), 52 Hopster, 35 I Icflix, 21–23 Immigration/immigrant, see Migration/migrant I-News, 12 Infotainment, 108, 119 Instagram, 54, 113 Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA), 53 International Central Institute for Youth and Educational Television (IZI), 11 International Media Support (IMS), 105 International Rescue Committee (IRC), 7 International Telecommunication Union, 9 Iran, 9, 62 Iraq/Iraqi, 4–7, 9, 64, 113 Ireland/Irish, 32, 49, 55, 83, 104 Italy/Italian, 27, 32, 33, 35, 38, 51, 53, 59, 63, 75, 77, 82, 104, 129 ITV, 26, 119 J Jeem TV, 30–32, 62, 76–79 JimJam, 25 Jordan/Jordanian, 6, 7, 9, 13, 21, 31, 34, 52, 56, 61, 63, 64, 79, 88, 93, 106 Journal of Children and Media, 2

140 

INDEX

K Karameesh, 31 Ketnet, 9 KiKa (Kinderkanal), 27, 64, 108, 110 Kokoa, 87–90 Kurdistan/Kurdish, 8 Kuwait, 4, 34, 58 L Lamsa, 35, 80, 87–90, 93, 94, 133 Lebanon/Lebanese, 6–8, 11, 21, 48, 52, 56, 62–64, 75, 79, 88, 106, 116, 117 Lego Foundation, 7 Libya/Libyan, 4, 6, 63 Little Baby Bum, 34, 37 Live action, 25, 35, 36, 38, 39, 75, 80, 86, 93, 108, 114, 128 M MacArthur Foundation, 7, 8 Majid TV, 74 Mansour, 29, 38, 78 Market failure, 47, 48 Masha and the Bear, 34 MBC, 23, 25, 30, 31, 37, 80–83, 93, 94, 133 MBC3, 25, 29–32, 37, 80–84 Media Commission (Jordan), 52 Media literacy, 51 Mediterranean Network of Regulatory Authorities (MNRA), 51, 54 Merchandising, 31, 37, 39, 82 Migration/migrant, 3, 5, 9, 102, 104, 106, 107, 109, 117–121, 128, 130, 131, 134 Minecraft, 34 MIP Junior, 23, 63 Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), 76–78, 83, 87

Mondo TV, 32, 75 Morocco/Moroccan, 10, 21, 22, 28, 38, 48, 50, 52, 55, 56, 63, 65, 116, 132 My-HD, 25 N Netflix, 20–24, 32, 54, 61, 79, 83, 93, 112 Netherlands/Dutch, 12, 27, 33, 35, 37, 75, 82, 101, 104, 107–109, 111, 113, 115–118, 121, 129, 130, 132, 134 New York University (NYU), 8 Nickelodeon, 23, 27, 29, 32, 108 Nick Jr., 27, 29, 32 Non-governmental organisations (NGOs), 4, 5, 13, 60, 105 Northwestern University in Qatar, 21 Norway, 6, 20 O Ofcom, 35, 47, 49, 106, 111, 113 Oman, 4, 28 Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), 57 Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, 65 OSN, 24, 27, 29, 89 P Pacca Alpaca, 34, 39 Palestine/Palestinian, 9, 60, 62, 74, 87, 117 Pew Research Centre, 6 Poland, 33, 52, 82 Policy community, 61, 66, 107 Portugal/Portuguese, 28, 51, 55, 114

 INDEX 

Preschool/preschooler, 9, 25, 29–32, 34, 39, 64, 87, 109–111, 115 Prix Jeunesse Foundation, 11 Public service broadcaster(s) (PSBs), 47, 93, 102, 103 Public service media (PSM), 49, 103, 131, 134 Q Qatar, 4, 21, 24, 28, 30, 34, 62, 63, 74, 76–78, 82 R Ramadan, 113, 114 Ramasjang, 48 Refugee(s), 3, 5, 6, 9, 12, 14, 101, 102, 105, 109–115, 117–121, 128–131, 134 Regulation/regulatory, 14, 15, 39, 46, 47, 50, 52–54, 56, 59, 60, 65, 66, 107, 132 S SAT7 Academy, 12 SAT7 Kids, 12 Saudi Arabia, 4, 21, 22, 24, 25, 28, 30, 33, 36, 54, 58, 81, 83, 88, 132 Saudi Broadcasting Corporation, 31 Sawa, 9 Scandinavia/Scandinavian, 32, 113 Self-regulation, 50, 54, 57, 65, 66 Serbia, 107, 117 Sesame Street, 34, 61–62, 87, 88 Sesame Workshop, 7, 8, 87, 88, 106 Shahid.net, 25, 80 Shahid Plus, 23, 25 Sharia Law, 57 Sharjah, 62, 89 Slovenia, 53, 108, 117

141

Smartphone, 33, 82 Snapchat, 33 Social differentiation, 14 Social media, 3, 34, 36, 49, 50, 53, 54, 66, 113, 118, 134 Spacetoon, 27, 29, 30, 37 Spain/Spanish, 10, 33, 55, 82 Starz Play Arabia, 22 Storytelling Club, 11, 12 Studio 100, 24, 78 Subscription video-on-demand (SVOD), 21–25, 31, 33, 39, 80–83, 93, 112, 133 Super RTL, 27 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 7 Sweden/Swedish, 33, 49, 82, 92, 101, 129 Switzerland/Swiss, 6, 20, 24, 55, 78, 108, 113, 116 Syria/Syrian, 4–8, 21, 30, 62, 91, 101, 106, 131, 134 T Tablet, 20, 33, 82, 85, 89 Tax credits, 49 Teletubbies, 35, 77 Time Warner, 24, 26, 108 Tunisia/Tunisian, 10, 21, 52, 53, 55, 56, 60, 62, 63, 65 Turkey/Turkish, 6, 8, 75, 78, 79, 110, 115 Turner, 24, 29, 78 Tuyur al-Jannah, 31 Twitter, 54 Twofour54, 49, 88 U Unboxing, 33, 36 UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, 46, 59, 60, 65, 129

142 

INDEX

UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), 6, 45, 46, 54, 56–60, 65, 128, 129 UN CRC Article 2, 6 UN CRC Article 12, 55, 57, 128, 129 UN CRC Article 13, 57, 58, 129 UN CRC Article 16, 57 UN CRC Article 17, 45, 46, 50, 56–60 UN CRC Article 18, 58 UN CRC Article 29, 57 UN CRC Article 31, 129 UN CRC Article 43, 59 UN CRC Article 44, 59 United Arab Emirates (UAE)/Emirati, 4, 21–24, 28, 29, 31, 33, 38, 58, 64, 75, 79, 81, 82, 84, 88, 89, 94 United Kingdom (UK), 4, 9, 21, 24–27, 32–36, 47, 49, 53, 54, 63, 75, 81–84, 86, 87, 93, 104–109, 111, 112, 119, 129, 132, 133 United Nations Children’s Fund’s (UNICEF), 4, 6, 11, 13, 53, 102 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 10, 13, 62, 84, 103 United States (US)/American, 2–5, 7, 21, 22, 24–32, 37, 38, 61, 75, 79, 84, 85, 88, 89, 93, 106, 108, 132, 133 UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 59

V Viacom, 24, 26, 108 Video-on-demand (VOD), 20, 21, 31, 39, 73, 80, 112, 113 Vloggers, 36 The Voice Kids, 37 Vrolijkheid Foundation, 118 W Wadada News for Kids, 12 Where in the World?, 9, 109 WildBrain, 35 World Bank, 21, 85 World Health Organisation (WHO), 53 World Summits on Media for Children, 46 Y Yemen/Yemeni, 4, 21, 108 YouTube, 20, 33–39, 53, 54, 61, 79, 93, 112, 113, 121, 131, 132 Z ZDF, see Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen Zodiak Kids, 32 Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF), 23, 108, 110, 116, 119, 120