Conclusion and Recommendations
There are numerous studies about violence against women in the media, but there is less attention to films, especially Thai films. However, the studies on violence against women in films are more about direct violence, such as sexual violence or physical violence. Correspondingly, Galtung's triangle of violence shows that direct, structural, and cultural violence support each other although cultural violence is violence which people accept, and sometimes they do not even know that the violence is happening. Therefore, this study has attempted to increase the scope of violence against women, and was the first study to track the three types of violence against women in Thai films. In this paper, the discussion centers on perspectives of stakeholders within civil society on violence directed toward women in the selected Thai film. The available evidence seems to suggest that violence against women according to Galtung's violence model is characterized in some of the content in ‘The Eternity’. More specifically, direct violence emerged in the form of rape, slapping, and beating in addition to physical humiliation. Direct violence has been categorized as the commonest form used against women, which needs to be discouraged. Interestingly, only a female respondent highlighted the rape as direct violence in this film. Moreover, one of the areas of violence which does not receive attention, but causes harm to women in most societies is structural violence. In this study, various forms of structural violence were found to be present in ‘The Eternity’. For example, the display of gender inequality could be seen to reinforce conceptions of how women should be treated and similarly, the primitive way in which women were treated as perpetual slaves who are afraid of men is a kind of structural violence. Also, the demonstration of the power structure in which one person is almighty and to be feared portrays all other people, especially women, as pets that are owned by the powerful and can be manipulated as they wish. This portrayal is what sociologists detest and is referred to as power structure. Another key point of this study is cultural violence which is the aspect of the culture which is used to justify violence against women. In ‘The Eternity’, power acceptance as well as patriarchy was used to establish the dominance of males over females even where the female contributes significantly to the wellbeing of the family. Significantly, the cultural violence content in this film supports structural violence and direct violence to be social norms which women and society accept and dare not challenge. These results provide confirmatory evidence that violence against women in this film is complex.
