Banning movies on bullying won’t solve anything

 We need rigorous data, not reactionary censorship. Audiences are not a monolith, nor are they mindless vessels waiting to be programmed.

From Jamaluddin Aziz

Mara chairman Asyraf Wajdi Dusuki’s call to end or restrict movies and dramas depicting bullying represents a familiar, knee-jerk reaction to deep-seated societal issues.

It is clear that while the anxiety surrounding youth violence in schools is entirely valid, the proposed censorship and blanket ban on creative narratives rest on an archaic understanding of how the media operates.

As media scholars, we have seen this script play out for over a century, and history has repeatedly proven that smashing the mirror does not cure the reflection.

To understand why this approach is fundamentally flawed, we must trace this anxiety back to the birth of media effects research in the early 20th century.

During the 1920s and 1930s, early theorists propagated what became known as the “Magic Bullet Theory” or the “Hypodermic Needle Theory”.

This paradigm assumed that media messages were injected directly into a passive, helpless audience, immediately altering their behaviour and thoughts. It presumed that if a viewer saw violence on screen, they would inevitably replicate it on the streets.

By the 1940s, empirical research had thoroughly discredited this theory. Audiences are not a monolith, nor are they mindless vessels waiting to be programmed. Yet, the tradition of using the media as a convenient scapegoat for complex societal ills persists.

From comic books and rock music to video games and local cinema, authority figures have long favoured moral panics over structural analysis because blaming a screen is far easier than fixing a broken social fabric.

Crucially, the rapid evolution of media technology has completely transformed what it means to be an “audience”. The very concept of “mass media” belonged to a bygone era of a one-to-many communication flow, a single broadcasting station transmitting to an uncritical mass. Today, that dynamic is dead.

The contemporary media landscape is highly decentralised and personalised. We no longer have passive consumers; we have “producers” who are individuals who simultaneously consume, critique, remix, and actively create content.

Modern audiences possess a sharp consciousness of their own individuality and exercise significant agency in how they interpret media.

Therefore, trying to eradicate bullying by banning a movie is a remarkably lazy policy response. It assumes a direct causal link that simply does not exist in a vacuum.

If the core fear is that a gullible audience will immediately mimic cinematic slang and adopt aggressive personas, we must look at the wider cultural landscape. Consider how the term “bossku” was enthusiastically adopted and chanted by political fans across the nation.

That phrase did not gain cultural dominance because of a movie script; it thrived because of real-world political dynamics, digital echo chambers, and active audience participation. Media does not dictate culture; it interacts with it.

To truly make sense of bullying and the bully, we must look beyond the screen. Banning stories about bullying only sanitises our media environment while leaving the actual victims unprotected in the real world.

We need to understand why bullying takes place, the psychological mechanisms behind peer pressure, and the systemic failures within our educational and familial institutions that allow aggression to go unchecked. To achieve this, we need rigorous data, not reactionary censorship.

I urge our relevant government agencies as well as the education; higher education; women, family and community development; and communications ministries to collaborate and offer substantial research grants dedicated to qualitative studies on youth deviance and bullying.

We must talk to the perpetrators, the victims, and the bystanders.

Only by conducting deep, qualitative research can we understand how bullies make sense of their own behaviour, how they rationalise their actions, and how subcultures form. Censorship is a temporary curtain; empirical understanding is the only real cure.

Let’s stop blaming the filmmakers and start funding the solutions. - FMT

Jamaluddin Aziz is an associate professor in critical media studies at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia’s Centre for Research in Media and Communication and an FMT reader.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.