Thai soaps trigger outcry over romance

In a famous scene from Thailand's award-winning soap opera The Power of Shadows, the protagonist gets drunk and rapes the leading lady. He later begs her forgiveness, and the producers say they will live happily ever after in the sequel.

Boy Meets Girl, Boy Rapes Girl, Boy Marries Girl. The premise is so common in Thailand's popular prime time melodramas that it could be called a national twist on the universal romantic plotline. But calls for change are growing.

The recent real-life rape and murder of a girl on an overnight train in Thailand has focused national outrage on messages in popular culture that trivialize - and some say even encourage - rape. Even the powerful general who took over the country in a coup this year had to apologize after suggesting that women who wear bikinis on the beach are vulnerable to sexual assault.

Many in the soap opera industry continue to defend sexual violence, in part, as a key to high ratings in a fiercely competitive industry that draws more than 18 million viewers a night to network television, or nearly a quarter of Thailand's population.

Rapists are seldom punished in TV melodramas, and their victims rarely talk about it. That much, at least, is reflected in real life.

Last year, the Thai Public Health Ministry said its hotlines received 31,866 calls from victims of rape or sexual assault. But police that year filed only 3,300 rape cases, and made just 2,245 arrests.

Public concern about rape in Thai society grew this summer after a 13-year-old girl was raped on an overnight train, then suffocated and thrown out the window. A 22-year-old train employee has been convicted of the attack and sentenced to death, and the rail authority has introduced a women-and-children-only sleeper carriage with policewomen as guards.