Trapped by Culture, Not Education: An Analysis of Domestic Abuse in Pakistani Television Dramas through Audience Reception

Abstract

This study examines how Pakistani YouTube audiences receive and interpret the domestic abuse experiences of educated women in two Pakistani television dramas. In Jafaa (HUM TV, 2024), a medical doctor named Zara endures years of escalating abuse from her husband before finally leaving him. In Kankar (ARY Digital, 2013), a university-educated woman named Kiran resists her marriage and eventually secures a divorce. The study grew out of a puzzle in Pakistan's development story. Women's literacy and enrollment have risen steadily for two decades, yet national survey data show no matching decline in intimate partner violence. This raises a direct question: does an audience's recognition of a female character's education actually soften the cultural scripts that ask women to endure abuse, or does it make little difference? To answer this, the study draws on a qualitative thematic analysis of approximately 350 YouTube comments, gathered through a three-tier purposive sampling strategy. It applies an integrated theoretical framework combining Reception Theory (Hall, 1973), Feminist Media Theory (hooks, 2000; Gill, 2007), and Cultivation Theory (Gerbner, 1998) to code the data across seven thematic categories and three reading positions. Dominant readings that reproduce patriarchal norms turned out to be the most common reception category in both dramas, accounting for 48.9% of comments on Jafaa and 52.1% on Kankar. Justification of abuse (31.1%) and victim-blaming (21.7%) together made up more than half of all coded discourse. Counterintuitively, the resistance narrative generated more justificatory and victim-blaming commentary than the endurance narrative did, a backlash effect this study attributes to cultivated audience expectations being broken rather than persuaded. Educational identity was frequently invoked but consistently subordinated to cultural prescriptions of marital duty. Based on these patterns, the study proposes a five-mechanism Cultural Mediation Model: cultivation priming, narrative negotiation, discursive mobilization, social reinforcement, and educational subordination. The findings carry implications for drama production, media literacy curricula, and domestic violence policy in Pakistan.