Abstract
It is not easy to demonstrate how media reporting has violent, material effects on communities, and analysis of the media that just focuses on the visual details or the language leaves you wanting more to connect the dots between media and society. But this welcome co-edited collection of essays, Media, Crime and Racism, offers engaged scholarship that explores the complex processes through which the media racialises crime, and criminalises race, and the impact this has. Arranged into eighteen chapters, which cover a range of issues, including child sexual abuse, terrorism, policing, the refugee crisis and Islamophobia, this path-breaking book reveals the systemic processes of racialisation that exist across different national contexts.
One of the critical issues unpacked is the racialisation of sexual abuse in the media, and the impact this has on victims of sexual violence and local Muslim communities that are collectively blamed for the crimes. An issue that the far Right has been increasingly co-opting to push an anti-migrant, anti-Muslim agenda, 1 it is of crucial importance that we have this kind of rigorous scholarship to dismantle its arguments. One of the editors, Waqas Tufail, contributes a crucial article on the racialisation of child sexual abuse in Rotherham, a postindustrial northern town in the UK. ‘Local media discourses and state and institutional actions (or inaction) shaped the racial landscape of Rotherham’, he writes. The focus in the local media on ‘Asian grooming gangs’, with a supposedly hyper-masculine and ‘backwards’ patriarchal culture, obscured the local dynamics of power and exploitation that enabled the conditions for sexual violence to occur in Rotherham, and ignored the failures of the state to protect the victims, many of whom lived in care homes.
The racialisation of sexual abuse has a long historical context that Tina G. Patel expands upon in her chapter on how a process of ‘browning’ creates a new category of the ‘black folk devil’ that draws on ‘older racialised panics about the brown menace and white victims’ − ignoring white perpetrators and marginalising the existence of victims from BAME communities. As contributor Ulrike M. Vieten illustrates in her chapter on media coverage following the New Year’s Eve 2015/16 attacks on women in Cologne, Germany, this is not unique to the UK – in the last year we have seen how this trope travels across Europe and beyond, continuing to be manipulated by the far Right, the mainstream press, and, sadly, a section of feminists.
An anti-racist feminist analysis is key to ensure that both racism and sexism are challenged simultaneously. Lawyer and academic Kiran Kaur Grewal provides one in her recent book, Racialised Gang Rape and the Reinforcement of Dominant Order, 2 which examines cases of gang rapes in France and Australia. Though Grewal does not have a chapter in Media, Crime and Racism, her perspectives, on nationhood being deeply embedded in respective contexts, are. She highlights how the two countries’ colonial history and sense of nationhood position white women’s bodies as ‘symbols of the nation’, and Muslim men as a ‘civilisational threat’. Grewal, in providing a nuanced analysis that challenges both racism and sexism, does not flatten the dynamics of gender and power. She treads that difficult line, which few manage to maintain, and proposes an alternative way of responding to sexual violence committed by members of ethnic minority communities.
One of the key strengths of Media, Crime and Racism is that, like Grewal’s analysis, the book looks to specific geographical and historical contexts to expose the ‘relationship of the media to the racialisation of crime and the criminalisation of racialised others’. As Anneke Meyer and Scott Poynting explore in their chapter on ‘Islamophobic moral panic and the British tabloid press’, the role of the nation was particularly important during the Abu Qatada case in 2012, during which Qatada became a metonym for ‘the global Muslim figure of evil and threat’ which, like a magnet, became bound to public fears about supposedly uncontrolled immigration and anxiety that society was under threat from ‘welfare scroungers’. In a time of major cuts to the welfare budget, this directed anger away from the state.
The media not only frames ‘the problem’ but itself can provide a source for violence, and many of the articles in Media, Crime and Racism demonstrate the symbiosis between the media and politicians, and the policies they enact. One of the most important chapters, provoking a feeling of outrage, is Michael Grewcock’s on the Rohingya refugee crisis which so clearly confirms the ‘material and ideological links between the mainstream media and the Australian political establishment’. By representing the plight of Rohingya refugees as a crisis of border policing, the media obscured the systemic violence that they were fleeing, thus turning a humanitarian crisis into a question of border controls, which resonates with how European countries continue to leave refugees stranded in the Mediterranean.
But how does the media legitimise police violence and border control tactics? ‘Rohingya were simultaneously vulnerable and threatening’, writes Grewcock, ‘stranded at sea but with the potential to overwhelm the capacities of receiving states.’ This was graphically reinforced through images of ‘emaciated Rohingya on crowded boats clinging to debris’ and language that described them as migrants rather than refugees. Thus rendering invisible the fundamental crisis of the Rohingya within Myanmar, described by Amnesty International as ‘the most persecuted refugees in the world’. 3 Similarly, as Monish Bhatia shows, imagery of racialised non-white crowds of people clashing with white police officers depicted the Calais ‘jungle’ camp in 2016 as a site of criminality that was a threat to the social order, thus legitimising police violence. (The Refugee Rights Data project found that 89.2 per cent of Calais refugees experienced police violence in 2017.) Bhatia succinctly deconstructs the term ‘illegal migrant’ to explain its dehumanising effects: ‘it switches their status from at-risk individuals deserving of safety and security to those who are risks, criminals and a source of insecurity’.
The switching of status is returned to in Marta Kolankiewicz’s piece on the racist attack on a school in Trollhattan, Sweden in 2015 by a Nazi sympathiser. Instead of focusing on the perpetrator, reporting centred on the school as a racialised, suburban space in which violence is a mundane part of everyday life, suggesting ‘some lives are less grievable’. This resonates with Ryan Erfani-Ghettani’s cogent historical analysis of how UK black communities’ demands for justice after the police killings of Wayne Douglas in 1995, Joy Gardner in 1993, Stephen Lawrence in 1993 and Mark Duggan in 2011 were portrayed as illegitimate, or as ‘public order issues’ that were criminal in nature, in contrast to the ‘neutral force’ of the police.
Despite the anthology’s extensive and thorough analysis, there are gaps. For example, I was left wanting to know more about the process through which media are produced – the editorial relationships, how the news agenda is set and who dictates the production of impact-generating articles which racialise crime and criminalise race. And particularly, in addition to Katy Sian’s analysis of online Islamophobia, a chapter focusing on the far Right’s use of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, which bypass editorial control and are used to position themselves as voices of ‘the people’, would have been a valuable contribution to an otherwise very comprehensive anthology. Electoral successes of rightwing parties across the world (Brazil, India, Italy, Austria and Hungary, to name a few) have bolstered the Right, who now openly share content that promotes hate towards vulnerable people. 4
But Media, Crime and Racism is a very important book that encourages the reader to constantly make links between different communities across international contexts – the treatment of the Rohingya resonates with the depiction of Calais as a criminalised space, Indigenous peoples’ resistance to policing in Australia connects to black communities’ campaigns for justice following deaths in custody, the racialisation of sexual violence is not unique to the UK but plays out in Germany, Sweden, France and Australia. As state politics and media framings become transnational, our analyses and solidarity have to do likewise.