Abstract
Within the sociology of crime there is a long history of investigating the public perceptions of criminal behaviour and offenders. There is a general agreement amongst researchers that fear of victimization appears to be increasing (Surette, 2007). One complex question, however, remains open to dispute: what fuels the fear of crime? Much research in this area indicates that the media plays a pivotal role in shaping our cognition, beliefs and feelings about unlawful activities, wrongdoers, victims, policing and security as a whole (Eschholz, 1997; Gerbner et al., 1986; Grabe and Drew, 2007). The edited volume Media, Crime and Racism is a seminal contribution to this field of criminology, examining as it does the nexus between media and crime through the lens of racism.
The book’s normative point of departure is the ‘racialized criminalization’ of media discourses. This concept refers to the social construction of certain groups, especially black or Asian young males, as perpetrators or potential criminals. The dominance of racialized narratives of crime in media discourse is assessed as a harmful social practice which reinforces prejudices and legitimizes racial discrimination of minorities. Whilst the interplay between racialization and criminalization is a well-documented phenomenon, the theoretical innovation of the book is the skilful combination of the racialized criminalization concept and the moral panic model. The collection not only returns to the roots of the discussion of the ‘media, crime and racialization’ triangle, but carefully assesses the impact of changes in today’s mediascape. The introductory chapter by Monish Bhatia, Scott Poynting and Waquas Tufail provides a compact critical account of the Facebookization and Twitterization of public discourses, by highlighting the harmful effects of opinion-based communication and the virality of fake news in crime-related issues all across the Globe, but especially in Anglo-Saxon countries and continental Europe.
The chapters are designed to shed light on how the discursive mechanisms of traditional news media outlets, tabloid press and social media associate crime with race. Following the intellectual legacy of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, the book mainly offers qualitative case studies to unpack the different dimensions of racialization in crime and the criminalization of vulnerable groups.
The first substantive chapter of the book – Chapter 2, written by Colin Webster – immediately engages readers with a nuanced description of the media portrayal of British Asians from 1961 to 2011. By investigating the ethno-racist media frames employed in news coverage, the author compellingly demonstrates the discursive shift from this social group ‘being victims’ to ‘being criminals’ in Britain. Chapter 2 concludes with a mixed observation concerning the role of social media: on the one hand, racialized criminalization is prevalent in digital spaces; on the other hand, multimedia platforms are available for minorities as well to raise their voices against Islamophobia. Chapters 3 and 4 present case studies on the mass media coverage of child abuse in the UK. It is found that the crimes are systematically and repeatedly racialized by the media. Instead of focusing on the social-economic or gender dimensions of the sexual exploitation, the Pakistani folk devil and the category of black deviance have been created to support racism in public perceptions. Employing the methodological apparatus of interviews, Chapter 4 also highlights that racism in crime coverage is challenged and resisted by British Muslims who are active on social media. The book offers qualitative evidence from a series of focus groups and in-depth interviews of how British Muslims negotiate the Islamophobic sentiments in public discourse. Chapter 6 draws attention to the huge discrepancy between the social construction of British Muslims and the experiences of young people with immigrant backgrounds in the UK.
Chapter 7 moves towards an intersectional perspective, and demonstrates that racialization and sexism sometimes work together. This chapter explores how the mixture of hate speech and misogyny can be particularly challenging for women of colour undertaking social media activism. Another aspect of the sexualization of criminal behaviour is illustrated in Chapters 6 and 8: online spaces are characterized by the constant repetition of myths about ‘sexually barbaric’ Muslims threatening the ‘purity’ of European females. Social media is studied here as fertile ground for new waves of Islamophobia.
The volume as a whole – but especially Chapters 8, 9, 10, 16 and 17 – pays particular attention to the interplay between the press and politics in the racialization of crime. The British press is argued to provide discursive support for the populist argument that crime is rising due to the failure of multiculturalism. It is striking to see the similarities of media coverage in the UK and Australia: the press not only plays an important role in constructing social crises about immigration, but the mainstream media significantly contribute to the dissemination of the governmental agenda by relying predominantly on official government and institutional sources. Beside this bias of one-sided information, the everyday and popular racism in crime-related news stories is investigated via a content analysis of tabloid press in Chapter 11. The topic of biased media coverage also receives considerable scholarly attention in Chapter 12, in which the author discusses how the British media deal with the death of black citizens in custody. The overall conclusion of the empirical analysis is that black lives in custody do not matter and the newsworthiness of such deaths is relatively low in the UK.
In addition to the British cases, a study on crime news reporting in Germany is presented. Chapter 5 scrutinizes the public controversy that was triggered by the sexual attacks in Cologne, Hamburg and Stuttgart during New Year’s Eve 2015/2016. In the author’s view, the signs of the moral panic were manifested during the media coverage of the crime events and ‘new scales of racialization’ (p. 74) of the abusive behaviour were detected. The chapter analyses the afterlife of the scandal by discussing the ways in which the criminal investigation, the courts and NGOs reacted to the sexual abuse and the racialized narratives. An analysis of Swedish news reporting – the basis for Chapter 12 – shows that ethnocentrism and racialization is widespread in other continental European countries as well. This chapter also reveals that news items might be neutral in term of coverage, but the opinion-oriented commentaries that accompany them tend to focus on racial elements of the criminal behaviour.
A perspective outside of Europe is provided in Chapters 14 and 15. Chapter 14 looks at new insights arising from the racialized criminality of Indigenous people in media discourse in Australia. A wide range of media formats – printed, broadcast, social media and films – is analysed to examine the representations of Indigenous people. The study, however, also indicates that there is an alternative media ecosystem which is operated by Indigenous people to challenge mainstream representations. Beside the German, Swedish and Australian case studies, research on Canada is included in the volume to examine news relating to policing and race. Chapter 15 explores the Black Lives Matter movement from the perspective of critical race theory. Notwithstanding the neutral tone of mainstream media reporting about the movement, the intensive coverage of the violent actions connects crime and race without contextualization. It is the authors’ assessment that the media contribute to the portrayal of black males as overwhelmingly ‘violent, uneducated, troublesome and problematic’ (p. 314).
Whilst the global outlook of the book is welcome, readers might wonder about the justification for the country selection. For example, it would have made the book even more impressive if the Calais case in Chapter 11 had been investigated in France as well. I also missed the studies which might have uncovered the regional specifics of racialization in post-communist countries, such as the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Poland, in which the public discourses were heavily influenced by the criminalization of asylum seekers and racist narratives after the 2015 crisis about migration.
For this reader, the most thought-provoking part of the book is Chapter 18 in which Vicki Sentas suggests the need for a theoretical shift from media discourses to a systemic approach to racialization in criminal justice. The study argues that the systematic exploration of the experience of racialized people is lacking and it is imperative to comprehend the institutional dimension of cultural racism. By revising the key concept of ‘racialization’, this chapter provides an overview of the limits of media discourse-centric studies and encourages the academic community to break away from the restrictive paradigmatic blindfold of constructivism and moral panic theory. The chapter propagates a move beyond discursive approaches and concentrates on the practices and experiences of racialization in the criminal justice system. In this respect, the book might be considered an important contribution towards the performative turn in criminology.