Middle Eastern Appearances: “Ethnic Gangs”, Moral Panic and Media Framing
| Date | 01 April 2001 |
| DOI | 10.1177/000486580103400105 |
| Published date | 01 April 2001 |
| Author | Paul Tabar,Scott Poynting,Greg Noble |
Middle Eastern Appearances:
"Ethnic Gangs", Moral Panic
and Media Framing
Scott Poynting
University
of
Western
Sydney
Greg Noble
University
of
Western
Sydney
Paul Tabar
Notre
Dame
University,
Beirut
This article details a moral panic in 1998-2000
about
"ethnic gangs" in
Sydney's
south-western
suburbs
and
analyses
its
ideological
construction
of
the
links
between
ethnicity,
youth
and
crime.
It
documents
the
racisms of labelling and targeting of immigrant young
people which misread, oversimplify and misrepresent complex and class-
related social realities as racial, and
the
common-sensei sharing of
these
understandings, representations and practices by "mainstream" media,
police and vocal representatives in state, local and "ethnic" politics.
The
data used in this analysis
are
largely comprised of English-language media
extracts, press, radio, television -both commercial and government-
funded; and national,
state
and local in circulation, supplemented by inter-
view material, from an ethnographic pilot study, with Lebanese-Australian
youth, Lebanese immigrant parents, ethnic community workers, commu-
nity leaders and police.
This article details arecent moral panic about "ethnic gangs" in Sydney's south
...
western suburbs, following
the
stabbing to
death
of Korean
...
Australian school
...
boy Edward Lee in Punchbowl in
October
1998
and
the
shots fired at Lakemba
Police
Station
in November 1998.
The
paper traces a triangle of inter
...
relations between a police service which has
not
yet overcome aculture of racism
(Chan,
1997),
the
ethnocentric mainstream
media,
the
populism of state politicians in
the
context
of an election campaign
and
aclimate of
anti
...
immigrant scapegoating,
and
the
incorporation of "ethnic leaders"
beholden by a political patronage style of multiculturalism. It demonstrates how
Address for correspondence: Scott Poynting, Senior Lecturer, School of Cultural Inquiry,
University of Western Sydney, Locked Bag 1797, Penrith South OC
NSW
1797, Australia.
E
...
mail: s.poynting@uws.edu.au
THE AUSTRALIAN
AND
NEW
ZEALAND
JOURNAL
OF
CRIMINOLOGY
VOLUME 34 NUMBER I 200I pp.67-90
67
68
scorrPOYNTING,
GREG
NOBLEAND
PAUL
TABAR
these interests inter-reacted to foment a"moral panic" over "ethnic youth gangs",
in which virtually
an
entire
ethnic
community in south-western Sydney -
and
especially its young
men
- were criminalised,
and
the
problems of youth crime
were racialised, legitimising alaw-and-order crackdown which arguably garnered
votes for
the
government
but
severely damaged police-community relations.
Data
and Method
The
data
used in this analysis are largely comprised
of
English-language media
extracts: press, radio, television -including
both
commercial
and
government-
funded media;
and
those with national, state and local audiences -over
the
period
October 1998 to March 2000.
The
authors examined over this period all articles in
national, state, or local newspapers in Australia which
had
identifiable references
to "youth
and
gangs", "youth
and
crime", "ethnicity
and
gangs", or "ethnicitv
and
crime"; supplemented by a sampling of electronic media -including talk-back
radio - over
the
period October 1998 to March 1999,
and
selected for analysis for
this article
the
reportage of events in western Sydney in late 1998
and
their after-
math. These were collated to identify established patterns in ideological themes,
especially those related to racialisation,
and
to trace
the
"amplification spiral" in
the
developing moral panic. This analysis is made alongside
the
interpretation of
some preliminary material from a pilot study using ethnographic methods, involv-
ing
open-ended,
semi-structured
one-to-one
interviews
at
home
and
in
the
workplace
with
young Arabic-speaking background people, Lebanese immigrant
parents, police
and
Police Service workers,
and
community workers
and
leaders,
about -among
other
things -their experiences of these media representations.
The
interviews were conducted in English by two of
the
authors, tape-recorded
and
transcribed for analysis by
the
research team. (All interviewees' names given are
pseudonyms) .
The
Making of aMoral Panic
The
moral panic was precipitated by
the
stabbing to
death
on
17 October 1998 of a
fourteen year-old schoolboy, Edward Lee, in a suburban street, outside
the
birthday
party of a teenage friend.
The
press described
the
victim
as
"the
only
child
of
Korean parents who live in Canterbury" (Clennell &Kennedy, 1998, p. 3),
and
reported
the
incident as follows:
The
Year9 student at Canterbury Boys' High School was stabbed on Saturday night
after he and four friends went to
the
party in Telopea Street, Punchbowl, and
became involved in a footpath brawl with about 20
men
police described as of
Middle Eastern appearance (Murphy &Power, 1998, p. 2).
From
the
beginning,
the
crime was causally linked by police
and
media to ethnicity,
the
perpetrators were described in racial terms,
and
the
spectre of "ethnic" gangs
was raised by police
and
media, feeding off each other. Commercial television news
reports (eg
Channel
Nine)
the
night
after
the
killing were linking it to a "gang"
and
faithfully circulating
the
police description of racial phenotypes clearly refer,
ring to Lebanese immigrants.
THE
AUSTRALIAN
AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY
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