India and Australia, racist attacks or moral panic?

The paper ran a cartoon depicting an Australian policeman wearing a pointed white hood associated with the US racist group the Ku Klux Klan. The officer was shown saying "We are yet to ascertain the nature of the crime."

That was, apparently, the actions of a newspaper in India called the Mail Today, in response to the murder of 21-year-old Indian student Nitin Garg. When I found the site of the Mail Today to check, the first thing I'm greeted with is a pop-up asking for my feedback in response to the question "SHOULD INDIA PURSUE THE MATTER OF AUSTRALIAN RACISM IN AN INTERNATIONAL COURT?"

It worries me that the single biggest source of the claim of a dramatic increase in racist attacks against Indian people in Australia appears to be the sensationalist media, and that the same media is making calls for special action to address the claimed problem. I'm currently trawling for actual statistics of crimes, but in the absence of reliable, verifiable statistics demonstrating an upsurge in demonstrably racist violence against Indian people, and with the role that the media is playing right now, I have to wonder: is this a moral panic? Is "racist Australia" here playing the role of a folk devil perceived as threatening the virtuous and vulnerable youth of India?

I have found one claim of of a clear and dramatic increase of attacks against Indian students as reported in the Indian media: both the Mail Today and the Siasat Times claim that a "government report tabled in parliament" said that "The number of Indians attacked in Australia in 2008 was 17. In 2009, 94 Indians were attacked till November 20. A total of 100 attacks on Indians, including students, have been reported in Australia during last year". If true, that would be an extraordinary upswing.

Unfortunately I don't know what this report actually is, or how these claimed statistics were compiled. I would need that information, I think, before I could accept the figure as accurate. So....moral panic or genuine upsurge in racist violence that specifically targets Indian people? I'm not really sure at this point, although I do find it odd that Indian people, and only Indian people, would be experiencing such an upsurge. I think that believing such a situation to be possible gives Australian racism far too much credit - it's far too broad to expect it to be targeted solely at one non-white group.

Even the child being "defended" sees this for what it is

Fascinating: in the wake of the moral panic triggered by a photo of an unclothed 6-year-old girl on an art magazine, the girl herself says that she has no problems with the photos. You'd think that her claim not to need any defense might at least slow down the people rushing to defend her from the big bad artists just a little bit. Not so. And the rhetorical move used to counter her claim is entirely predictable: accuse her parents of putting her up to it

Mr Rudd is standing by his comments and has warned against allowing children to speak out on the issue.

"If people want to make a political point in opposition to me, I don't think it's right they use underage children to make that point," he said.

"They can engage the political debate as much as they want, it's a free country, but when it comes to protection of children, that should be a foremost responsibility for each of us."

Because, apparently, children have no will of their own and no ability to form an opinion that is different from their parents. One of the commentwrs at the ABC website ("kieran" at 07 Jul 2008, 03:02pm) put it best:

It may be the norm for you to treat your children like this (stifling them, leaning on them, making sure they say what you want them to say), however there are parents who do give their children the freedom to think... I can think of a number of parents who are like this, and they are generally involved in the arts (the whole freedom of expression, etc).

Olympia Nelson deviated from the script that the fiction of a child as a helpless and angelic non-entity would require her to follow. It's depressing, but not at all surprising, that her comments are hammered into fitting that script of child as helpless non-entity regardless.

This really is more about defending a magical ideal of childhood that exists in our society than it is about defending any actual child, near as I can tell. Or that's how I read it from the way that the moral guardians are refusing to admit that Olympia Nelson might possibly have a mind of her own.

Welcome to the art/children moral panic

Having utterly failed in their witch-hunt against Bill Henson, the self-appointed "moral guardians" of children believe they've found a more readily exploitable target in the form of Art Monthly Magazine. Art Monthly decided to put a photo of an unclothed six-year old on its cover for the most recent issue, and the Sunday Telegraph yesterday ran a front-page article fulminating about how "sick" the imagery was. The rest of the Australian media has since taken off in their reporting about this allegedly evil act.

I deliberately say "unclothed" rather than "nude", because, unlike everyone so far who has piously denounced it as horrific, I've actually seen the image in question, and "unclothed" is a more accurate description. The, according to some ignorant commentators, "illegal" photo is at the time of writing still readily available at the Art Gallery Monthly Website. Funny - the way the papers described it, you'd think the child in question was posing like a Playboy centre-fold or something. The actual reality I see here hardly seems like it warrants all this hand-wringing.

And how interesting that in this currently oppressive media environment, the very act of verifying for myself what the media is trying to dictate to me as the truth about this photo actually feels like a dangerous enterprise. Will I now be accused of trying to access "child pornography" merely for daring to try and make up my own mind about this issue based on my own direct observation of the photo in question?

I don't think I've ever seen something in Australia, including the various emo panics, that so readily fits the definition of a moral panic like this does. The music scene I guess has become accustomed to defending itself against the routine finger-pointing that they have to endure, and can blunt the impact. The Australian art community doesn't yet have that experience.

Take this article from the Daily Telegraph. Members of the art community complained about what Art Monthly did. Reading the actual article, it's clear that they simply didn't want to deal with another round of media-driven conflict about "the community vs the arts". But the Telegraph gives the article a highly misleading title "Art lover slam child porn pictures" which makes it look the disagreement of the art community with the decision to publish is because they agree with the accusations leveled by the Daily Telegraph that the photos are child porn. The liars.

Some painfully bad news quotes

Hmm, who can give the most stupidly over-the-top quotation in a news article?

From 6 months ago, we have, in the article Websites linked to series of young suicides, the following contenders:

British Labour MP Madeleine Moon worrying that Internet memorial sites for suicide victims are dangerous to our youth:

"What is concerning is that you're getting internet bereavement walls. That's not going to help anyone," she said.

"What people need is not to go into a virtual world of the internet to deal with emotional problems... They need to stay very much in this real world and talk to real people."

People: the Internet is part of reality. Deal with it.

From the same article, I do feel a bit that the unnamed police officer who got quoted was being pushed into providing something, anything, that fed the reporter's narrative. This was offered up as a reason to believe that, yes, the mere existence of a memorial to a dead friend on the Internet (as opposed to, say on a wall, at a grave, or any of the gazillion other ways that people's deaths have been memorialised since, well, ever) could be seen as a way in which the Internet encourages youth suicide:

"They may think it's cool to have a memorial website," an officer told The Times.

"It may even be a way of achieving prestige among their peer group."

Sheesh.

But it's hard to top Russian state officials, whose "Concept for a State Policy in the Area of Spiritual and Moral Education of the Children of the Russian Federation and Protection of Their Morals" is awe-inspiringly bad. Nevermind the hysterical claim of Stanislav Govorukhin that "Today we have a lost generation of wandering morons whose parents’ moral vision was robbed by perestroika", it's in talking about goth and emo that things just get plain weird:

The drafters of the concept took a particular negative stance in regard to the Goth and emo youth subcultures, which are characterized by black clothing, piercings and a depressed outlook on reality. They authors compared the danger those subcultures hold for society to the dangers of skinheads, soccer hooligans, National Bolsheviks and even anti-fascists. Emo youths, according to the concept, “are subject to suicidal tendencies” and Goth children cultivate bisexuality. “The cost of the sexual services of an underage boy prostitute with Goth attributes is lower than for students in military schools but higher than for usual gay prostitutes,” the authors say, demonstrating their knowledge of life.

I suppose an anti-Western cultural backlash was inevitable (thank you so much, George W. Bush), but this kind of xenophobic outrage against "Western" concepts like emo and goth is downright scary.

More thoughts on the "emo" and "social networking" youth moral panic

Another tragic teen suicide that's vaguely related to emo and the Internet, another round of reporters writing bad articles that will actively contribute to the problem prompting all their hand-wringing.

The teenager this time is Sam Leeson. He was a thirteen year old who hanged himself. The Daily Mail reports that he was an "emo teen" who got bullied for it, and proceeds to list Blink-182 and Good Charlotte as examples of emo bands that he liked. They have the decency to list the Foo Fighters and Slipknot as "alternative" rather than "emo" at least, so it's nice to know they're trying to classify emo music accurately, even if they do fail. Blink-182, emo? People will be trying to say that Nirvana counts as emo music at this rate...

There's been plenty of pushback against bad reporting on emo in the media, with sites like Alterophobia springing up, and protests happening, of all things. The Daily Mail article is thus somewhat muted compared to its earlier dire warnings about the "emo suicide cult", as others have noted. It would be nice to think that this easing off on blaming emo would translate into thoughtful reporting, of a type that doesn't involve seeking a convenient scapegoat to account for deep-seated social problems being expressed in the attitude of teens towards each other and themselves, but that wouldn't sell papers now, would it? All attention is turned instead towards the other scapegoat that inevitably appears in these stories: the Internet, and the youth province of social networking sites.

Sam Leeson had an account on Bebo. From news.com.au: Bebo blamed for 13-year-old boy's death. Sam's mother "has blamed Bebo, a teenage social network similar to MySpace, for her son's death, and demanded a crackdown on websites that allow cyberbullies to target other users."

Unhelpfully, people in the comments section of this article at Mashable find it bemusing that someone could kill themselves just over cyberbullying, flat out saying that it shows Sam had something seriously wrong with him that the parents should have noticed...somehow. One goes so far as to say that "The parents should be charged with murder for allowing this clearly sick child to get on the computer for chatting at all!"

Some of this attitude is somewhat understandable given that certain facts did not appear in the media reporting. One such fact is the existence of offline bullying of Sam Leeson: claims that Sam "had been bullied by Severn Vale pupils particularly on the bus", that students from another school "apparently threatened him to kill himself, or they would kill him". The bullying was both offline and online. Why is it only the online bullying whose existence gets acknowledged?

Well...from Digital Journal:"Sam’s parents didn’t realize that he suffered from bullying until they checked his Bebo page after his death". Think about this. His parents didn't know about ANY bullying, both offline and online, until they found online evidence of it.

The Internet has changed things, but not in the way that people getting all hysterical about the "new menace" of cyberbullying claim. All that's happened is that the bullying which has always been there is now much more readily visible to the people who ought to be concerned with it. "Cyber-bullying" is not a new form of bullying. It is not threatening in some unspecified way that "real" bullying is not. It is just the extension of it into an online environment. Nothing more, nothing less.

The problem, then, is not Evil Emo Music[tm], or Evil Internet[tm]. The problem is what it has always been: the existence of bullying. What's changed is not its prevalence, but its visiblity. This could be seen as an opportunity, should people concerned with the issue be willing to take it. It is such a shame that they are proving unwilling or unable to do so.