CONREP Policy Report: Combatting Corrosive Narratives about Refugees
Executive Summary
This report calls for a fresh approach to the debates and policy about refugees and asylum seekers. It calls upon governments and the media to ensure that the way they present policy and analysis about people seeking refugee protection is transparent, principled and accurate. It makes the case that governments, political parties and the media should refuse to engage in harmful narratives and practices. Such narratives – most often negative stereotypes - are fostered by political debates and media reporting that often fail to comprehend asylum. In many instances, they intentionally inflame the debates about refugee movement. They also often fail to communicate directly with people seeking refuge. There is considerable evidence that the voices of those seeking refuge are often unheard, deliberately silenced or have been manipulated in ways that diminish their personhood. When they are heard, they are, at best, mediated by others – including by those who support them - who listen and observe from a distance. In many instances refugees remain neither seen, nor heard, at all. This is not to say that the voices of refugees are always absent: rather, there is failure to listen with care in politics and the media. Yet listening to the voices of others is critical, in order to fully resist injustices enacted at the border. In contrast, their stories are distorted or even erased by media and by political debates that frame them either as vulnerable victims or as undeserving criminals. Such inaccurate depictions or even bifurcations lead to the erosion of human rights and to the legitimation of violence.
This report also cautions against those humanitarian narratives that may, however unintentionally, homogenise the experiences of people seeking refuge, and that may mask the specificity of each person’s experience. We are attentive to the danger of emotive language that reduces those seeking refuge to the figure of the ‘victim’. Asylum seekers have often reflected on the harm that is done by such narratives, as we illustrate in this report: by constructing people as little more than a victim, there is a tendency to engage in pity, a position that draws on a public imaginary of the ‘benevolent’ state as a ‘saviour’. At the same time, constructing refugees as a threat is equally harmful and produces securitised discourses that are dehumanising.
The purpose of this report is two-fold. It aims to provide the context and rationale for fostering a humane and sincere approach to narratives about people seeking asylum and refugees. Secondly, it outlines a series of recommendations to support a shift away from corrosive narratives, and in so doing, to challenge harsh policies that are enabled by harmful and often untruthful representations of refugees.
In sustaining the border as a site that can only be crossed by those deemed worthy to do so, some sections of the media participate in – or fail to challenge – inaccurate depictions by governments of refugees, thereby contributing to the dilution of responsibility by governments and the European Union (EU) under the Refugee Convention, as well as to the reinforcement and militarisation of the border.
We challenge the myths underlying corrosive narratives. In failing to hold governments to account, some media organisations and individulas also accept, without adequate questioning – or indeed any questioning at all – the rhetoric of governments, and their mistruths. In many cases, some in the media have circulated negative, and misleading, narratives with minimal or no effort devoted to fact-checking and to verifying the truth of statements made to them. In this respect, the media’s historical role as the ‘Fourth Estate’ – as providing independent oversight of government – has not only been diminished, but has been degraded. Despite this, some within the media persist in seeking to report on the hardship experienced by those seeking refuge. Yet, as we illustrate in this report, when such members of the media have sought access to information, such as within Australia’s offshore detention centres and within detention centres in Libya that are financed by the European Union (EU), they have often been denied that access, with considerable restrictions placed on them by states that are signatories to the Refugee Convention.
Authors:
Dr Claire Loughnan is a lecturer in Criminology in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Her research examines the carceral expansion accompanying immigration detention and other border protection measures which seek to limit refugee protection, through the lens of an ethic of responsibility. Claire is a research partner with the Comparative Network on Refugee Externalisation Policies (CONREP), a Jean Monnet Network that examines the externalisation of refugee policies within the EU and Australia. She is also the Co-Convenor of Academics for Refugees, University of Melbourne branch, and a committee member with the Carceral Geography Working Group of the Royal Geographical Society and the Institute of British Geographers.
Prof Philomena Murray, Jean Monnet Chair ad personam, is Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. She holds honorary positions at Trinity College Dublin and the United Nations University Institute for Comparative Regional Integration Studies, Bruges. She is Director of the Comparative Network on Refugee Externalisation Policies (CONREP), a Jean Monnet Network that examines the externalisation of refugee policies within the EU and Australia. She is a founder of Academics for Refugees. Research interests include refugee externalisation policies; EU legitimacy; comparative regionalism; EU-Asia relations and EU-Australia relations. She was Research Director on Regional Governance in the EU Centre on Shared Complex Challenges and Director of the Contemporary Europe Research Centre, Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence, both at the University of Melbourne. She has directed a number of international competitive research projects and networks.