Racism in Australia and Media Representations - Essay Example

Running Head: Racism Racism [Writer’s Name] [Institution’s Name] Racism Introduction Racial discrimination in Australia is linked to the history of colonization as well as migration. The indigenous populations of Australia, alternatively known as the Aborigines have been the main victim of this discrimination. Until recently, policies and practices, highly racist in nature, were deeply entrenched within governmental laws and institutions of Australia. Some of these are prevalent even today (B’nai B’rith Anti Defamation Commission 2008). Racism in Australia The populations which inhabited the continent of Australia prior to 1788 are known as Indigenous Australians or the Aborigines. When the European settlements were established in Australia following 1788, attempts were made to clear the continent of the Aborigines. The resources on which the Indigenous people relied were reduced. They were thus forced to move into neighboring areas. In the mid of 1800s, the Indigenous people were relocated to church missions and reserved lands. In the duration between 1869 and 1969, large numbers of children of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders were forcibly taken away from their families by the agencies of Australian government. Many historians have classified this act as genocide. These children are termed as stolen generations. In April 2000, the Australian Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, John Herron argued in a report that only 10% of the total number of Aboriginal children had been taken away, and therefore it would be unfair to classify them as a generation. This report sparked protests from media. Finally in February 2008, Kevin Rudd apologized to the international community with regard to stolen generations (Ambus, Large, & Weirda, 2009). The indigenous people in Australia are greatly suppressed in the processes of Australian criminal justice. The representation of indigenous Australians in the processes of criminal justice is undoubtedly a very important subject of research for human rights organizations, social scientists and the world community. According to a research, ‘On an Australia wide basis an Aboriginal was 27 times more likely to be in police custody than a non-Aboriginal, and the figure 15 times in New South Wales, 13 times in Victoria and three times in Tasmania. Australia wide an aboriginal was 11 times more likely to be in prison than a non-Aboriginal, and in New South Wales eight times, in Victoria 12 times and in Tasmania three times’ (Cunneen & Libesman 1995: 59). Media Representations Media representations perform a very important role in molding the criminal justice system against the indigenous people by shaping the public attitudes and perceptions. Media representations serve to justify the over representation of the Aborigines in the justice system, and hence further promote these injustices. Media representations portray this mass over representation as an outcome of Indigenous deviance (Gargett 1995). The media discourses omit the part played by the White Australia towards criminalization of the Aborigines. On 15 February, 2004, a riot occurred between the Australian police and the Aboriginal youths, in which an indigenous teenager TJ Hickey died while he was being unreasonably chased by the police. He fell from his bike and was stuck in a fence. The media representations of this riot, which came to be known as the Redfern riot, vigorously linked crime with race. These media discourses promoted negative and stereotypical opinions, painting Aboriginality as criminal in itself. Redfern has been presented as a symbol of Aboriginality and hence crime. The Redfern riot depicts the power possessed by the media in promoting the colonial mindset (Gargett 1995). Criminal Justice Indigenous Australians are highly disadvantaged in all the aspects of the procedures of criminal justice. Lincoln and Wilson (1994: 63) concluded from their studies that ‘Aboriginal people are arrested more often than non-Aborigines; that they are most often charged with ‘good order’ offences; and that they are vastly over-represented in prisons.’ Moreover a study conducted into the deaths of Aborigines analyzed the cases of death of 99 Aborigines in custody. The study concluded that a large number of indigenous Australians could have been saved from dying they had been subjected to better physical care. A large number of aborigines are gravely apprehensive of the police discretion. Cunneen and Libesman (1995: 60) indicated that the greatest degree of over-representation of indigenous Australians in the custody of police is in that area of offences where the discretion of police is the most significant factor in deciding who have to be taken into custody and for what. Police arrests mostly Aborigines because of two main reasons namely race and discretion. Stereotypical perception is the main cause why police in Australia mostly tends to arrest the Aboriginal people. The great discretionary powers assigned to the police are responsible for most of the injustice done in this regard. It has also been found that the communities of the Aborigines are usually stationed with extraordinarily large force of police as compared to the native Australian communities. This differential allocation of members of police force is an act of discrimination in itself. According to studies, offenders are usually easy to apprehend largely because of involvement of alcoholism and poorly committed crimes. But the community pressure and leadership pressure causes the police to be lenient toward the native offenders. As a result, the Aborigines are target more than is justified. Hence the Aborigines who might have committed only a few offences are charged with multiple offences to cover the crimes committed by the native Australians. According to Jochelson (1997: 1), there have been many cases where an Aborigine arrested for just a minor offence like using abusive language leads to altercation with police resulting in serious charges like resisting arrest or assaulting the police. Aborigines also have to experience racist language at the hands of police which provokes violence by the Indigenous offenders. Aborigines have often been accused by various sections of the population of New South Wales of many types of social disorder. Similarly the police officers are also inclined to attach Aborigines with criminality by means of their stereotypical opinions (Davis 1999). The racist violence suffered by Aboriginal people is illustrated by the following case study. In 1985, a clash occurred between an Aborigine called Blinky Simpson and a publican former police officer at the Railway hotel in Mullawa (A.B.C., “Black Death”, Video Recording). The publican passed derogatory remarks at Simpson which gave rise to violence. As a result of the fight, Simpson was killed by the publican. The indigenous people of Mullawa reached the hotel demanding justice. However the detectives drove the publican out to Geraldine. The publican was neither arrested nor charged (Davis 1999). Oppression to which the Aboriginal Australians are subjected leads them to violence, which further takes them to the racist criminal justice system, at the hands of which they suffer further exploitation and oppression. The Aborigines suffer not only from high arrest and charge rates, but also from extraordinarily high conviction rates. The Aborigines are denied bail much more often than the publicans. Aborigines are arrested for offences for which the publicans receive summons. An important cause of this injustice is the attitude of esteemed publicans who enjoy great power over the Aborigines. For example, in 1979, a magistrate belonging to New South Wales described Aborigines as ‘a race of pests’ (Cunneen 1993: 77). Racial discrimination exists not only in arrest by police, but also in every other aspect of criminal justice. The entire Criminal Justice System, in all arenas, subjects the indigenous people to severe disadvantages. Judiciary is also discriminated in its entire procedure. Then the convicted Aborigines have to undergo discriminatory treatment in prison. Several other factors are also responsible for discriminatory treatment of Aborigines within the Criminal Justice System. These include high rate of unemployment, insufficient family supports, insecure residence, social isolation and illiteracy (Hayes 1996: 317). Moreover it has also been found that the procedure for recruitment and selection in the police service of Australia is biased against all those who are not 5 feet, 8.5 inches tall, white Anglo Saxon males. This is to suggest that female Aborigines are more highly disadvantaged than the males Aborigines, especially in matters pertaining to employment opportunities. As compared to all the other countries, the police of New South Wales, as well as other police agencies of Australia, have set a ‘number of physical, educational and character assessment entry criteria that were arbitrary or not substantiated in terms of being a bona fide occupational requirement’ (Mozley 1998). In other words, the overall entry process was so design as to preclude the minorities, particularly the Aborigines. On the other hand, the police agencies in other countries like United States, New Zealand and Canada, have designed programs to promote the recruitment and retention of Aboriginal police. But the case is entirely opposite in Australia (Mozley 1998). The first worth mentioning research carried out to study the nature and gravity of over representation of Aborigines was conducted more than 30 years ago by Elizabeth Eggleston (Eggleston 1976). This research study is considered quite important because it presented a clear picture of over representation of the indigenous people in rates of arrest and imprisonment across three Australian states with characteristic urban, rural and Aboriginal populations. It has been proved that the police largely arrests Aborigines for such minor offences as abusive language or being publicly caught drunk. A few years ago, an organization termed as the Australian Institute of Criminology began to collect the prisoner index of Australians which focused primarily on the extraordinarily high imprisonment rates of Aborigines, as compared to those of the native Australians. Since then the Australian Institute of Criminology has continuously testified to the over representation of Aborigines in the prisons all over the country (Walker, 1994). Ever since then, the research work produced by Eggleston and the data concerning prison populations provided by the Australian Institute of Criminology have served as the foundation of most of the research works on crimes among the Aborigines. It must be mentioned here that criminal research has concluded that Aborigines are not more inclined to adopt criminal behavior than any other Australian community (Mozley 1998). Greta Bird (1987) studied seven towns in Southern and Western Australia in order to find out if the Aborigines were subjected to higher rates of arrest, conviction and imprisonment than the non-Aborigines and to analyze the causes of this aspect of criminal justice system. In her findings, Greta Bird also concluded that the Aborigines mostly indulged in the so called public order offences. Aborigine adults were mainly found guilty of such offences as drunkenness, abusive language and offensive behavior. Similarly the juveniles among the Aborigines were found guilty of such minor crimes as vandalism and thefts, most of which were directed against the state buildings. In contrast, most of the publican offenders were responsible for traffic offences. In short, a large number of studies have served to prove beyond doubt the existence of the phenomenon of racial discrimination in Australian police, law and justice system. The most disturbing aspect of the statistical data available on the issue is that there has been no decrease in the high rates of arrest and imprisonment ever since 1970s. In spite of the fact that the Australian police has been protesting time and again against the accusations of racial discrimination, claiming that there is equal and impartial application of law to all communities and groups, research has proven beyond any doubt that no other class or community in Australia is subjected to such high degrees of supervision and scrutiny (Mozley 1998). Similarly, the Australian government still seems reluctant to admit the existence of racism in the Australian society. Incidents of racial abuse are also common in Australian sports. The Aborigines are seriously under represented in sports teams, and are discouraged from participation on all levels. Females The practice of racial discrimination targets the female Aborigines more bitterly than it does the male Aborigines. Also among the foreign students, the females are more severely bullied than the males, perhaps because men are able to defend themselves much more effectively and aggressively against racially motivated attacks. In most of the cases, racial remarks go unreported. Most of the time, the Australian students manage to get away with their discriminatory acts because foreign students tend not to resist, retaliate or report such cases to the concerned authorities (Sanders 2008). Throughout the Australian history uptill 2005, the Australian High court has only had one female judge. Mary Gaudron, as she was called, retired in February 2003, and ever since then, all the seven judges of the High Court are men. Other countries like US, Canada, Britain and New Zealand include a minimum of one woman judge in their High Courts (The Sydney Morning Herald 2005). There is a crisis in the degree and kind of contact the Indigenous women have with the criminal justice system in Australia. The imprisonment rate of indigenous women is the highest of all the groups in Australia, including the Indigenous men. Removal of these women from the society exposes their children to the risk of being neglected, abused and homeless. It has been found that Aboriginal women generally serve short sentences in jail, which indicates the failure to use the principle of confinement as the last option (John Mark Ministries 2009). Shorter sentences can be linked to high incarceration rates for minor offences. Statistics prove that the Aboriginal women who are imprisoned once are faced with a greater risk of being jailed again. The number of Aboriginal women imprisoned has risen from 104 in 1991 to 370 in 2001 - a 255.8% rise over a period of ten years. ‘For the June 2002 quarter, Indigenous women were over-represented at 19.6 times the non-Indigenous rate compared to Indigenous men at 15.2 times’ (John Mark Ministries 2009). Indigenous women are also subjected to over policing in some areas. Indigenous woman has never been equal to the colonial white woman, and the two have never experienced similar issues. During the era of colonialism, the indigenous women were tormented on racial basis, both by white males and females. Indigenous men were driven out of their lands; women were captured and pushed into domestic labour. In other word, women have always been subjected to a worse treatment. In the federation, when the white woman was given the right to vote, the indigenous population was not even considered a human, let alone being given the right of voting. At the time of emergence of second wave feminism, the Aborigines had hardly been recognized as humans entitled to have possession of their children, without fearing that the white man would take them away. The indigenous women had no representation in the government, not for being females but for being blacks. Their prospects for employment were minimal. They had no access to the pleasures the white woman enjoyed (Court, T. 2009). Improvement Efforts are being made at various levels to improve the situation by means of policy statements, suitable training, recruitment of minorities in the police and introduction of new policing strategies. However it is largely believed that such steps cannot make any significant difference. The situation can only be improved if a complete change is brought about in the thinking and mindset of the publicans regarding the Aborigines. Only when the non-Indigenous Australians will realize the gravity of the situation, can the situation be made to improve. Attempts should be made to reduce the ignorance and prejudice that exists among the non-Indigenous people regarding the Indigenous ones, by bringing to light the disadvantages, atrocities and oppression the Indigenous people have to face in every sphere of life. A number of commissions have made recommendations to cure the situation, but most of these still remain to be implemented. The main purpose of setting up these commissions is not to bring about a change, but to serve political functions and to defuse criticism against the criminal justice institutions (Davis 1999). Conclusion The solution lies in giving the Aborigines the right to suitable self government and the right to formulate their own laws. The Aborigines are moving closer towards the attainment of self determination, though at a slow pace. Moreover the idea that the Aborigines should be given the control of the mechanism of resolution of their internal disputes has also been introduced into the policy agendas of the government (Davis 1999). Thus it can be concluded that the indigenous people of Australia have always been subjected to inhuman treatment, and are still far from enjoying the same social and legal status as the publicans. Their over representation in rates of arrest, conviction and imprisonment testify to the prejudicial laws and biased criminal justice system prevalent in Australia. Moreover it can also be concluded that the situation of indigenous women is even worse than that of their male counterparts. References Ambus, K., Large, J., & Weirda, M. (2009). Building a Future on Peace and Justice: Studies on Transitional Justice, Conflict Resolution and Development the Nuremberg Declaration on Peace and Justice. US: Springer. Australian Broadcasting Network, (1985), Black Death in Western Australia. Marr, D. (Reporter), Four Corners, (23 September). Bird, G. (1987). The civilising mission: race and the construction of crime. Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues. (4), Faculty of Law: Monash University. B’nai B’rith Anti Defamation Commission 2008, Racism in Australia, USA: B’nai B’rith Anti Defamation Commission, Inc. 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