Apex

History

Before 2016

Australia has a history of moral panics regarding immigrant criminality, specifically related to real or supposed "gangs" from communities involved in recent waves of immigration. The folk devil in these panics has varied according to time and location; in modern Sydney, Muslim and Arab immigrants have taken over from the Italian and Greek communities that were the cause of concern in the 1970s and 1980s, whereas in Melbourne and Perth discourse around gangs has centred on Asian groups.

From the mid-1990s to 2011, 27,679 people who were born in Sudan migrated to Australia, mostly as refugees, with the peak years of settlement between 2002 and 2006. This wave of African migration led to the creation of gang stereotypes similar to those which had been used to characterise previous newly arrived migrant communities. By 2004, the Australian press was already using the term "African gang" to categorise fights between youngsters of African origin.

In 2007, Liep Gony, a 19-year-old refugee who had migrated from Sudan in 1999, was badly beaten in the Melbourne suburb of Noble Park, dying from his injuries 24 hours later. Despite the fact it later emerged that Gony had been murdered by white assailants, the immediate response to Gony's murder from politicians and the press was to frame it as an example of "African gang" violence.

Soon after the murder, Kevin Andrews, the minister for immigration, declared, "some groups of immigrants aren't settling and adjusting into the Australian life as quickly as we would hope." Initial press reports took the position that the murder was an example of "ethnic gang violence", basing their stories on off-the-record comments from anonymous police officers and local residents, with Andrews stating that officers had told him Melbourne had "a serious Sudanese gang problem." However, at the time of the murder, Melbourne Police's Multicultural Liaison officer told The Australian that police often mistook innocent groups of Black youths for gangs.

When it became clear that Gony had been murdered by two white men, Andrews declined to apologise for his comments on Sudanese-Australians, stating "I'm not proposing to apologise for saying what people are concerned about." Minister Andrews was also reticent to comment on the white attackers who beat another Sudanese man in an openly racist attack the day after Gony's funeral, which sociologist Joel Windle contrasts with his immediate condemnation of an attack by Sudanese youths on a policeman as "un-Australian". Clashes between Sudanese youth and police occurred on several occasions between September and December, with police accounts of the violence in one alleged "riot" contradicted by witnesses. In the aftermath of the events, the Liberal party presented the murder and assaults in Melbourne as examples of a "failure of integration", and cited them as justification for a reduction in the percentage of humanitarian visas given to Africans from 70% to 30%.

Height of the panic (2016–2018)

The immediate trigger for the moral panic around "gangs" in Melbourne was a "riot" at the Moomba Festival in 2016. In the two years prior to the festival, there were a total of four articles published in Melbourne's two most popular newspapers, The Age and the Herald Sun which mentioned the words Sudanese and gang, whereas in the two years which followed it there were 130. Similarly, in the two-year-period preceding the festival, there were only two mentions of the supposed "Apex Gang", which would become a prominent feature of racialised discourse on crime, neither of them connecting it to a specific ethnicity.

The panic fizzled out following the Labor victory in the Victorian State Election of 2018, after which the media and Coalition politicians stopped aggressively pushing the African gangs narrative. The period of intense media and political attention on Melbourne's Sudanese community lasted around 32 months.

On the night of 12 March 2016, clashes broke out at Melbourne's annual Moomba Festival, a family orientated festival held in central Melbourne. Reports on the evening suggested that brawls had occurred involving young people largely from African-Australian and Pacific-Islander backgrounds. Several incidents of vandalism and disorder occurred at the festival, with news reports suggesting that the fights had broken out between two separate groups of young people. There were also reports, based on accounts by festival-goers, of young men of Sudanese-Australian origin picking fights with other festival-goers. The disturbances culminated in members of the police employing capsicum spray to disperse a group of young men and boys in Federation Square. Following the events, the Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police stated that that the heavy police presence may have caused an escalation in the violence, interviews with Sudanese-Australians who attended the festival also suggest this to be the case. Videos of the events quickly emerged and were published on Australian media websites, often embedded in articles which made reference to "ethnic gangs". They typically showed dark-skinned individuals who outnumber police and appear to be acting in a threatening manner.

In the days which followed the clashes at Moomba, a media narrative emerged which placed the blame for the events on a group it identified as the Apex Gang, which was alleged to consist principally of Sudanese-Australians. Editorials and news articles regarding Apex first appeared in the Herald Sun, and the story was then picked up by local news channels and other newspapers. Melbourne paper The Age initially echoed the coverage of the Herald Sun, however, within a few weeks it ceased to include ethnic descriptors in its coverage and in time began to question aspects of the narrative. The narratives also suggested a surge in crime rates was affecting Melbourne due to the activities of this gang. These sensationalistic stories were often translated into Chinese and spread among Melbourne's Chinese student community on WeChat channels, creating panic and widespread fear of people of African origin.

Crime in Melbourne during the panic

While media reports in the 2016–2018 timeframe focused heavily on crimes committed by people of African origin, in reality figures released by the Crime Statistics Agency in 2018 showed that they were responsible for only 1% of crimes in Victoria. This was in excess of their share of the population, which was 0.14%, but this is not unusual given the fact that most crimes are committed by people between 16 and 24 years of age, and the Sudanese Australian population is over-represented in that cohort.

A great deal of media attention was directed to the offence of aggravated burglary. This offence did have a significant over-representation of Sudanese-Australians, but again the total only represented 4.8%, with the vast majority of offences being committed by White Australians.

Molla states that, despite the "hyperbolic reporting", crime rates were actually lower in Victoria than in other states. Furthermore, in terms of youth crime, the number of youth offenders in Victoria (population 6,526,400) was 8,182, in New South Wales (population 8,046,100) it was 17,972, while in Queensland (population 5,052,800) it was 11,699.

Lee and colleagues write that between 2009 and 2019, youth crime in Victoria decreased by 34.9%. This meant that the state was the focus of a panic about youth crime during a period when the actual youth crime rate was falling drastically.

Analysis of the moral panic

The term Moral panic was popularised by sociologist Stanley Cohen in the 1970s. It describes the process by which the media use sensational headlines and melodramatic language to exaggerate events and actors, creating fear of supposed threats to the safety of society and othering groups which are identified as source of this threat. Cohen specifically applied the term to the interplay of crime reporting and social reaction in the UK. He states that a moral panic will emerge when "a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media," and this media focus is echoed by politicians and experts. These targeted groups are referred to by Cohen as folk devils. He notes that use of the concept of a moral panic does not require the problem to be inexistent, merely exaggerated, usually in a way which is conditioned by the ideology of the dominant sector of society.

Academic interpretations of the African gangs panic

The political and media storm around so-called African gangs of 2016–2018 is described by academics as an example of a moral panic.

Tebeje Molla notes that while racialised moral panics around crime and immigration are not unusual around the world, the intensity of the panic around "African Gangs" in Melbourne was exceptional. However, Molla also notes that, unlike in classic moral panics, where "experts" play a key role in the escalation of the panic, the police, statistical bodies and local authorities in Victoria resisted the narrative and denied the existence of a gang problem. John Gaffey also views it as an atypical panic, in that experts resisted the narrative.

Gatwiri and Anderson view African gangs panic as part of a continual series of ideologically motivated racialised moral panics which are a response to social change in Australia. They state that panics flourish because they "obscure meaningful critical analysis of the validity of these panics and instead allow for a projection of anxieties and fears onto minoritized others who can easily be scapegoated through these events." They also argue that while moral panics abate, the negative representations of African-ness and its coding as criminal have permanent negative effects on African communities in Australia.

Lee and colleagues state that while the punitive narratives in the media and politics tying Sudanese young people to crime contained elements of a moral panic, there was more to them than just structural factors. They argue that offending behaviour can stem from members of marginalised communities taking pleasure in transgressive actions. They also indicate that evidence from interviews suggests that the media attention and scapegoating incited Sudanese youth to take part in antisocial activities, and that the widespread coverage of the supposed "Apex gang" may actually have caused youths to create a real gang of that name.

Kounmoris and Blaustein view the events of 2016–2018 as "a multi-mediated moral panic". They point to the relevance and similarity of Stuart Hall et al.'s 1978 study of a racialised moral panic around mugging in the UK to the Melbourne panic. In their view, the African gangs panic is a case study which brings Hall's analysis up to date into the new fragmented media landscape of 24-hour news, online news sources and social media.

Causes of the panic

Black people in modern Australia suffer a high degree of racial discrimination, with the 2018 Australian Human Rights Commission report stating "the five groups that experienced the highest level of racial discrimination were those born in South Sudan, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Ethiopia and those who identified as Indigenous."

Australia has a long history of official and unofficial racism towards black Africans, reflected in the White Australia policy, in effect from 1901 until the 1970s, which prohibited the immigration of black Africans, among other non-White groups. Prior to the policy's implementation, small numbers of black Africans and African-Americans were resident in Australia, and their presence was explicitly mentioned in the discussions on the restriction of non-white immigration.

Following the end of this policy, despite Australia becoming more ethnically diverse, negative stereotypes around black Africans remained prominent in Australian culture. Modern African-Australians are culturally and socially diverse, but Australian society typically views them as a homogenous group, set in opposition to its constructions of whiteness. In Australia, "Africanness" is associated with a lack of civilisation, disease, dirt, war and poverty; scholars such as Wearing, Jakubowicz, Wickes and others note that this perception is rooted in a social context of racist and discriminatory assumptions about black people.

Current academic literature has highlighted frequent experiences of discrimination, criminalisation and racialisation shaping the interactions of black-African Australians with majority society. In particular, a strong negative association between Africanness and criminality exists in Australian culture, which was reflected in the media's presentation of the events in Melbourne. This has been accompanied by islamophobic rhetoric emerging in the war on terror, where Muslims are racialised as others who are dangerous for Australian society and incidents of criminality are viewed by the media as potential indications of Islamic extremism.

The 2016 Challenging Racism Project found negative attitudes to black people were common in Australia. 21% of respondents felt that African refugees increased crime in Australia, and 16.1% stated they felt "very negative or somewhat negative" towards African Australians. Wickes et al. argue that these attitudes reflect implicit biases widespread in Australia which can cause unconscious discrimination. They consider this to be a factor in both the press and politicians presentation of so-called "African gangs" and the public's reaction to it.

Effects of the panic on Black Australians

A 2018 study based in interviews with young Sudanese Australians found that they reported many negative consequences of the media's reporting of the Moomba riot and the subsequent gang narrative. The participants reported that during the panic, there was an increase in racial abuse towards them in public spaces and that individuals with racist views were emboldened to express them, as they felt they had been legitimised and normalised by the media's racialised language. This increase in racist commentary and abuse was also noted by the participants on social media sites like Facebook. Participants also noted being distressed by online comments under reports from media organisations such as Channel Seven which frequently contained virulently racist views and calls for the deportation of Sudanese Australians. The participants noted the lack of comments defending African Australians and perceived these comment sections as "a constant reminder that some segments of the vocal Australian public were fundamentally intolerant of the presence of South Sudanese communities in Australia."

In addition to this exposure to racism, young Sudanese Australians felt that the panic stigmatised them and associated them with criminality, having negative effects on both the personal and communal level. Some young people experienced this as a constant pressure to prove the stereotypes wrong. Others reported that their awareness of the racist element in Australian society and its intolerance towards them, made them suspicious of people outside their group, despite them being aware that the racist element was a minority.

In schools, Sudanese Australians report that the exaggerated reports on the supposed "Apex gang" led to teachers to perceive groups of Sudanese children as potentially criminal gangs, and that groups of Sudanese children were not tolerated. Similarly, Sudanese Australians were insulted with terms reflecting the language of the panic both in school and in public. They further reported frequent microaggressions which led them to question their belonging and worth in Australian society.

The racial profiling of African-Australians by police during the panic led to feelings of being harassed and lacking in freedom of movement and to associate in public with people of their own ethnicity.