Sept 23 2002 – Politicians increasingly link law-and-order issues with ethnicity. But a study of attitudes to crime reveals the gap between political grandstanding and reality.
It seems a lifetime ago now, but I remember the heart-pumping humiliation as if it were yesterday. It was roll call time at Pymble Public School and every morning the deputy principal, our sixth class teacher, would shout “potato tomato” instead of my name.
For a year, that elderly, soon-to-retire teacher used my Italian name – and my “differentness”- to build a bond with other kids in the class, isolating one to draw in the rest.
On the last day of primary school, I fell over playing chasies in the playground and felt a snap in my right arm. “Stop being such a hysterical little Italian,” he said, forcing me back to the classroom to finish a two-hour art class.
That afternoon the arm was x-rayed and I spent the last summer before high school in plaster.
Such memories of being a wog kid during the 1960s and early ’70s returned with clarity as Sydneysiders have been swept by the rhetoric of the state’s politicians whose drive to link law-and-order issues with ethnicity is building to a pre-poll peak.
Back then, Italians were painted as prone to criminality. Jokes about the “mafia” were never-ending as too were assumptions that somehow Italianness meant an innate predilection for criminal behaviour – usually assigned to your father or brother.
Remembering such experiences makes one wonder how it must be for young Arab women in the city’s south-western suburbs in the wake of the gang rape trials, or Vietnamese teenagers in Cabramatta when the heroin trade hit the headlines.
Life has changed enormously in the past three decades but, as politicians seize the climate of insecurity, it seems that my old teacher’s classic wedge tactic of isolating one to harness the support of the rest is alive and well.
Professor Jock Collins, of the University of Technology’s business school, says the experiences shared by each wave of new immigrants is a cyclical feature of life in big, diverse, multicultural cities like Sydney.
But the co-author of a newly released study of ethnic groups’ attitudes and perceptions of crime in Sydney, Gangs, Crime and Community Safety: Perceptions and Experiences in Multicultural Sydney, says he is increasingly worried that the law-and-order rhetoric of state political leaders is fanning and lengthening the normal, transient period of community discomfort that comes with adjustment to the newest wave of immigrants.
“The issue of ethnic crime raises its ugly head constantly in NSW history,” he says. “The mafia, the Greek conspiracy, the South-East Asian triads. It keeps coming and it is not always related to the last wave of immigrants, as the latest panic about Lebanese crime indicates. The problem with political developments recently is that we can slip from discussion of the criminality of individuals to the criminality of entire cultures.”
Collins points to the murder of the young Blacktown nurse Anita Cobby in 1986 as an example. The brutality of her death at the hands of a group of five Anglo-Celtic youths (the Murphy brothers were convicted of this crime) sparked widespread community outrage and comment.
“What really annoys me with the ethnic crime issue is that with the Anita Cobby murder there was no attempt by our political leaders to call in the Irish community and its leaders to ask them to deal with the problem,” Collins says.
Crime involving ethnic minorities are regarded as a problem for leaders of a community to solve. Yet if it is a crime involving the white majority, it’s a general community problem.
“There is an asymmetry in the way we respond,” he says. “We react differently to crime if it is committed by an immigrant minority than if it was committed by the white majority. That should no longer wash in a city like this, in this century.”
Collins and his co-authors, University of Western Sydney’s Associate Professor Scott Poynting and Dr Greg Noble, and Dr Paul Tabar from the Notre Dame University in Beirut, surveyed 380 adults and 445 young people to gain a rare snapshot of the relationship between youth, ethnicity and crime through the eyes of immigrants.
The group chose eight local government areas – Hurstville, Bankstown, Fairfield, Rockdale, Liverpool, Auburn, Bankstown and Canterbury – and most of the interviews with adults were conducted in languages other than English.
“Usually these people have no voice,” Collins says. “This was a unique exercise to tap the views of immigrant Sydneysiders who are at the centre of this ethnic crime storm and yet whose voices go unnoticed in most English-based opinion polls.”
The study shows clearly that the fear of crime is as much a feature of immigrant communities as it is among the older, established groups.
“It’s not surprising then that law and order is irresistible to NSW politicians, particularly since the events of the past year can only have escalated the fear of crime in NSW,” Collins says.
Nearly three-quarters of the adults surveyed believe crime is on the rise in Sydney. Most were very concerned and violent assault was the crime most feared.
As interviews were conducted before the September 11 attack on New York, researchers believe perceptions can only be worse now.
Interestingly, when it came to youth, violent assault, burglary and street theft were highest on the list but drugs were low compared with adults, who listed it as the biggest social problem.
All up, respondents who lived in Canterbury were the most fearful of crime, followed by those in Rockdale and Fairfield. By contrast, people in Hurstville, Bankstown, Liverpool and Auburn were less concerned.
The researchers also found that when it came to fear of crime being co-related to the actual incidence of crime, there were huge inconsistencies.
For example, burglary, followed by car theft, was the crime that most adults surveyed had suffered. Yet personal experience of violent assault – their biggest fear along with drugs and burglary – was very low.
Among young people, burglary and car theft were also the most common experiences, although there was a slightly higher incidence of violent assault experiences than among the adults, including sexual assault (7 per cent) and street theft (14 per cent).
Youth gangs, too, were interesting. Not surprisingly, two out of three adults thought youth gangs were a problem, while young people were much more ambivalent about the issue. However the majority of those surveyed did not link gangs with a particular ethnic group.
Collins warns, however, that as interviews were conducted before the gang rapes in south-western Sydney received publicity, chances are the results would be different today.
The results, however, threw up interesting geographic differences, with a higher proportion of youth living in Bankstown (33 per cent), the North Shore (29 per cent), Liverpool (28 per cent), Rockdale (28 per cent) and Auburn (27 per cent) reporting a criminal past than youth in Canterbury, Fairfield and Hurstville.
Fairfield was the area with the lowest rate of self-reported youth criminality.
Collins argues that Sydney is seeing in the lead-up to the state election simply an evolution of the phenomenon first harnessed by Pauline Hanson.
“In an age of insecurity and flux and well before September 11, Pauline Hanson tapped into these fears which are ultimately attributable to globalisation, to the restructure of the workforce and increasing unemployment, to the casualisation of work and the decline of rural Australia,” he says.
“Hanson’s trump card was linking this insecurity to ethnic and indigenous minority.”
The study showed also that the same people who revealed the extent of their concern about crime also thought their local area a safe place to live.
This finding – that two in three adults and eight out of 10 youth felt safe in their local area – particularly startled the researchers because most of those surveyed lived in the south-western suburbs, the area regularly reported as being at the heart of “crime-ridden Sydney”.
Overall, two in every three felt safe in their own area.
On the other hand, the places where people felt least safe were railway stations, car parks and in and around bus stops.
Just three out of every 10 felt safe on public transport, although young people felt safer than adults. Similarly, young people generally felt safe in the local shopping centres while one-third of adults did not.
For Collins, conclusions are clear: “The politicisation of the ethnic crime issue by both parties and the media’s obsession with the issue in the lead-up to the 2003 state election not only intensifies the fear of crime but undermines feelings of community safety and threatens to undermine social cohesion in the city.”
