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Unmasking Deviance: The Visual Construction of Asylum Seekers and Refugees in English National Newspapers

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Abstract

This paper explores the visual representation of asylum seekers and refugees delineating how English newspaper imagery constructs such groups as deviant and dangerous. A qualitative visual analysis of nine of the major national newspapers demonstrates how mediated images of asylum seekers focus upon three distinct ‘visual scenarios’ in the discovery of deviance, which collectively demonstrate how the social portrayal of the criminal immigrant fuses the otherness of the stranger with the otherness of the deviant. First, the faceless and de-identified stranger enables the construction of a panoply of feared subjects. Second, stigma is implicitly illustrated, deviance obliquely intimated and ‘spoiled identities’ constructed. Third, the mask is removed, the asylum seeker is identified and their deviant status confirmed. Such a process is reinvented, repeated and reworked in news stories, with deviance becoming increasingly engrained and entrenched in the image of the asylum seeker. This paper details how the repetition of specific visual scenarios in newspaper reporting contribute to the construction of ‘noisy’ panics about asylum seekers and asylum seeking. Moreover, it argues that such imagery is key to the construction of asylum as an issue of security, which necessitates a policy approach that is exclusionary in nature.

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Notes

  1. The Sangatte refugee camp is a reception centre near the Channel Tunnel in north-east France. The facility opened in September 1999 to provide food and shelter to homeless migrants in the region. Because migrants from the centre frequently attempted to travel illegally to the UK where they would claim asylum, the centre became a source of controversy between the two countries. In 2002 the UK's Labour government negotiated the closure the Sangatte refugee camp.

  2. Market research company offering polling, focus groups and telephone surveys in various specialist areas.

  3. The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, and The Times, Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Daily Star and The Sun.

  4. j.banks@shu.ac.uk

  5. Steaming is a slang term used in the UK typically for robbery performed on public transport by a gang or large group and often involving some level of violence. The victim is surrounded by the group who use intimidation and violence to commit theft.

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Malcolm Cowburn, Naemi Jarvis, Yvonne Jewkes, John Steel and Maggie Wykes for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this paper and the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable suggestions.

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  1. Department of Law, Criminology and Community Justice, Faculty of Development and Society, Sheffield Hallam University, Whitehouse, Southbourne, Collegiate Crescent Campus, Sheffield, S10 2BP, UK

    James Banks

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Banks, J. Unmasking Deviance: The Visual Construction of Asylum Seekers and Refugees in English National Newspapers. Crit Crim 20, 293–310 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-011-9144-x

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