Voices of reason: young South Sudanese Australians have their say

Although the South Sudanese have been migrating to Australia since the mid-1990s, the highest numbers arrived in 2004 and 2005 – before South Sudan became an independent country in 2011. Independence only came after two civil wars that killed and displaced millions.

The South Sudanese are now the biggest group of ‘new’ migrants of a refugee background in Australia. Most, according to a recent Monash University criminology report, arrived from “countries of first asylum” such as Egypt or Kenya, where they had sought safety from the wars in their homeland. The majority of the 30,000-plus population live in Melbourne.

But the community has had to deal with challenges far greater than those of the usual refugee settlement process – two significant challenges, in particular.

The first was the death of South Sudanese teenager Liep Gony in 2007 in Melbourne; he was murdered by two white men. At the time, federal immigration minister Kevin Andrews suggested it was evidence that South Sudanese had failed to integrate into Australia. Then, in 2016, was the so-called Moomba ‘riots’ in and around Federation Square. The spectre of the so-called ‘Apex’ gang appeared, and everything changed.

The report, 'Don’t Drag Me Into This’: Growing up South Sudanese in Victoria after the 2016 Moomba 'Riot', is a collaboration between Monash with the University of Melbourne and the Centre for Multicultural Youth (CMY). The main theme is the effect of media narratives on the young people of Melbourne’s South Sudanese community since Moomba 2016. The report is based on focus group interviews with 28 young women aged between 15 and 23.

“It’s very, very clear that this has created an environment where racism has become more problematic and more visible in various aspects of their lives,” said Monash criminology lecturer Dr Jarrett Blaustein, one of the report’s chief investigators. His collaborators were Dr Kathryn Benier and Dr Sara Maher of Monash, and Dr Diana Johns of the University of Melbourne.

The report reveals that in the two years before the 2016 Moomba riot there was only one media reference to a gang called ‘Apex’, and it didn’t mention ethnicity, whereas in the two years following there were 138 references to ‘Sudanese’ and ‘gang’.

Only one media outlet, The Age, began using “race or ethnicity” less commonly in the weeks following Moomba, “and journalists at the newspaper eventually started publishing articles and commentaries that challenged” the more racialised narrative in other media outlets such as Channel Nine, Channel Seven and the Herald-Sun, according to the report.

“Their lived experiences are a testament to the idea that racism involves more than prejudicial, offensive or abusive interactions … rather, they illustrate that racism can also take the form of excluding people.”

The report also documents the aftermath of media reporting of a federal government standing committee on migration – chaired by Liberal MP Jason Wood – and another flurry of “sensationalist” media pieces about “African gangs” in Melbourne. This was around the time the then home affairs minister, Peter Dutton, claimed people in Melbourne were “afraid” to go out to restaurants.

However, the report’s main purpose is to document how young South Sudanese Australians felt in the wake of all this.

“We wanted to understand ideas around belonging and long-term opportunities,” said Dr Blaustein.

The six focus groups were held in Fitzroy, North Melbourne, Sunshine, Sydenham, Werribee and Tarneit, organised by CMY through its network of schools and community youth groups.

The findings, the reports says, “collectively speak to racism as the overarching problem identified by all of our participants as a defining feature of their lives since the 2016 Moomba riot”.

“Their lived experiences are a testament to the idea that racism involves more than prejudicial, offensive or abusive interactions … rather, they illustrate that racism can also take the form of excluding people.”

The report illustrates these findings partly through direct quotes from the participants, in three parts: Moomba in the Media; Racism; and Belonging and Opportunity.

Moomba in the Media

The report says participants had “clear consensus” that what happened at Moomba in 2016 was “heavily exaggerated” in the media. A participant who was there on the night said:

“… it started off as a joke. And then because the police took it as, this is a group of Sudanese kids, it’s about to go out of hand. They just instantly went to force …”

The report notes (in footnotes) that video footage given to radio station 3AW “suggests the disorder was seemingly ignited after approximately six police officers found themselves surrounded by a crowd of young people in Federation Square. At one point, some members of the crowd started chanting ‘f--k the police’, prompting the police to deploy capsicum spray, which caused people to flee.”

A participant said racially-angled media coverage changed their lives.

“That stereotype was not there … and then as soon as that came, like, everything changed. For the worse.”

Racism

Participants felt media coverage intensified discrimination against them and made discrimination socially acceptable both in person and on social media.

“It’s just everyone agreeing, ‘Oh send them back’, um, ‘these dogs, deport them’, and all these things. So, the comments really hurt me more than when I saw the photos [of Moomba].”

One participant described how she was upset to see a news article through Facebook about a South Sudanese female model in Melbourne who was in advertising images for a department store, but comments on the article were “disrespectful” and racist.

Participants felt “stigmatised and labelled because of their race and perceived association with criminality”.

“… we’re all thugs. We all steal. We all fight and everything, and that’s not what it is.” 

“Not all Australians are racist, but there’s that 1 per cent that make it so hard to see the good in everyone else.”

Participants – and their siblings – felt more racialised bullying at school, and some felt school teachers “failed to deal with the problem” and displayed “micro-aggressions” that could be “patronising” towards them.

The idea they were “different” from their peers was reinforced. Two of the participants had experienced racism on public transport, and many felt they were racially profiled by Victoria Police. Many also said it affected the relationship and sense of trust with their parent or parents.

In public, groups of young men or boys got “negative reactions”. Participants felt an increased level of “surveillance within and exclusion from shops as a consequence of their physical appearance”.

They felt “cultural ignorance” about the way they and their families and friends behaved.

“When we head out together, they think that we’re gonna do something bad, but … they are our brothers and sisters … we’re not even doing anything. This is our culture. Our culture is to stay together. You know? But them, they think that they’re kind of like gang towards stuff. That we’re gonna cause trouble.”

Belonging and Opportunity

Belonging, according to the report, “implies feeling ‘at home’ and being emotionally attached to one’s place of residence and community”.

For young South Sudanese Australians, belonging can manifest through health and wellbeing, positive education experiences and multicultural friendship networks. Most participants talked about Melbourne and Victoria as somewhere stable to live after the upheaval and transitory nature of their lives before.

But they told the report’s authors that racism and misunderstandings of the diversity of African cultures led to them feeling like outsiders.

“They see someone … with a darker complexion, and all of a sudden it’s ‘South Sudanese’ … and I sit back and I’m like, ‘Not every black person you see is from South Sudan’. Africa is a big continent.”

Participants were saddened by the stereotype of young South Sudanese Australians lacking parental supervision.

“They made us look like our parents don’t raise us. It looks like we have no home training at all. It looks like we are a bunch of kids who basically do not respect their parents, don’t respect the law. And, like, what people don’t understand is, like, we come from the most strictest households … and what the media’s showing people, they’re showing us like we’re out of control, but to be honest, it’s the complete opposite.”

The participants broadly described belonging as feeling accepted.

“To not be judged.”

In terms of opportunities, they can be defined, according to the report, as “economic, social or cultural”. However, participants said they had to work harder than others to access opportunities despite prominent success stories of South Sudanese Australians in sport and the professional workforce.

“I think the hardest part [of growing up in Victoria] is having to prove that you’re more than your colour.”

The report contains 13 recommendations to governments, Victoria Police, the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission and media, highlighting the participants’ concerns and suggesting ways forward.

“We want to explore these issues further with CMY,” said Dr Blaustein.

“We want to better understand the concerns of, specifically, teenage boys and young men from the community. We also want to better understand what’s happening in schools. We see government agencies as key partners, but we need their help to figure out what’s going on. It’s a case now of ‘watch this space’.”