- 25 May 2012 03:11
#13969168
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There have been a spate of reports recently in the UK related to the charging and sentencing of alleged members of child-sex rings. Referred by police as “sex grooming”, these gangs prey on (mostly) teenage girls, befriending them, earning their trust through drinks, gifts and money, and then – gang raping them. Not surprisingly, the usual suspects have come out of the woodwork and pounced on the alleged perpetrators “muslim-sounding” names to draw baseless conclusions about the “problem” of the muslim community, and their propensity to engage in these horrific crimes.
What we are seeing here is a classic ‘moral panic’ against a cultural ‘other’. As an Australian, I am all too familiar with such moral panics, particularly those that are directed against the muslim community. The most potent of these was over Lebanese gang-rapes in the late 1990s. Through the mediums of tabloid media and right-wing commentators, these moral panics seek to tar entire communities, and to associate their culture with characteristics that are both morally inferior and incompatibility with the host culture; to the extent that certain behaviours (eg raping) are not merely seen as deviant behaviours, but are actually considered normal within those foreign cultures.
Of course its needless to say that such moral panics have no basis in reality; there has never been any evidence of a culture of gang-rape within the Australian Lebanese community, just as there is no evidence of a culture of sex-grooming within the muslim community in the UK.
While using a few isolated incidents to smear an entire community is bad enough, what is even worse is when a crime is attributed to a particular group or community when it cannot possibly be known whether or not the perpetrator even belongs to that particular group or community.
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