Refugees as/at risk: The gendered and racialized underpinnings of securitization in British media narratives

Abstract

It is well established in the literature that migration has become increasingly securitized. In this article, we examine the racialized and gendered grids of intelligibility that make securitizing moves possible in the migration context. Specifically, we argue that the securitization of migration during the so-called EU refugee crisis comes into being through intertwined and mutually dependent representations of racialized, masculinized threat and racialized, feminized vulnerability, which are woven into the scaffolding of colonial modernity. We construct our argument through an analysis of relevant newspaper articles published in British newspapers between September 2015 and March 2016. Accordingly, our discussion advances understandings of the dominant narratives through which the ‘refugee crisis’ has been understood. In addition, in highlighting the naturalized inequalities that underpin securitizing speech acts, the article also contributes to literature that seeks to add an improved understanding of power to securitization theory.

Keywords

Gender media race refugee crisis securitization of migration vulnerability

Introduction

The spring of 2015 saw a dramatic increase in refugee arrivals to Europe. In media reports, this event became known as the European ‘refugee crisis’, recognizable through images of refugees in overcrowded rubber dinghies and desperate people trying to cross the Western Balkans, as well as the iconic image of three-year-old Alan Kurdi’s body washed up on a beach in Turkey. While initial reporting centred on the vulnerability of those seeking protection, media representations would soon change their focus towards EU member-states’ (lack of) ability and/or willingness to host the growing number of refugees, shifting the emphasis from refugees ‘at risk’ towards refugees ‘as risk’ to Europe’s security, culture and social fabric.

In this article, we examine the gendered and racialized logics through which refugees have been represented as/at risk in the reporting around the so-called refugee crisis in British newspaper articles. It has been convincingly argued elsewhere that migration has become increasingly securitized (see, for example, Bourbeau, 2011; Huysmans, 2006; Ibrahim, 2005). The notion of securitization here captures the gradual move of migration issues from the realm of ‘normal’ politics into the realm of security. Approached as a ‘speech act’ (see Buzan et al., 1998), securitization encompasses an ‘intersubjective process’ wherein different agents (securitizing actors and audiences/elites and the public) come to a shared understanding around ‘the perceived seriousness of a threat … and the urgent need to mobilize all available recourses to curtail its development’ (Karyotis, 2012: 391). In such processes, media frames play an important role (Vultee, 2010), and numerous studies have shown how news media (re)produce constructions of migrants as ‘enemies at the gate’ (Esses et al., 2013) who pose a threat to the physical safety, economy and identity of receiving countries in the ‘West’ (Innes, 2010). Interrogating the mediation of the current ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe, scholars have further qualified how securitizing frames may shift quite rapidly over time (Greussing and Boomgaarden, 2017; Chouliaraki et al., 2017), wherein notions of ‘victimhood’ and ‘threat’ function as ‘co-existing’ categories (Chouliaraki and Zaborowski, 2017: 617) that can be effectively employed in debates around the un/deserving migrant/refugee ‘Other’ (Goodman et al., 2017; Holmes and Castañeda, 2016; Holzberg et al., 2018).

While the above scholarship has brought forward important insights on how refugees are discursively located as ‘victim’ and/or ‘threat’, our endeavour in this article is somewhat different in that we do not frame the securitizing ‘speech act’ visible in the media discourse as the pivotal point at which refugee bodies are discursively relocated from ‘the threatened’ to ‘the threat’ (see Balzacq, 2005). Rather, we seek to examine the gendered and racialized logics of coloniality that make such securitizing moves possible. We thus urge caution in overemphasizing the meaning of these moves and rather suggest that the apparently ambiguous ways in which refugees are ‘suspended between victimhood and malevolence’ in media reporting around the crisis (Chouliaraki and Zaborowski, 2017: 616) is rooted within a coherent set of gendered and racialized colonial logics that are not new but rather woven into the scaffolding of colonial modernity (Moffette and Vadasaria, 2016). Our argument is that securitizing moves, as they appear in media frames, are made possible by intertwined and mutually dependent gendered and racialized representations of refugee threat and vulnerability, which are familiar rather than foreign to the designated audience (Balzacq, 2005). This perspective allows us to unpack how British media discourse comes to be characterized both by expressions of sympathy for the plight of refugees and by fear of those same refugees, often without much overt interrogation.

The article proceeds as follows: We begin with a discussion of our specific focus and methodology, and then sketch out the gendered and racialized logics that have been identified as characteristic of colonial modernity. We continue by charting the more overt representations of racialized feminine vulnerability and masculine threat that emerge in our sample of newspaper articles and that, we suggest, form the overarching grids of intelligibility underpinning interpretation of the events of the crisis in the media. We then focus on three phases of the narrative as it evolved over our sample period. The first phase, which we have termed ‘Refugees Welcome’, stretches roughly from September to early November 2015; the second, ‘Paris Changes Everything’, from the terrorist attacks in Paris on 13 November 2015 to January 2016; and, finally, the ‘Sexual Jihad’ phase began with reporting of the New Year’s Eve violence in Cologne and elsewhere. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of our discussions for understandings and responses to the European refugee crisis itself.

Focus and method

Investigation of the UK press coverage of the ‘refugee crisis’ is interesting for several reasons. First, British newspapers are read by audiences all over the world: of the four newspapers we analysed – The Guardian, The Telegraph, the Mirror and the Daily Mail – three are among the top ten most read online newspapers worldwide (Radwanick, 2012). Second, reports suggest that the British press were the most polarized in their coverage of the ‘refugee crisis’, with the right-wing press showing outright ‘hostility towards refugees and migrants’, visible in a predominance of negative frames as well as in editorials pushing ‘Fortress Europe approaches’ (Berry et al., 2015: 10). The British context itself, of course, is a particular one, which shaped the analysed articles in specific ways. Besides the general historic specificities of immigration in Britain (see Innes, 2010), the most salient factor was the referendum on whether the UK should remain a member of the European Union – the so-called Brexit referendum – which took place on 23 June 2016 and in which the UK voted to leave the EU. The spectre of the referendum arguably shaped much of the narrative on the refugee crisis that emerged from the British press, as immigration, from Europe and beyond, became the most significant issue in driving the vote to leave (Ipsos Mori, 2016). Similarly, the geography of the UK, as well as its non-membership in Europe’s passport-free Schengen area, plays a significant role in shaping the discourse, in particular in drawing attention to the so-called Jungle camp in Calais where refugees and migrants lived while trying to enter the UK.

The four newspapers selected for our analysis represent the spread of political standpoints across the press: encompassing a right-wing and a left-wing broadsheet (The Telegraph and The Guardian, respectively), and a right-wing and a left-wing tabloid (the Daily Mail and the Mirror, respectively). As Berry et al.’s (2015) analysis suggests, there were, in some aspects, significant differences between the views espoused by the different newspapers – the Daily Mail, for example, was much more likely to express outright animosity towards refugees than was The Guardian. Despite this, we chart similarities and shifts across the dominant narratives that emerge, to a greater or lesser extent, across all four of the newspapers analysed. Moreover, in pointing to the intertwined gendered and racialized logics that underpin representations of both vulnerable and threatening refugees, we draw attention to important similarities and co-dependencies that characterize both ‘pro-refugee’ and ‘anti-refugee’ narratives.

We used the Factiva database to search for relevant articles from the four newspapers published between 1 September 2015 and 31 March 2016. These dates were chosen to align with significant events in the European refugee crisis: the death of Alan Kurdi on 2 September 2015 and the signing of the EU–Turkey deal to end ‘irregular migration’ from Turkey to the EU on 18 March 2016. Our search identified articles that contained at least one of the words ‘refugee’, ‘migrant’, ‘immigrant’ or ‘asylum’, along with some form of ‘protect’, ‘safe’, ‘security’, ‘risk’, ‘danger’ or ‘terror’, as well as reference to the ‘EU’ or to ‘Europe’. These search terms were chosen to identify articles that focused on the EU refugee crisis in relation to the broad concepts of safety and security – whether of ‘Europe’ or of migrants themselves – in order to access representations of refugees both as and/or at risk. It is possible that the focus of our search terms caused us to miss alternative representations of refugees that did not focus on questions of safety and security. However, given the large number and range of articles that we found, we do not think that we missed significant numbers of articles. The original search found 2679 articles, although a significant number were excluded for irrelevance on reading (e.g. for being focused on refugees journeying to Australia rather than to Europe). Our analysis included news articles, features and opinion pieces from both print and online versions of the newspapers. It is worth noting that the articles were not evenly distributed across the four newspapers: considerably more articles were found in The Telegraph and The Guardian than in the Daily Mail and the Mirror, a difference that was likely attributable in large part to the different lengths of the publications as well as their editorial stances and priorities. We did not conduct a quantitative analysis and, accordingly, the statements that we make about the newspaper narratives do not rely upon the number of articles within which particular framings appeared (for a quantitative account, see Chouliaraki et al., 2017). Rather, we conducted an interpretive, thematic analysis to identify what we read as the most significant framings of refugees that emerged from the newspaper articles. In comparison to a quantitative content analysis, this approach enabled us to interpret the context and meaning with which particular frames were used, and to pay attention to both manifest and latent content (Joffe and Yardley, 2004: 57). Generally speaking, the frames that we read as the most significant appeared in multiple articles; however, we do not rest our interpretation of importance on quantitative measures and, indeed, we also discuss less common themes in several of the article’s subsections.

Analytical framework: Gender and race as the scaffold of colonial modernity

Drawing upon the work of, among others, Moffette and Vadasaria (2016), we approach media representations of refugees as/at risk as shaped by the discourses that are embedded in ‘colonial modernity’, which we understand as a project underwritten by the inseparably intertwined operations of gender and race. Moffette and Vadasaria analyse ‘colonial modernity’ in relation to race, arguing that ‘“coloniality … is constitutive of modernity” (Mignolo 2011, 3), and therefore “[m]odernity is racial” (Hesse 2007, 643)’ (Moffette and Vadasaria, 2016: 302n1; see also, inter alia, Appiah, 1991; Quijano, 2007; Said, 1978; Spivak, 1988). In their compelling analysis, Moffette and Vadasaria demonstrate that the failure of much of the literature on securitization to properly engage with race constitutes a ‘serious oversight’ (Moffette and Vadasaria, 2016: 301), because the securitization process itself ‘builds upon already established grids of intelligibility [that are] intrinsically connected to the project of race’ (Moffette and Vadasaria, 2016: 293). They argue that while securitizing moves may represent ‘a qualitative shift’ in the ‘everyday governance of racialized individuals and migrants’ (through their being policed, criminalized and subjected to violence) (Moffette and Vadasaria, 2016: 294), securitization processes are ‘premised upon race as a mode of governing and knowing’ (Moffette and Vadasaria, 2016: 294). That is, it is because of the racialized logics that underpin colonial modernity that non-white populations come to be easily read and treated as threatening and violent (Moffette and Vadasaria, 2016: 295). Accordingly, the securitization of non-white bodies as ‘threat’ is not ‘an actual shift from normal liberal politics to exceptional measures’ (Moffette and Vadasaria, 2016: 297). Rather:

we should aim to describe how the securitization of immigration operates as a political technology that lifts the inhibition of racist violence that is always lurking in the shadow of racialized modern civility, allowing for an increase in anti-migrant violence while at the same time consolidating the fantasy of liberal tolerance and white civility. (Moffette and Vadasaria, 2016: 297)

In our reading of British newspaper reports, we follow Moffette and Vadasaria in arguing that securitizing narratives should not be read as ruptures in response to extraordinary circumstances but, rather, as the product of narratives that are integral to the modern colonial European project. Recognizing the intersectional formulation of oppressions based on race and gender (as well as sexuality, class and other axes of social identity) that has been identified by black feminist and feminist postcolonial scholars (see Crenshaw, 1989, 1991; Henry, 2017), we trace the gendered and racialized images of threat and vulnerability through which refugees come to be read as risk or as at risk.

Feminist postcolonial scholars have described how projects of colonial modernity rely upon orientalist fantasies of the ‘other’ formulated through representations of gendered identities, gender relations and gender (in)equalities. Within these fantasies, ideas about differences in relations between men and women across particular cultural spaces have been integral in symbolically defining the identity and character of nations and their borders: in defining ‘the limits of national difference and power between men’ (McClintock, 1993: 61, emphasis in original). Nationalist and colonial politics have been characterized by gendered and sexualized portrayals of the other as ‘backwards’, and of the West, in comparison, as the space of civilized modernity and progress; by ‘portrayals of enemy men either as sexual demons, bent on raping nationalist women, or as sexual eunuchs, incapable of manly virility’ (Nagel, 1998: 257; see also Ahmed, 1992: Scheibelhofer, 2012: 320–321). Women also emerge from colonial narratives in diverse ways that have been used to justify and perpetuate oppression. In colonial narratives, racialized women have often been approached as uniquely vulnerable and in need of rescue from their ‘oppressive’ cultures – a construction most iconically captured by Gayatri Spivak’s observation that the colonial project has been justified by the notion that ‘white men are saving brown women from brown men’ (Spivak, 1988: 297; see also Ticktin, 2008: 880). In other cases, most notably in relation to enslaved black women in the USA (and in the legacies that persist beyond the formal system of transatlantic slavery), racialized women have been framed within the dominant (white) culture as particularly strong and masculine, lacking in modesty, sexual purity and innocence, and thus they have been denied access to the labels ‘vulnerable’ and even ‘woman’ (Collins, 2000: 82; Hoagland, 2007; hooks, 1982).

While racialized oppressions have drawn upon varied representations of gender, it is intertwined ideas of racialized masculine threat and racialized feminine vulnerability that we identify as underpinning securitizing narratives in contemporary British media discourse. These representations have a long history, but have taken on renewed vigour in the post-9/11 era, particularly in relation to the majority Muslim and/or Arabic cultures from which many refugees coming to Europe have fled. Numerous scholars have highlighted the role that such narratives have played in legitimating contemporary violence. Abu-Lughod, for example, discusses the simplification and instrumentalization of Afghan women’s oppression under the Taliban for the purposes of justifying the post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan (Abu-Lughod, 2002: 784; see also Cloud, 2004). Similarly, Bhattacharyya (2008) explores the linkages drawn within dominant discourse between (Muslim) men’s perpetration of terrorist violence and sexual violence; in Zalewski and Runyan’s (2015: 445) words, ‘the neoliberal international policy establishment’ has perceived ‘a relationship between men’s “uncivilised” behaviour towards women as connected with “uncivilized” acts of terror’. Such narratives both serve to close down the moral space for dissent against the ‘war on terror’ (Shepherd, 2006: 26) and come together in such a way that ideas about gendered oppression and sexual violence become a ‘discourse of border control’ that defines the parameters of European nation-states, as well as ‘who is included and who excluded, culturally, racially, and legally’ (Ticktin, 2008: 864; see also Cloud, 2004; Grewal, 2003; Zalewski and Runyan, 2015: 452). Through these narratives of ‘masculinist protection’ (Young, 2003), not only is female agency erased but, also, ‘the notion of male vulnerability [becomes] essentially unimaginable’ (Myrttinen et al., 2017: 110, emphasis in original; see also Carpenter, 2006).

It is in this context instructive to note how the notion of ‘culture’ has come to perform some of the productive work of ‘race’ in such discourses (see Barker, 1981; Van Dijk, 1991). As Ibrahim (2005: 165) argues, the systems of classification that link migration to threat/vulnerability are not merely based on notions of biological difference but also, and increasingly, on cultural difference. Here the ‘inferior cultural practices, attitudes and values’ of migrants and refugees take centre stage (Every and Augoustinos, 2007: 413) and become ‘the primary means for marking those who are deemed a threat’ (Holmes and Castañeda, 2016: 18). While this helps us forefront how racist discourses are key to securitization processes, Moffette and Vadasaria (2016: 294) also urge caution in conceiving of racism through the ‘prejudice and negative attitudes that stem from “pseudo-biological culturalism”’. This conceptualization, they argue, ‘fails to engage with the modern colonial project of the nation – the object of securitization in this context – as a project already informed by interconnected genealogies of race’ (Moffette and Vadasaria, 2016: 294). For our analysis, this is important for the ways in which it illuminates how the amplification of ‘cultural differences’ in media frames should not be read as separate from but rather as integral to colonial modernity.

Overarching grids of intelligibility

If it was women and children … on their own, I wouldn’t mind. (female British resident in the Greek island of Kos, cited in Squires, 2016)

Gendered and racialized representations of vulnerability and threat form the basic grids of intelligibility through which events of the ‘refugee crisis’ are interpreted in our sample of newspaper articles. Refugees as vulnerable subjects in need of protection, sympathy and support appear to some extent throughout all phases of our sample period, and these representations are often centred on images of women and children. In some cases, it is just children – particularly unaccompanied children – who are represented as being uniquely vulnerable (e.g. Gentleman, 2016; Reid, 2016; Young, 2015), but in general representations of vulnerability centre on ‘womenandchildren’ (Enloe, 1993: 166), on pregnant women and, in some cases, on the elderly and disabled. So ubiquitous are such representations that these groups seem to be used as a shorthand for refugee vulnerability (see, for example, Myers, 2015; Rowley, 2016; Shute, 2015).

The vulnerability of ‘womenandchildren’ is further reinforced by the implication that their suffering and death is especially upsetting. Articles seeking to emphasize the horror of the situation refer not just to deaths, but to the deaths of women and children: ‘Four babies, two children and four women were among the dead’ (Smith, 2015; see also Stevens, 2016a). Similarly, articles emphasize the poor conditions endured by refugees along their journey by highlighting the fact that women and children are among those who must endure them: ‘Fearing that temperatures could soon dip as low as −20C … the charity [Save the Children] runs a shelter here, where women and children can spend the night in the warmth and receive thick socks and raincoats’ (Rowley, 2016). It is worth noting here that the linkage between ‘womenandchildren’ and vulnerability that we identify in this time period does not mean that these subjects are ‘given voice’ in the media frame. Rather, and as proposed by Chouliaraki and Zaborowski (2017: 622), refugee subjects largely appear ‘as abject bodies unable to participate in public discourse’.

Representations of refugee men as vulnerable emerge less strongly from the material (see also Pruitt et al., 2018: 694–695). When they do appear, they are most often representations of injured, disabled or elderly men: ‘Beside her hobbled 22-year-old Mahmoud from Damascus, struggling on a pair of crutches because of his injured legs’ (Graham-Harrison and Henley, 2015). We also found some representations of refugee men as family men – particularly, but not only, as fathers – who must bear their families’ physical vulnerability and cope with their own emotional vulnerability in relation to their families, as in the story of a Syrian man who ‘breaks down in uncontrollable tears’ when he speaks of his wife and children left behind (Shute, 2015). Some articles also referred explicitly to the vulnerabilities that men and boys experience as men, such as the threat of forced recruitment into armed groups:

it’s the boys, from the age of about eight and up, who are most likely to be turned by Islamic State into ‘cub’ fighters – or killed. That’s why they are so vulnerable, and so intent on reaching safety out of the country. (Afzal, 2016)

However, this last narrative was not one that emerged strongly from the articles. Indeed, we also found articles that not only failed to recognize forced recruitment as a gendered form of vulnerability, but – perhaps reflecting an idea that men who flee war rather than fighting exhibit a ‘failed masculinity’ – themselves called for the conscription of male refugees into fighting groups:

especially while we are still seeing young men in the streams of refugees heading to Europe, an urgent programme should be begun to organise and train men currently living in the refugee camps surrounding Syria. They should be motivated and armed, with our help, to fight for their villages, towns and cities. It may sound harsh, but some of their blood should be shed in the attack on Isil before we even consider committing British ground troops to combat in the region. (Dannatt, 2015)

While the dominant narratives generally merely omitted references to single, able-bodied adult male refugees in their depictions of vulnerability, there was also a strong tendency towards overt rejection of these people from the category of the vulnerable through the depiction of such subjects not as threatened but as threatening. Describing the ‘Jungle’ camp in Calais, for instance, one article highlights how neighbouring residents speak of being ‘terrified by the presence of hundreds of men living rough, just yards from their front doors’ (Mulholland, 2015). Another juxtaposes imagery of ‘desperate families’ and frightening single men, referencing the statement of a female British resident in the Greek island of Kos:

If it was women and children and families on their own, I wouldn’t mind, but my fear is that there will be a lot of single young men roaming around, walking between the camp and the village. (Squires, 2016; see also Brooke and Allen, 2015)

Similarly, while some articles express sympathy specifically for young unaccompanied boys (Reid, 2016), others draw clear lines between vulnerable male children and threatening male adults and express mistrust about who falls into which group: ‘certain “child” asylum seekers turn out to be over six feet tall with stubble, like the “15-year-old” Somali youth who stabbed a young Swedish social worker to death’ (Pearson, 2016a).

In contrast to ‘womenandchildren’, single, able-bodied and young refugee men cannot be recognized as vulnerable and in need, as they are too readily identified as a threat through their racialized maleness. In relying upon such a narrative strategy, the newspaper discourse (re)produces the deeply rooted gendered dichotomy between threatened and threatening racialized subjects, and obscures the possibility that male bodies, too, are weak and breakable in the face of war, intense cold or the ocean. That is, reflecting the insights of feminist postcolonial scholarship sketched out above, we see how the overarching grid of intelligibility that informs press coverage of the refugee crisis relies upon the assumption, on the one hand, of racialized women as innately vulnerable and in need of paternalistic protection and, on the other hand, of racialized able-bodied men, in particular those without family ties, as suspicious and threatening.

The gendered and racialized logics identified above form the basic understanding that underpins the ‘refugee crisis’ narrative in the British press. However, how these logics came to be (overtly and covertly) employed in interpreting the unfolding events and in representing refugees either as risk or as at risk requires a somewhat closer reading of the evolving reports throughout 2015 and 2016. In the following sections, therefore, we take a closer look at the newspaper articles across our sample period and identify three ‘phases’ in the dominant representation of refugees, which we entitle ‘Refugees Welcome’, ‘Paris Changes Everything’ and ‘Sexual Jihad’.

Three ‘phases’ of newspaper narratives

‘Refugees welcome’

The dominant narrative in the newspaper articles from September, October and the early part of November 2015 largely reflects compassion towards the refugees (see also Chouliaraki et al., 2017; Goodman et al., 2017). Sympathy for their plight swelled across much of the world after pictures of the body of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, who drowned attempting to reach Europe along with his five-year-old brother Galib and their mother Rehana, were published in multiple media outlets. Articles in this period tell with sympathy the story of the Kurdi family and its tragic destruction, describing the ‘pain’ and the ‘emotional scenes’ at the family’s funeral, and stating that ‘the devastating image of little Aylan [sic] … has come to symbolise the human horror of the refugee crisis’ (Duffin, 2015). In this phase, the dominant narrative reflects broad support and sympathy for the plight of refugees under the slogan ‘refugees welcome’ (e.g. Pidd, 2015), expressing sympathy for those ‘who have endured so much’ and had ‘no choice’ but to flee their homes (Said, 2015).

Reflecting the orientalist fantasies outlined above in which (some) racialized women are seen as innately vulnerable (see, for example, Abu-Lughod, 2002; Spivak, 1998), representations of refugee suffering during this phase in the reporting skew towards a focus on women. Images of families, of the disabled and of mothers cradling their children abound. In some articles, family identity is used to draw empathetic connections between the refugees and ‘us’: ‘I am a mum, and certainly I have been sleeping with my children in my bed with me because I just can’t imagine not having their little warm chubby arms around my neck’ (Addley and Gani, 2015). This is further reinforced through critical reporting of the perceived failure of European governments to respond properly to the crisis (Rossington et al., 2015; Thornton, 2015). Europe is accused of ‘slamm[ing] its doors’ in the face of vulnerable refugees, and Eastern European nations – particularly Hungary and its Prime Minister Viktor Orbán – come in for the harshest critique. Several articles, particularly in The Guardian, describe Orbán as ‘hardline anti-immigrant’ (Traynor et al., 2015), and his government as ‘xenophobic’ (Kingsley, 2015). His remarks are described as ‘incendiary’ (Traynor, 2015), and his border fence – the ‘razor-wire’ of which is repeatedly referenced (e.g. Graham-Harrison and Henley, 2015; Kingsley, 2015; Traynor, 2015) – as ‘controversial’ (Graham-Harrison and Henley, 2015).

It is important to note, however, that not all of the articles published between September and mid-November 2015 expressed support for refugees. Articles in the Daily Mail, in particular, buck this trend with a markedly ‘anti-refugee’ stance; indeed, the Mail published pieces in this period that explicitly objected to the way many people had ‘succumbed to a surge of emotion’ around the refugee crisis (Hastings, 2015). In some examples, the Mail was rabidly anti-refugee: an article published as early as September 2015, which foreshadowed many of the gendered narratives of threat that appear in later phases of our analysis, scathingly mocked the ‘idiocy’ of the ‘gormless Twitter generation’ for showing compassion to in-comers, many of whom, in writer Richard Littlejohn’s (2015) hyperbolic terms, were ‘intent on trying to murder us’, to ‘insist [that women do not] leave the house unless [they are] wearing a full burka’, and to ban alcohol and pork. It is worth noting that Littlejohn’s rhetoric here, in contrast with the dominant, women-focused narrative of this period, assumes the refugee subject to be male. This culturist narrative was mainly concentrated in the Mail at this time; however, it did also appear in some of the other papers in a less hyperbolic form (e.g. Porter, 2015). Moreover, while the Mail was notable for its representation of refuges as (racialized and gendered) threat even in this early stage, the other newspapers did communicate narratives that resisted the dominant ‘refugees welcome’ trend in various ways, expressing concern, for example, over the sustainability of public services (e.g. Hartley-Brewer, 2015; McKenzie, 2015), the harm caused by people smugglers (Squires, 2015) and, in a subordinate narrative, the possibility that would-be terrorists might enter Europe amid the flow of refugees (Akkoc and Hall, 2015).

The sympathetic narrative that nonetheless dominated media reports during this phase relied on the overwhelming depiction of refugees as vulnerable, and particularly as ‘womenandchildren’ whose need for paternalistic protection was being failed by the governments of Europe. That is, drawing on the feminist postcolonial scholarship outlined above, we would argue that the focus on female refugees enables their positioning as symbols of vulnerability who need to be ‘saved’ by the heroic Western subject (Abu-Lughod, 2002; Spivak, 1988; Ticktin, 2008). However, as the refugee crisis developed, the emphasis of the reporting shifted, and its focus on women – and therefore on the vulnerability of refugees – receded.

‘Paris changes everything’

On 13 November 2015, a set of coordinated attacks were staged in Paris. Four terrorists detonated suicide vests at locations across the city, including outside the Stade de France, and several others opened fire with assault weapons at bars, restaurants and the Bataclan concert hall. Responsibility for the attacks was claimed soon afterwards by ISIS.¹ In the aftermath of these events, there is a notable shift in the narratives that dominate the newspaper reports of the refugee crisis, reflected in the assertion by German politician Markus Söder, quoted in multiple articles, that ‘Paris changes everything’ (e.g. Hall, 2015).

Specifically, reporting came to be dominated by the fear that would-be terrorists are slipping into and across Europe under the cover of the movements of refugees. Immediately after the Paris attacks, there were reports that a Syrian passport found near the body of one of the alleged terrorists had been used to cross into the EU via Greece (e.g. Safi, 2015). While later reports state that the passport was likely to have been fake or stolen (Graham-Harrison, 2015), the concern that one or more of the attackers may have ‘posed as refugees to enter Europe before carrying out the atrocities’ (Foster, 2015a) created a lasting association in the newspaper discourse between the arrival of refugees in Europe and threats to security (Goodwin, 2015). While this narrative was, as noted above, present to some extent before the Paris attacks, from mid-November onwards the refugee crisis comes to be more or less automatically linked within the newspaper discourse to the threat of terrorism (see also Chouliaraki and Zaborowski, 2017: 621), so that they come to be framed as ‘twin’ issues: the ‘twin terrorism and refugee crises facing Europe’ (Tisdall, 2015; see also Hope et al., 2016; Worth, 2015).

Given this connection, the dominant narrative that emerges in this time period – in particular in The Telegraph – calls for a tightening of border controls (Foster, 2015b; Holehouse and Samuel, 2015). The articles assume a need for careful screening of refugees (Lomas, 2015), cite European leaders’ demands for a strengthening of the EU’s internal and external borders (Foster et al., 2015), and issue grim warnings about the potential risks of lax borders (Telegraph, 2016). In general, the articles do not blame refugees themselves but state that terrorist organizations are ‘exploiting’ the refugee crisis by using it as a ‘Trojan horse’ in which to smuggle operatives into Europe (Coughlin, 2015). Accordingly, while the narrative frames ‘genuine’ refugees themselves as blameless, the overwhelming story is that, unfortunately, the risks of allowing refugees unchecked into Europe may be too great: ‘no sane person would welcome a stranger into their home without first being assured the newcomer meant their family no harm’ (Coughlin, 2015).

In dividing ‘genuine’ refugees from those using the crisis as cover to enter Europe for nefarious ends, this narrative has continuities with our previous phase of analysis, in that the image of the vulnerable feminized refugee persists. This representation, however, is overlaid with representations of the in-comers as a (racialized, masculinized) threat. The figure of the threatening terrorist that is constructed in the newspaper discourse is implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, both male and racialized. Some of the articles draw overt links between the racialized maleness of the refugees and the terrorist threat: ‘With every month that passes, thousands more mainly young Muslim Arab men continue to pour into Europe – with Islamic State making determined efforts to smuggle as many of their jihadi fighters across our borders as possible’ (Bradley, 2016). Most, however, simply assume the maleness and racialization of perpetrators of terrorist violence. In contrast, Hasna Aït Boulahcen, a woman killed in a police shoot-out in the days after the attacks, was described as ‘Europe’s first woman suicide bomber’ (Sawer and Samuel, 2015) before subsequent reports suggested that she had not in fact been wearing an explosive device at the time of her death. The fact that reporting of Boulahcen’s death was centred on the fact of her femaleness – on her ‘glamorous’ looks and on how, in perpetrating violence, she had ‘defied every feminine instinct’ (Jones et al., 2015) – but that, conversely, the articles do not generally comment on the maleness of other terrorist suspects, of course, speaks to the normativity of the connection between (racialized) masculinity and violence. That is, recalling the feminist postcolonial scholarship outlined above (e.g. Abu-Lughod, 2002; Spivak, 1988; see also Sjoberg and Gentry, 2011), while an emphasis on racialized female refugees in the initial phase of reporting functioned as a shorthand for vulnerability, the shift in emphasis towards racialized male refugees in this phase became a shorthand for threat.

The discourse that assumes the refugee crisis and the threat of terrorism as ‘twin’ issues is not, of course, complete or homogeneous – some articles, for example, make the point that most terrorism is ‘home grown’ (Sherlock, 2015). However, even among those that lament the tightening of Europe’s borders there is often a feeling that it is more or less inevitable: ‘It’s natural and human, when under threat, to want to seal the borders’ (The Guardian, 2015). Moreover, the counter-narrative is overwhelmed by the volume and the urgency of calls to close the borders to refugees in the pursuit of security from terrorism.

‘Sexual Jihad’

On 31 December 2015, numerous incidents of mass sexual harassment, sexual assault and theft took place in European cities that included Helsinki, Zurich, Salzburg, Hamburg, Düsseldorf and, most notably, Cologne. According to the newspaper reports, between 500 and 1000 men aged between 15 and 35 gathered outside Cologne Cathedral for New Year’s Eve celebrations, before surrounding women in groups of 30 or 40 and groping and/or mugging them (Connolly, 2016a). As of 8 January 2016, police in the city had received around 120 complaints, including two of rape (Pearson, 2016b). It was widely reported that the attacks in Cologne were carried out by ‘up to 1,000 men of Arab or North African appearance’ (Pearson, 2016b). Although the articles admit that it is difficult to know whether these men were recent arrivals into the country – and, indeed, it was later reported elsewhere that only three of those arrested were recent arrivals from Syria and Iraq (Mortimer, 2016) – it was widely assumed that many of them were. In the aftermath of these events, the rhetoric of the newspapers moves towards a focus on an apparently unassailable cultural difference between refugees and their European hosts. While such narratives do, as we note above, appear throughout the sample period, after Cologne the representations of cultural difference become much more commonplace and accepted, and tend to centre mainly on gender roles and gender ideologies, with ‘Europe’ portrayed as a ‘modern’ space of gender equality and the culture of the refugees derided as innately misogynist and, therefore, ‘backwards’ (see Holzberg et al., 2018 for similar findings from Germany).

The New Year’s Eve sexual violence is explained largely through gendered narratives of ‘culture’, based on the assumption that the refugees ‘come from cultures that do not respect the rights of women or gay people’ and ‘don’t understand that sticking your hand up a woman’s skirt is unacceptable’ (Pearson, 2016c); that the attacks represent ‘the tectonic plates of two civilisations coming up against each other with earth-shattering consequences’ (Daily Mirror, 2016). These ‘migrant sex attacks’ (Stevens, 2016b) emerge as different from ‘normal’ sexual assaults, which might be ‘merely opportunist, as much criminal as sexual in nature’, perpetrated ‘by young men who were drunk or high’, and instead are explained as being perpetrated by individuals from ‘a very different, male-dominated culture’ (Woods, 2016). Accordingly, concern appears about the future implications of importing such ‘cultural misogyny’ (White, 2016) and of the ‘social and religious chasm … between the general population and its growing ethnic minority’ (Woods, 2016) that seems to exist as a result. As the following extract demonstrates, the idea emerges that, given the strength of the patriarchal norms embedded within the cultures that refugees are thought to bring with them, such episodes of violence are largely inevitable:

If you are doctrinally commanded to cover up your women, then the sight of lovely, blonde Michelle, uncovered and happily self-confident, provokes temptation, and this makes you angry. That anger is not directed where it should be – at yourself or at a belief system that forbids a woman to behave as she pleases – but at the temptress. In order for male pride to be salvaged, the temptress can be humiliated and terrorised, thus restoring power and dominance to where it properly belongs – the man. (Pearson, 2016b)

In this narrative, the events of Cologne come to represent ‘the first of many battles in a new clash of civilisations’ (Pearson, 2016b). Indeed, an article published in the Daily Mail in February suggests that the ‘culture of misogyny’ brought by the refugees already means that, ‘in Europe’, young women ‘can no longer enjoy the same basic freedoms – a night out on the town without being attacked by mobs of men – as previous generations’ (Vine, 2016). Accordingly, the wearing of ‘mini-skirts and micro-shorts’ by women on the streets of German cities is described as ‘defiant’, and as an act of resistance: ‘we’re going to party – otherwise they just win’ (Foster, 2016).

Moreover, the events of Cologne come to be interlinked in this discourse with those of Paris, and with the refugee crisis more broadly. That is, much as the refugee crisis becomes ‘twinned’ with terrorism in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, after the events in Cologne misogyny and sexual violence are also plaited into this narrative, an association most succinctly encapsulated in the phrase ‘sexual jihad’ (White, 2016). Cologne’s Rose Monday Carnival in February, for example, is described as taking place against a threatening ‘backdrop of mass immigration, January’s sex attacks and the threat of Islamic terror’ (Connolly, 2016b). Reports begin to mention accusations of sexual assault made against terror suspects (Huggler, 2016b), framed as ‘fuelled by a clash of cultures’ (Malone, 2016). That is, reflecting Zalewski and Runyan’s (2015: 445) work cited above, the notion of Muslim/Arab masculinity as characterized by the interwoven ‘uncivilized’ acts of sexual and terrorist violence comes to the fore in this phase of reporting.

In contrast to the reporting in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, the gendering of these narratives is significantly more explicit, as the threatening subject is clearly and overtly depicted as male, and moreover as male and young (see Pruitt et al., 2018). This maleness, moreover, is explicitly racialized – it is not men in general who are positioned as a sexual threat to women, but men from ‘conservative cultural backgrounds in the Middle East and north Africa’ (White, 2016). Indeed, the dominant narrative avoids drawing any connection between the acts of sexual violence perpetrated in Cologne and the types of sexual violence that are endemic in the experiences of so many women across Europe. For example, while we find complaints about the lack of robust legal protection and punishment in relation to these acts of violence (e.g. Huggler, 2016a), it is telling that they do not connect their discussions to the similarly low rates of legal punishment for all sexual assaults across Europe (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2014). Similarly, while we find outrage after the mayor of Cologne reportedly proposed that young women should regulate their behaviour so as not to be subject to attack – and this is, of course, outrageous – several of the articles connect this to failures to prosecute cases of sexual abuse in Rotherham and Rochdale ‘by gangs of mainly Pakistani origin’ because of an alleged concern for cultural relativism (Pearson, 2016b; see also Afzal, 2016; Vine, 2016) rather than, for example, to the multiple times that British police forces have faced criticism for victim-blaming anti-rape campaigns that similarly call upon women to change their behaviour to avoid violence (see, for example, Everyday Victim Blaming, 2015; Gander, 2015). Moreover, while we found some concern that refugee women are made vulnerable by being forced to sleep ‘surrounded by groups of men’ (Ghouri, 2016), the dominant focus of outrage appeared in relation to the victimization of white women – of ‘lovely, blonde Michelle’ (Pearson, 2016b) – in a discourse that clearly reflects the colonial fear of racialized sexuality (Nagel, 1998: 257).

Indeed, in contrast to the earlier phases that emerge from our analysis, from January onwards narratives about refugee women largely disappear and their vulnerabilities, previously at the foreground of the narratives, retreat from view. That is, the idea that racialized women need to be ‘saved’ from their oppressive cultures and from the hardships of their refugee journeys recedes into the background in the face of the more immediate concern for the ‘saving’ of ‘our’ women. Refugee women, who were previously held apart as a particular group in need of support, are now reabsorbed into the threatening (masculinized) mass of ‘refugees’ writ large. In these narratives, that is, these acts of sexual violence come to stand in for differences and relationships of power between masculinized national identities (see McClintock, 1993: 61; see also Ahmed, 1992; Nagel, 1998: 257; Scheibelhofer, 2012: 320–321). Accordingly, and recalling Ticktin (2008: 864), it is unsurprising that this narrative once again connects to border security (Pearson, 2016d; Wright, 2016). Again, it is important to note that this shift in the narratives that takes place after the events of New Year’s Eve is neither homogeneous nor neat, and that some articles continue to express sympathy for refugees at this time. However, these counter-narratives are overwhelmed by representations of (masculinized) refugees as sexually threatening and as terrorists – as the racialized masculine ‘other’ found in justifications of colonialism.

Concluding remarks

In this article, we have explored the intertwined gendered and racialized representations of vulnerability and threat that have framed images of refugees coming to Europe in British newspaper reports. These representations, we have argued, are neither new nor surprising, but rather reflect the logics underpinning colonial modernity. Accordingly, while we can certainly speak about the securitization of migration in response to the ‘refugee crisis’, it is important to bear in mind that ‘extraordinary’ responses to particular circumstances are made possible by the ‘ordinary’ ideas about vulnerability and threat that ground dominant ways of understanding the world (Mofette and Vadasaria, 2016). In addition, we have illustrated how the forms of violence that underlie contemporary modernity are formulated through ideas not just about racialized threat but also about racialized vulnerability, and, moreover, that such representations of racialized vulnerability and threat are formulated through gender. These underlying racialized and gendered logics form the framework through which contemporary events are made sense of within dominant discourse. As such, they inform the ways in which policy responses to contemporary events are formulated.

The gendered and racialized grids of intelligibility that we have identified in this article, in other words, matter in important ways to people’s abilities to find safety, because they inform the ways in which global events come to be interpreted and responded to. Specifically, we argue that the dichotomous framing of gender and vulnerability that characterizes much of the media discourse and the failure to recognize that all people seeking to cross into Europe in this way are subjects at risk, albeit in diverse and intersectionally mediated ways, contributes towards an end result where it becomes difficult to recognize the vulnerability of this mobile population writ large. That is, while it is certainly important to recognize the gendered nature of challenges facing displaced populations, positioning (all) women refugees as uniquely vulnerable has here enabled the obscuring of the vulnerability of (all) refugee men. When the focus of the reporting shifted from female to male refugees with the events of Paris and Cologne, it was a relatively easy move to assume the threatening nature of refugees as a group because male vulnerability had been obscured from the outset. Accordingly, the pervasive imaginaries of intertwined (racialized, feminized) vulnerability and (racialized, masculinized) threat through which refugee bodies appear as/at risk serve to legitimate responses to the crisis through which both male and female refugees are made unsafe.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Maria Eriksson Baaz for her insightful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Funding

Harriet Gray’s work is funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR) (grant number 2014-3519). Anja Franck’s work is funded by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences (RJ) (grant number P14-0866:1).

Notes

ORCID iD

Harriet Gray

Harriet Gray is a lecturer in international relations in the Department of Politics at the University of York. Her research interests fall within the overlapping fields of critical military studies, critical war studies and feminist international relations, and her research focuses primarily on sexual and gender-based violence in military and conflict spaces. Gray’s work has been published in journals that include Gender, Place and Culture; British Journal of Politics and International Relations; Feminist Studies and Critical Military Studies. Email: harriet.gray@york.ac.uk.

Anja K. Franck holds a PhD in economic geography and currently works as a senior lecturer at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg. Her research interests centre on gender, migration and border studies, directing explicit attention towards how migrants and refugees navigate increasingly selective and securitized migration regimes in Southeast Asia and Europe. Franck’s work has been published in Urban Studies, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, International Labour Review and the Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie. Email: anja.franck@globalstudies.gu.se.

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