Manipulative silences and the politics of representation of boat children in Australian print media
- Authors: McLaren, Helen , Patil, Tejaswini
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Continuum Vol. 30, no. 6 (2016), p. 602-612
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- Description: There is substantial literature on media representations of asylum seeker policy in Australia from a number of theoretical standpoints, namely moral panic theory, whiteness studies and belonging and citizenship. While many of these studies use discourse analysis of textual media as a methodology, there is scant attention to the contribution of manipulative silences in media texts on asylum seeker children. Using a form of discourse analysis to explore the idea of manipulative silences, we demonstrate how media representations may steer public attention towards asylum seeker children in two dominant ways: (i) in discourses of deviancy by association with adults and (ii) the rights of boat children in association with immigration detention. Both generate confusion between rights, compassion and deviancy and, by shifting public attention, they serve to silence more essential concerns for the children. We seek to analyses these manipulative silences in the context of Australian asylum seeker policies of the Abbott government. In elucidating the use of textual silences to manipulate discourse, it is possible to see how Australian media representations may be skewing dialogue in the public sphere away from core political, legal and humanitarian issues that are imperative for the well-being of asylum seeker children. © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Australian media and Islamophobia : Representations of asylum seeker children
- Authors: Patil, Tejaswini , McLaren, Helen
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Religions Vol. 10, no. 9 (2019), p. 1-14
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- Description: Australian media invests considerable attention in asylum seekers and their children, especially those arriving by boat. In this paper, we provide an analysis of Australian newsprint media published during the term of Australia's Gillard's government (2010-2013). This period is critical as it coincides with rising numbers of boat arrivals to Australian shores, fear towards Muslims, and growing Islamophobia. At the time, there were government promises to move children from offshore immigration detention into community-based detention, that would involve living among mainstream Australian society. A data set of 46 articles from major Australian newspapers articles was subject to a discourse analysis of representations of children in both the written texts and in silences. Manipulative tactics of 'risk framing' and 'dispersed intentionality' were identified as discursive acts aimed to confuse compassion and deviancy with respect to asylum seeker children presumed to be from Islamic backgrounds. We argue that this was achieved through binary characterizations in which Muslim parents and people smugglers were constructed as deviant alongside intentional silences, that may have otherwise elicited compassion for asylum seeker children. We propose that this period of media reporting is foundational to understanding the rise of Islamophobic discourses and the implication of Muslim children in Australia.