African gangs moral panic
The African gangs moral panic, sometimes referred to as the African gangs narrative, was a moral panic relating to the supposed presence of Sudanese-Australian and South Sudanese-Australians criminal gangs in Melbourne, Australia. The most intense period of the panic occurred over 32 months between March 2016 and November 2018, in the run up to the Victorian state elections of 2018.
The trigger for the panic was clashes between young people and the police at the Moomba Festival on 12 March 2016, after which members of the Australian Liberal Party and the Australian media, especially the Herald Sun newspaper, made frequent reference to an "African gang" problem in Melbourne. During the panic, newspapers amplified any criminal activity committed, or alleged to be committed, by people of African origin, routinely publishing and focusing on the ethnicity of alleged offenders. This generated further comments from politicians, pressure on the police to take harsh action against the supposed threat, and led to fear amongst White-Australians which was reported by the media, in a cycle which fuelled the moral panic.
Despite the salience of this discourse in the media, police and community organisations denied the existence of criminal gangs among the Sudanese-Australian community, and statistics showed that crime by Sudanese-Australian youth constituted only a tiny fraction of offences in Victoria. For this reason, media studies scholars view the African gangs narrative as an example of a racialised moral panic.
The media and political focus on Sudanese-Australians and crime in Melbourne declined sharply after the 2018 elections, but the effects of negative stereotyping, over-policing and racialisation of crime are still felt by the Sudanese community, and Black people generally, in Melbourne and across Australia. Melburnians of Sudanese origin report feeling distrust of the police and nervousness of gathering in public for fear of harassment by law enforcement.
History
Before 2016
Australia has a history of moral panics regarding immigrant criminality, specifically related to real or supposed "gangs" from communities involved in recent waves of immigration. The folk devil in these panics has varied according to time and location; in modern Sydney, Muslim and Arab immigrants have taken over from the Italian and Greek communities that were the cause of concern in the 1970s and 1980s, whereas in Melbourne and Perth discourse around gangs has centred on Asian groups.From the mid-1990s to 2011, 27,679 people who were born in Sudan migrated to Australia, mostly as refugees, with the peak years of settlement between 2002 and 2006. This wave of African migration led to the creation of gang stereotypes similar to those which had been used to characterise previous newly arrived migrant communities. By 2004, the Australian press was already using the term "African gang" to categorise fights between youngsters of African origin.
Murder of Liep Gony and the events of 2007
In 2007, Liep Gony, a 19-year-old refugee who had migrated from Sudan in 1999, was badly beaten in the Melbourne suburb of Noble Park, dying from his injuries 24 hours later. Despite the fact it later emerged that Gony had been murdered by white assailants, the immediate response to Gony's murder from politicians and the press was to frame it as an example of "African gang" violence.Soon after the murder, Kevin Andrews, the minister for immigration, declared, "some groups of immigrants aren't settling and adjusting into the Australian life as quickly as we would hope." Initial press reports took the position that the murder was an example of "ethnic gang violence", basing their stories on off-the-record comments from anonymous police officers and local residents, with Andrews stating that officers had told him Melbourne had "a serious Sudanese gang problem." However, at the time of the murder, Melbourne Police's Multicultural Liaison officer told The Australian that police often mistook innocent groups of Black youths for gangs.
When it became clear that Gony had been murdered by two white men, Andrews declined to apologise for his comments on Sudanese-Australians, stating "I'm not proposing to apologise for saying what people are concerned about." Minister Andrews was also reticent to comment on the white attackers who beat another Sudanese man in an openly racist attack the day after Gony's funeral, which sociologist Joel Windle contrasts with his immediate condemnation of an attack by Sudanese youths on a policeman as "un-Australian". Clashes between Sudanese youth and police occurred on several occasions between September and December, with police accounts of the violence in one alleged "riot" contradicted by witnesses. In the aftermath of the events, the Liberal party presented the murder and assaults in Melbourne as examples of a "failure of integration", and cited them as justification for a reduction in the percentage of humanitarian visas given to Africans from 70% to 30%.
In his analysis of reporting on the events around Gony's murder, Windle highlights the process of racialisation by which the Australian and the Herald Sun universally labelled non-white individuals with ethnic markers when discussing them, contrasting this with the assumed default de-racialised status of whiteness when discussing anonymous "locals". He also notes the frequent negative use of language in association with these ethnic markers, especially around groups of young people.
| Group | Racial attributes | Collective attributes | Age attributes | Migration attributes | Locality | Moral quality |
| Racialised African refugees | African, North African, Of African descent, Black, Sudanese, Sudanese-born | a mob, packs, a gang, gangs, a group, community | youth, kids, children, under-age, teenagers, teens, juvenile | refugees, immigrants, migrants | residents | delinquent, lawless, thugs, offenders |
| De-racialised "local" sources | White, Caucasian, Non-African | the community, the people | -year-old | long-term Australians, locally-born | locals, residents, long-time residents, home-grown neighbours, local businesses |
Murder of Alex Ngong Akok
Two years later, in Adelaide, Alex Ngong Akok, a young man of African background, was murdered, with the attack again presented by the media in terms which criminalised the victim. Despite the attack being committed by white youths, the local press published details of court charges he was facing, speculated that there was a gang link and suggested that his murder constituted "retaliation".Height of the panic (2016–2018)
The immediate trigger for the moral panic around "gangs" in Melbourne was a "riot" at the Moomba Festival in 2016. In the two years prior to the festival, there were a total of four articles published in Melbourne's two most popular newspapers, The Age and the Herald Sun which mentioned the words Sudanese and gang, whereas in the two years which followed it there were 130. Similarly, in the two-year-period preceding the festival, there were only two mentions of the supposed "Apex Gang", which would become a prominent feature of racialised discourse on crime, neither of them connecting it to a specific ethnicity.The panic fizzled out following the Labor victory in the Victorian State Election of 2018, after which the media and Coalition politicians stopped aggressively pushing the African gangs narrative. The period of intense media and political attention on Melbourne's Sudanese community lasted around 32 months.
Moomba Festival clashes and the Apex Gang
On the night of 12 March 2016, clashes broke out at Melbourne's annual Moomba Festival, a family orientated festival held in central Melbourne. Reports on the evening suggested that brawls had occurred involving young people largely from African-Australian and Pacific-Islander backgrounds. Several incidents of vandalism and disorder occurred at the festival, with news reports suggesting that the fights had broken out between two separate groups of young people. There were also reports, based on accounts by festival-goers, of young men of Sudanese-Australian origin picking fights with other festival-goers. The disturbances culminated in members of the police employing capsicum spray to disperse a group of young men and boys in Federation Square. Following the events, the Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police stated that that the heavy police presence may have caused an escalation in the violence, interviews with Sudanese-Australians who attended the festival also suggest this to be the case. Videos of the events quickly emerged and were published on Australian media websites, often embedded in articles which made reference to "ethnic gangs". They typically showed dark-skinned individuals who outnumber police and appear to be acting in a threatening manner.In the days which followed the clashes at Moomba, a media narrative emerged which placed the blame for the events on a group it identified as the Apex Gang, which was alleged to consist principally of Sudanese-Australians. Editorials and news articles regarding Apex first appeared in the Herald Sun, and the story was then picked up by local news channels and other newspapers. Melbourne paper The Age initially echoed the coverage of the Herald Sun, however, within a few weeks it ceased to include ethnic descriptors in its coverage and in time began to question aspects of the narrative. The narratives also suggested a surge in crime rates was affecting Melbourne due to the activities of this gang. These sensationalistic stories were often translated into Chinese and spread among Melbourne's Chinese student community on WeChat channels, creating panic and widespread fear of people of African origin.
The Herald Sun reported that the clashes had been caused by armed teenage street gangs and the alleged existence of the Sudanese Apex Gang was rejected by local police leaders. A survey of the local Sudanese population also suggest that the gang did not exist, seemingly being little more than a social media phenomenon symbolising an anti-social attitude or lifestyle. Sudanese-residents of Melbourne interviewed between 2017 and 2019 stated that violence at Moomba 2016 was heavily exaggerated, and that press attention was immediately focused on people of African origin, despite the participation of people of various ethnicities, due to racism in the Australian media and population. Lee et al. describe Apex as "a media confected crime gang" and suggest that the name had initially covered an "unstructured group of young people" from various ethnic backgrounds but had come to serve as a stand in for Sudanese Australians.