The term
Moral panic was popularised by
sociologist Stanley Cohen in the 1970s. They state that panics flourish because they "obscure meaningful critical analysis of the validity of these panics and instead allow for a projection of anxieties and fears onto minoritized others who can easily be scapegoated through these events." The presence of people of African descent was a trigger for the adoption of the
White Australia policy. Black people in modern Australia suffer a high degree of racial discrimination, with the 2018
Australian Human Rights Commission report stating "the five groups that experienced the highest level of racial discrimination were those born in South Sudan, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Ethiopia and those who identified as Indigenous." Australia has a long history of official and unofficial racism towards black Africans, reflected in the
White Australia policy, in effect from 1901 until the 1970s, which prohibited the immigration of black Africans, among other non-White groups. Prior to the policy's implementation, small numbers of black Africans and
African-Americans were resident in Australia, and their presence was explicitly mentioned in the discussions on the restriction of non-white immigration. Following the end of this policy, despite Australia becoming more ethnically diverse, negative stereotypes around black Africans remained prominent in Australian culture. Modern African-Australians are culturally and socially diverse, but Australian society typically views them as a homogenous group, set in opposition to its constructions of whiteness. In Australia, "Africanness" is associated with a lack of civilisation, disease, dirt, war and poverty, and scholars such as Wearing, Jakubowicz, Wickes and others note that this perception is rooted in a social context of racist and discriminatory assumptions about black people. Current academic literature has highlighted frequent experiences of discrimination, criminalisation and racialisation shaping the interactions of black-African Australians with majority society. In particular, a strong negative association between Africanness and criminality exists in Australian culture, which was reflected in the media's presentation of the events in Melbourne. This has been accompanied by islamophobic rhetoric emerging in the war on terror, where Muslims are racialised as others who are dangerous for Australian society and incidents of criminality are viewed by the media as potential indications of Islamic extremism. The 2016 Challenging Racism Project found negative attitudes to black people were common in Australia. 21% of respondents felt that African refugees increased crime in Australia, and 16.1% stated they felt "very negative or somewhat negative" towards African Australians. Wickes et al. argue that these attitudes reflect
implicit biases widespread in Australia which can cause unconscious discrimination. They consider this to be a factor in both the press and politicians presentation of so-called "African gangs" and the public's reaction to it.
International Studies scholar, Mandisi Majavu also identifies a tendency to identify African Australian men as "towering seven feet 'brutes'" associated with "backwardness, primitiveness, danger and crime" and states that blackness is a source of fear in some whites. Examples of this include a ban on Sudanese students congregating in groups of more than three in Melbourne schools for fear that they may seem threatening. He views this perception of threat as a strong contributory factor to the moral panic. Australian academics, Kathomi Gatwiri and Leticia Anderson argue that African Australians are defined as "perpetual strangers" within Australian society, and as such are constructed as a threat, sometimes within rhetoric of a "
clash of civilisations". They view the African gangs crime panic as forming part of this positioning of the African body as a source of societal danger.
Media factors Sections of the Australian media, especially those belonging to the
News Corp stable, played a significant role in the development and maintenance of the moral panic around crime and African Australians in Melbourne. This echoes studies on previous moral panics, which identified the key role of the press in distorting and exaggerating reality, thereby exacerbating social anxieties and reactions to a scale disproportionate to the phenomena provoking them. However, Kounmouris and Blaustein, writing in 2021, argue that the advent of a new media landscape following the collapse in the profitability of print media and the structural changes in the newspaper industry it engendered, means that the Australian African gangs moral panic must be studied both in terms of the traditional structural analysis at a societal level and in terms of the granular "mundane aspects of newsmaking". Anonymous interviews with Australian journalists who had published articles on the "Moomba riot", "Apex", "African gangs" or "the law and order election" found that most of them expressed disillusionment and frustration with the way the subject had been covered by their own papers and the press in general. However, multiple participants felt that the crimes which were reported were newsworthy, and some defended the practice of noting the ethnicity of crime suspects and use of contested terms like "gang" and "thug". The principal moral entrepreneurs in the panic were the state leadership of the Liberal National Party, who used the concept of "Sudanese gangs" to "construct a narrative about South Sudanese criminality that directly resonated with enduring narratives of black, specifically South Sudanese (i.e. black/migrant), criminality in the Australian context." The journalists surveyed by Kounmouris and Blaustein perceived these political developments as triggers for the "Apex" narrative, which rendered any subsequent incidents of criminality by people of South Sudanese origin newsworthy. However, the journalists recognised that their media organisations had made a choice to amplify the Liberal Nationals' message. Academics writing on the panic have noted the key role of the
Herald Sun newspaper. In the year following the 2016 Moomba festival disturbances, the
Herald Sun ran 173 stories mentioning "Apex", including 37 opinion pieces. A third of these stories included the words "African" or "Sudanese". The stories in the
Herald Sun were sensationalised and often included language like "hoods", "thugs", "packs" and "gangs". Analysing media reporting on race in 2018, All Together Now found that across the Australian press, 56.5% of reports were negative, 8.5% neutral and 34.9% were "
inclusive". A significant proportion of these negative reports came from the
Herald Sun and
Daily Telegraph. Furthermore, 70% of these negative articles employed "covert techniques" such as
dog-whistling,
irony and
decontextualisation. The pushback against this racialised threat construction came from academics, left-leaning journalists, members of Victoria's legal profession and community activists, with their rebuttals receiving coverage in mainstream progressive newspapers. In this case, the diversity of Australia's media landscape functioned to offer a challenge to the
hegemonic right-wing viewpoint. Journalists working during this period felt that given low staffing and the prevalence of
churnalism, and the need to react instantly due to competition from social media, they were not able to fact-check stories sufficiently. They also felt pressured by editors to include racialised keywords such "apex" in their copy, as this generated online engagement. There was also a perceived pressure for journalists at the
Herald Sun to publish stories which conformed to the conservative worldview of their readership, constraining them from refusing to publish unethical content in a way that did not occur at liberal papers like
The Age. Despite the more restrained tone at
The Age, it still contributed to the creation of the concept of an "African gang threat", especially in the early period of the panic. A further factor mentioned by journalists at the
Herald Sun was the fact they felt their job was to give victims of crime a voice, with this identification with the victim causing them to tolerate "news-making practices that contributed to sensationalised and racialised representations of offenders". In addition to the press coverage, the Nine Network's
A Current Affair programme was a key driver of the multi-mediated moral panic. Gaffey's study of the programme's crime coverage during this period focuses on its centring of experience over expert opinion or statistical data. In the show's reporting, the contradiction between citizens' often indirect "experience" of "gang crime" and the police and other bodies' denial that such a problem existed was presented as a failure of the state to deal with criminality rather than mistaken perception on the part of the public. This prioritising of perception over fact is viewed by Gaffey in terms of the concept of a modern form of
parrhesia, in which the voice of experts are consider less truthful than the "experiential" narratives of "ordinary people", who often, in reality, lack direct experience of the subject upon which they are commenting. ==Effects of the panic on African Australians==