Everyone with an interest in language, its use and abuse, will ask themselves the same question from time-to-time: are words really that important? Does analysing public discourse provide any benefit – even assuming that anyone pays attention in the first place – or is it just the intellectual equivalent of discussing prevention strategies while the bushfire is actually raging? Sadly, the world will reliably bring forth evidence to set your mind at ease, evidence that the narratives we construct can create not only disadvantage but actual harm to individuals. Words create myths, myths lead to prejudice and prejudice to vulnerability.
Australian political discourse is filled with myths. My last post, The Cold Water, discussed myths around the industrial relations debate. But one of the most pervasive myths in recent discourse is the “threat of the refugee” – the impertinent queue jumper, here to take our jobs and undermine our shared values (just as soon as we figure out what they are). It’s a flimsy narrative built on an absence of evidence and based is an essential contradiction: people so desperate to join our community that they are willing to risk their lives, somehow, represent a threat to our way of life. Yet, we have become so fearful of the “refugee peril” we have invented that we classify them, through our words and our actions, as criminals. We imprison them to protect ourselves from what, in reality, is a terrible desire to be a member of our society. In doing so, we provide no chance to disprove the myth, so it becomes self-fulfilling and unchallenged: refugees need to be detained because detention is what you do with refugees. The debate shifts to methodology of detention. The myth becomes orthodoxy. The disempowerment complete and vulnerability established. Meanwhile, we all sleep at night knowing that our borders are protected from the unceasing scourge of the desperate.
We take blind comfort in this insidious zombie-movie narrative we have bought into. This allows us to do things to “them”, refugees, which we would otherwise find abhorrent, such as incarcerating children who have been convicted of no crime. The imprisonment of a child is an act we generally take with the utmost seriousness. We employ diversionary tactics and systems to re-engagement to avoid it. Incarceration is the punishment of last resort for children. With refugee children, it is an act we undertake as a matter of course. Indeed, it is our preferred management approach. We have come to tolerate what would otherwise be intolerable because of this nebulous threat we have constructed. Within this narrative, we permit ourselves to things that we would protest in the actions of others. The myth both prompts and justifies our inhumane treatment of refugees and their children.
The refugees are coming, and they'll be wanting brains...
Earlier this week, documents from the Department of Immigration were released under Freedom of Information. These documents detailed cases of self-harm among children imprisoned in refugee detention centres. The evidence is an indictment of our, so called, egalitarian society. A nine year-old child attempting suicide by over-dosing on painkillers because he was “going crazy in detention”. A ten year-old boy cutting himself. A 17 year-old trying to hang himself.
These were not acts of protest or attempted persuasion. These were acts of despair induced by an imprisonment that has turned desperation into hopelessness. Acts born as a consequence of a dehumanising and demonising narrative that has rooted itself in our psyche. This is harm for which we are all culpable through the words we utter or accept without challenge. These are the effects of public discourse subjugated to base human instincts and the reasons why the critique of such discourse is vital to a fair, free and rational society ... [fades to static]
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