Refugees then and now: altering perceptions
Half a decade has passed since Europe's refugee crisis of 2015. Back then mainstream media often framed these arrivals as outsiders, different from Europeans, and evoked a general fear of danger storming from across the Mediterranean Sea. In recent years, narratives about refugees transformed, Austeja Treinyte writes, altering public perceptions about those, fleeing war and persecution.
2021/05/18
When BBC and Sky News teams broadcasted live images of migrants and asylum seekers attempting to cross the English Channel in small boats last summer, the coverage received criticism and public condemnation. Live scenes portraying passengers scooping out water from their small overloaded dinghies were treated as dehumanising and capitalising on misery.
‘We should ensure people don’t drown crossing the Channel, not film them as if it were some grotesque reality TV show’, said the Labour MP Zarah Sultana at the time. One person was heard yelling ‘please no camera’ when a reporter approached one of the boats to ask where they are coming from. Some yielded: ‘Iran’.
This was the most recent of many dehumanising, damaging, and careless reports about refugees crossing the Channel since 2015. In the past six years, we saw a stream of dynamically altering public perceptions of the dramatic situation in media and communities. Newspaper headlines were filled both with humanitarian efforts in the Mediterranean, and more negative angles covering migrant violence. However, after the November Paris Attacks, the media took on a mostly singular stance, what the Council of Europe report, published in 2017, described as 'fear and securitisation'.
In narratives about them, refugees were voiceless, and anxieties about loss of cultural identity, resources, and even tourism emerged in European countries. In general, a report by the Council of Europe found that the European press played a central role in framing the arrivals as a crisis for Europe: ‘while coverage of ‘the crisis’ is characterised by significant diversity, overall, new arrivals were seen as outsiders and different to Europeans: either as vulnerable outsiders or as dangerous outsiders.’
After more than five years, mainstream media coverage of refugees sometimes still can’t escape these binary narratives, dehumanising and voyeurism reporting. However, as citizen journalism and social media play ever-bigger roles in informing and analysing issues, refugee narratives are changing and in return we see public perceptions alter. Over the last five years, many different social media accounts of refugees and refugee advocates emerged providing a different portrayal in which refugees aren’t victims or villains anymore, but rather skilled, normalised, and equal members of the society.
Change for refugee narratives is crucial in 2021, more than ever before. The covid-19 pandemic has pushed those in need further to the sidelines. The worldwide health crisis and economic chaos triggered new hardship for refugees and asylum seekers. UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency report estimates that global forced displacement has surpassed 80 million by mid-2020, the most since the Second World War, of which 26.3 million are refugees, while a full picture is yet to be established. Nearly 310,000 people applied for protection in the EU during the first three quarters of 2020, compared to more than 467,000 over the same period in 2019, according to data from Eurostat, the EU’s statistical office. The shrinkage is a result of disruptions to international flights and closed borders.
Life doesn’t get easier for those who finally reach their destination countries. The UK granted asylum or some other form of protection to almost 10 000 people last year, a 52 per cent drop compared to 2019, according to data from the Home Office. Those still seeking asylum were often forced into homelessness and serious health conditions. Sisters Not Strangers, a coalition of eight organisations, surveyed over 100 asylum-seeking women from England and Wales and found that 74% of 115 women were not able to get enough food during the pandemic, more than a fifth of them were homeless, and 82% of 101 women said their mental health had worsened during the pandemic.
Tackling such issues that refugees face requires media attention that best represents the situation and the affected. In 2015, when the refugee crisis in Europe reached its peak, this wasn’t the case. Many journalists and media organisations were simply unprepared to cover such fast-developing news relating to unfamiliar phenomena and people.
When Aylan Kurdi’s body was washed up on a beach near the Turkish resort of Bodrum almost every newspaper in Europe debated whether to publish it. The next morning, however, all media publications, almost without exception, reported pleas for action with Aylan Kurdi’s photograph on their cover page. At the same time, other refugee stories focused on more dismissing language. Refugees were called ‘illegals’, who were pursuing a ‘back door’. The media was often influenced by mainstream political narratives and popular public perceptions.
The sympathetic and empathetic response of a large proportion of the European press in the summer and especially early autumn of 2015 was gradually replaced by suspicion and, in some cases, hostility towards refugees and migrants, according to the report by the Council of Europe. The contradictory narratives surrounding refugees in the media generated myths and stereotypes and above all else fostered an increasingly polarised society. People asked why they do not stay in their countries and fight, why they don’t stay in the countries they arrived at first, and whether they threaten our security, culture, and values. Most of all, however, the refugee stories highlighted the fear of the other.
The mainstream xenophobic moods felt in politics and communities concerning refugees are well reflected in Freudian Uncanny theory (das Unheimlich). Freud described uncanny as something both homely ‘heimlich’ and unhomely ‘unheimlich’, in other words, both familiar and unfamiliar. This blurring of two different notions produces certain anxiety.
Literature, especially science fiction, also film, and art have often exploited the uncanny. It is our natural human nature to fear the other. It both scares us and fascinates us. Refugee boat stories provoke these contradictory feelings in us, but that doesn’t help the individuals who the narratives are written about. Consuming these stories, we didn’t learn anything about the people as individuals or the issue in depth.
Council of Europe report found that ‘refugees and migrants were given limited opportunities to speak directly of their experiences and suffering. Most often they were spoken about and represented in images as silent actors and victims.’ Mainstream media has often reported refugee issues in homogenising narratives, reducing them to either vulnerable outsiders or dangerous outsiders – victims or villains. These simple binaries have been explicit in refugee stories.
Esther Grenssing says that these stories can be damaging, ‘particularly if asylum seekers are presented as desperate sufferers who are completely dependent on external support’. The representation of refugees as victims depicts the ‘refugee crisis’ as a humanitarian emergency; however, this kind of narrative doesn’t inspire further action. It is, simply, a report of current affairs.
Other times, refugees are portrayed as villains, draining public resources, inflicting crime, and deepening our distrust. The host country is the victim here. Events like the muggings and sexual assaults of women in Cologne and the November 2015 attack in Paris further triggered these binary narratives in the mainstream media, playing on stereotypes about wild, dark outsiders threatening white European purity.
In his highly acclaimed book Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them, John Yorke argues that all archetypical stories are journeys towards completion – voyages from darkness to light. The so-called refugee success stories can be reduced to this classic quest structure. There’s usually a journey from the symbolic hell that is a refugee’s country of origin, affected by conflict and violence, to a paradise that is Europe, which provided them shelter and a new beginning.
However, Rifaie Tammas, a Syrian activist, writing for openDemocracy warned that ‘we should be aware that the fetishization of success stories can ignore the painful reality that for many refugees, surviving and adapting to a new life outside of their country is often overwhelming, difficult and painful.’
Refugee success stories may be compelling to journalists and readers, providing a colourful piece about an individual and seemingly acknowledging the fact that refugees have a voice. Still, these stories are often narrated on the reporter’s terms. When Tammas was invited by a TV news network to discuss US airstrikes in Syria, he thought of it as an opportunity to share his academic knowledge and standpoint. However, in the news clip, Tammas says, he was featured just for a moment, ‘half in tears and conspicuously traumatised while mentioning the loss of my brother and father’.
Another problem with these success stories comes from an illusion about a refugee arriving from hell to a paradise. More often than not, the reality is quite different. After coming to Greece, as a refugee from Afghanistan, Zeinab Nourzehi, describes her life in a refugee camp in Lesbos as ‘hell’.
When Zeinab was 17 years old, her life changed entirely. ‘My family was constantly threatened and after 5 years of fighting, we realised that we can’t stay there anymore. We had to run abroad,’ she says. It’s been a year and a half since Zeinab came to Greece, but she doesn’t feel like anything changed in her life. ‘I ran from one war only to come to another war. In Afghanistan, I was fighting for my life, here I’m fighting to have a life,’ she says.
When 7 months pregnant Zeinab and her husband came to the Moria refugee camp in Lesbos, in 2019, it was the largest camp in Europe, populated by around 20,000 people, until it was burned down last year. Initially designed to accommodate around 3,000 people, Moria was overcrowded, extending into a nearby olive grove, known as the ‘Moria jungle’. For refugees, including pregnant women and children, Moria provided dangerous and inhumane conditions to live in.
Zeinab says she still experiences bad dreams about the place: ‘When I arrived there, everyone said, “welcome to hell” but I thought they were joking at first. They gave us a tent and told us to go put it anywhere we want but, in the camp, there was no place for us. So, we put our tent outside of it, upon the mountain in the ‘jungle’. It was safer there.’
Zeinab recalls their tent being constantly cold and wet because of the heavy rain. Electricty wasn't accessible to everyone, so they couldn't even get a heater. ‘I couldn’t believe it at first, but I saw with my own eyes pregnant women living there and coming back from a hospital with their newborn babies to live in a tent. It took my breath away. I was praying to God and crying every night knowing that I can’t come back to the camp with my newborn baby,’ Zeinab remembers.
At the time of the interview, Zeinab told me that now her family lives in Athens, in a shared house with another Afghan family. The Covid-19 pandemic has slowed down her integration process. ‘If we didn’t have this pandemic in the world, I would have probably gotten a decision regarding my asylum request by now, could have connected with other people more, made friends, and found a job. During the pandemic, I lost the old dreams I had for my future,’ she says.
However, Zeinab's story is a perfect example depicting a recent positive change in media narratives of refugees. She has been using her social media accounts on Instagram and Facebook, by the name Art of Refugees, to share her art and sell her paintings. However, her social media is about more than that: ‘On my account, I try to show my life to more people and some of them thank me for sharing my stories. Sometimes, I talk about my life in Afghanistan and some people reach out to thank me because they didn’t know what was happening there.’
For Zeinab, this is very rewarding because she can use social media to raise awareness about what is happening in Afghanistan and talk about refugee life. She says there is also a strong community of refugee-related social media accounts, people constantly support each other and share each other’s accounts.
In recent years, social media has played an ever-bigger role in raising awareness about refugees and altering the stereotypical narratives of refugees as victims and villains. Personal accounts on Facebook and Instagram, like that of Zeinab’s, are a sort of first-hand evidence of their past lives and the torment they’ve experienced in their origin countries and later in refugee camps. They demonstrate the capacity in which social media can help inspire a change in refugees’ life and function as a tool to learn about problems refugees face, and engage with them directly.
Most notably, a Facebook page the Humans of New York (HONY) series on Syrian refugees has presented a different view towards refugees in 2015 and called for real action, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars. Perreault and Paul's (2018) analysis investigates the HONY influence. They found that while mainstream media images marginalise and dehumanise refugees, alternate sites such as HONY do not function under traditional journalistic norms and routines, providing alternate portrayals. Since HONY’s massive influence on refugee narratives in the U.S., refugees are more often seen as normalised, skilled, and capable of assimilating, the researchers found.
Living in Moria camp or ‘hell’, as many refugees called it, a constantly cold and wet place on the island of Lesbos, didn’t present many opportunities for a normal life, Zeinab was hoping for. One day, however, Zeinab found out about a painting class offered by the ‘Hope Project’, which was a glimpse of hope in the normally bleak everyday life in Moria. Today, Zeinab is living in Athens with her husband Pijvak, daughter Selena and a second baby on the way.
They are still waiting for a decision regarding their asylum request. Zeinab is not yet sure about her life or her daughter’s future but she hopes for a freer and safer world for Selena to grow. She shares this hope on her social media; much of her fears and aspirations are visible in the beautiful paintings she makes and shares on Instagram.
Sharing and selling her paintings on social media isn’t just a means of making a living for Zeinab, it is also a social report of refugee life narrated directly by a refugee, on her own terms, and in her own voice. Like many artists, Zeinab says that, overall, with her account, she wants to share her art and her feelings. Like anyone else, Zeinab ponders about humanity, the meaning of life, human agency, motherhood and femininity through her art.
Elizabeth Curry, a volunteer at Refugee Action – Colchester (RA-C), a voluntary organisation supporting refugees, asylum seekers, and other vulnerable migrants, says that refugees are like anyone else and wonders about the same things as everyone. ‘Refugees and asylum seekers are bewildered and worried in the same way as everyone is and the pandemic has highlighted their problems in the same way as it has the general population,’ she says.
Elizabeth Curry is also one of the curators of a recent exhibition at Firstsite in Colchester ‘My name is not Refugee’. The show is an invitation to dig deeper behind the rhetoric being printed in the press about refugees and acknowledge each person as the rich and varied human beings they are. The show’s curators include people who either are asylum seekers or have a refugee status, Firstsite staff, and volunteers from RA – Colchester. The exhibition includes artworks chosen by refugees and asylum seekers that represent themes and ideas meaningful to them but that we can all relate to.
Exhibitions like ‘My name is not Refugee’ created by local communities, refugee support groups, and refugees themselves show a transformation in how refugees are looked at and treated in the communities they live in. They are not seen as a threat or a victim but rather as equal members of society, similar in their aspirations, fears, and beliefs.
This shift comes from the people, not the government, says Ewa Haladus, a coordinator at Essex Integration, a non-profit organisation that provides essential support services to newly arriving refugees and migrants accepted under the Home Office VPR scheme to Essex. Ewa Haladus is originally from Poland. Comparing the attitudes of both countries towards refugees, she says that here in the UK the situation is now much better. ‘In Poland, people are scared and very against refugees and that’s only because they don’t know them,’ she says.
However, Haladus says, the situation has been changing recently in Poland as well. ‘Here, we have a right-wing government at the moment, which is very much against refugees but people will not be defeated. Support for refugees started from the bottom, the shift came from the people, not the government.’ Haladus tells that individual Polish people started support campaigns for Syrian refugees and because of that, there is more media coverage about refugees and support for them. ‘When the rest of the society watches these programs, they shall understand that refugees are just normal people and that they need our help,’ she says.
In 2015, the increased stream of people fleeing war and prejudice was never seen before, not of such magnitude. The extent of reports about it was even more significant. There was much talk about refugees and their reason for seeking asylum in Europe. Much of the talk was done by officials, representatives, and Western governments but not the refugee groups themselves which lead to problematic narratives in the media.
Communities that were engaging with refugees, social media campaigns, and personal accounts presented more effective storytelling that gave refugees a voice. The 'crisis' narrative itself has been in turn transforming into a more inclusive and positive language that focuses on both opportunities and risks by applying important global and historical developments.
The uncanny effect we Europeans felt, when encountering strangers from overloaded dingies, was fostered by similar media narratives. Refugees were often introduced either as victims or villains, however, these stories did not reflect the varied lives of asylum seekers and refugees. To change this, we need to challenge the idea altogether by making the uncanny beautiful, accepting the stranger, and exploring the possibility of a more intimate engagement with the lives of the refugees.
Photograph: robertsharp
Mark Titchner: Everything that I am not (2019) Firstsite, Colchester. Photographs: Ollie Harrop.
Remembrance of November 2015 Paris attacks victims. Photograph: Mstyslav Chernov
Photograph: Zeinab Nourzehi
Photograph: Zeinab Nourzehi
Photograph: Zeinab Nourzehi
My name is not Refugee (2020) Installation view. An Arts Council Collection National Partners Programme exhibition. Firstsite, Colchester. Photograph: Anna Lukala
Refugees, generally speaking, are displaced people who fled war, violence, conflict, or persecution, UNHCR defines. Esther Wolfe in her research on uncanny architecture and Palestinian refugee camps says: ‘the term “displaced” is especially spectral and deconstructive—to “displace” means both “to move from its rightful place” and “to take over the position of’. This hints at the uncanny perspective within the refugee status itself, they are both homely and unhomely.
Photograph: Massimo Sestini
