Sudanese-born Victorians and ‘African gangs’ have been copping flak from the media and politicians since Apex first made headlines in 2015.
The continuing divisive rhetoric has been criticised by Victoria Police, who have been trying to stamp out the use of ‘gang’ terminology since late last year.
Police say they are “working very closely with the African community to better understand the drivers of this behaviour and the underlying issues.”
“We know that young people of African backgrounds are overly represented in some high-harm crimes, and police and African-Australian communities are working extremely hard to deal with the issue,” a spokesperson says.
“Nonetheless, people from African backgrounds only represent a small portion of offenders in our community.”
Victoria’s Crime Statistics Agency (CSA) says there were 173,338 alleged offender incidents in the year to March.
Australian-born offenders made up three-quarters of that figure, and the last quarter was made up of offenders born overseas, as well as those whose country of birth was left unspecified.
Determining the representation of Sudanese-born Victorians in this ‘other’ category is “just not that straightforward”, says CSA Chief Statistician Catherine Andersson.
“When you’re talking about overrepresentation, it’s compared to something, so you might say compared to the population within the community,” she says.
“We use Australian Bureau of Statistics resident estimated population data, and to get that data for each state and territory by country of birth is only produced once every six years following a population census. That’s one of the reasons we don’t use a population denominator. For all our other data, we’ve got the most recent estimates available.”
Statistics alone can’t tell us everything about complex social issues, but Ms Andersson urges us to be critical of the way they are used by politicians and the media.
“When people start talking about a number, the question is where have they sourced that from, how old is it, what’s included, how’s it counted. They are the things that you need to look at.”
(Featured Image: A selection of headlines from Australian newspapers on African gangs and racist rhetoric (Credit: Greta Brereton)
