Attacks on civil society' : looking back at the Sydney gang rapes

Much highly politicized commentary has flourished around a series of ethnically and culturally defined gang rapes which occurred about a decade ago in Sydney, between 2000 and 2003. The crimes became known as the Sydney Gang Rapes, committed by Lebanese youth in two separate cases and, later, a group of Pakistani immigrant brothers. Most of the perpetrators identified as Muslims. The most vociferous of commentators were the popular media in its various forms, spanning across various shades of the political spectntm, the loudest voices belonging to conservative journalists. The sensationalized coverage traversed sordid detail about the gang rapes and the court trials, linking these with unrelated matters of international terrorism, immigration to Australia from the Muslim Middle East and a range of miscellaneous social evils associated with non-Western immigrants, especially from the Islamic world. Predictably, the popular media was also a key forum for law-and-order discourses which commonly associates rising crime rates with particular ethnic communities.