Media and Construction of Difference: How Media Representations Work to Criminalize, Label, and Induce Border-Restrictions against Young African Female Migrants in Europe

Abstract

The United Nation’s Technical Specialist for Adolescents and Youth at the UN Population Fund, Sylvia Wong reveals that young adults currently represent the largest proportion of transnational migrants (Wong, 2009). Migrant youth, and in this context, female African migrants are being subjected to very difficult transit experiences both at transnational borders (Toasije, 2009; Brachet, 2012) and in the receiving societies (Ki-moon, 2009; Solimano, 2010). Our work disturbs existing notion of free movement of individuals across transnational borders to accentuate the effect of Western media representations on Europe-bound female youth migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa. We foreground the pervasive border-restrictions, oppressive treatments, and involuntary deportations experienced by these female migrants in neo-colonial surveillance systems, and tropes of racist securitization masking the interlocking systems of oppression the female migrants have to deal with. The work uses textual analysis to speak to earlier research-report from regimented qualitative field-study conducted in 2013 in the Republic of Malta. It argues that labeling and criminalization of young African female migrants by the European media results in negative public opinions, and subsequently, severe restrictive and oppressive practices against these migrants both at EU borders and in the host societies.