The vicious underbelly of urban cultureSydney Morning HeraldDecember 13, 2005Violence in Sydney and Paris exposes the ugly machismo that drives society, writes Bronwyn Winter.
A MONTH ago Paris was burning, as riots broke out following the accidental death of two Arab youths. They were fleeing police at the time. Now it's Sydney's turn, as a demonstration over the mugging of two lifesavers in Cronulla by Middle Eastern youths spawns violence in beach suburbs.
Different place, different scenario, different magnitude of events, but both have been dubbed "race riots", with the focus on Muslim youths. In Sydney, however, the white boys are behaving badly, too.
Cronulla has been notorious for the bad behaviour of its male residents for at least three decades, as Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey, calling themselves the "Salami Sisters", wrote in Puberty Blues, a book of their experience of the macho beach culture of Sydney's south in the 1970s.
Is there that much in common between the violence in Sydney's beach suburbs and the recent riots in France?
A lot of the violence, in both countries, has been traced back to organised gangs.
In France, the riots were generally seen as an explosion of anger among North African youths living in the margins. In Australia, behind talk of "Lebs" and "yobbos", the ugliness of race hatred and social exclusion is also coming to the fore.
But gangs have existed for a long time. In Australia in the 1960s they were mainly white European gangs. Now they are European, Arab and Asian. The Rockers of the '60s today have become the "Lebs", while the surfies are still, well, surfies. And they all still have their gangs. And they are still violent. They are still testosterone-fuelled men behaving very badly indeed. They may be the vicious underbelly of urban culture, but they are also the extreme edge of macho culture.
It is a culture where to be a "real man" you know how to drink (or take drugs), how to swear, how to fight into submission men who are "different" to you, and how to dominate women. It is a culture where acting out violence is a rite of passage, it is how boys become men and individuals join the group. It is a culture of bullying, where the line between high spirits and abusive behaviour is blurred and the line between sex and rape is often non-existent.
Even if most of the reported violence in Cronulla has been men against men, it is part of a culture in which violence is the answer, and women are the most vulnerable targets. In Cronulla on Sunday, a young man ripped the Islamic headscarf off a young woman's head as she was attempting to escape to safety down the sand dunes.
In 2001, one of the first reactions in Australia to the September 11 attacks in New York was to stone a bus taking young headscarf-clad Muslim girls to school.
In 2002, the Bra Boys caused havoc at Coogee RSL.
In France in 2002, the late Samira Bellil published Dans l'Enfer des Tournantes ( In the Hell of Gang-Rapes), her account of life as a teenage girl with the street gangs in the North African ghettos of Paris, where violence is the norm, and women and girls its main targets.
Different places, different cultures, very different sorts of problems. But the same macho mindset, whether white European or Muslim: a mindset that says if you want to belong to the group, then show how powerful you are by abusing someone more vulnerable than you. Or, if you are frustrated, if society shuns you or your world is being changed in ways you can't control, then express your frustration by abusing someone more vulnerable than you. And that will more often than not be a woman.
This is what "race riots" or instances of "gang violence", whatever their other differences, always have in common. Until the macho mindset in our wider culture changes, the violence will not stop.
Dr Bronwyn Winter is senior lecturer in the school of languages and cultures, Sydney University.
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