Refraining from reporting crimes: accounts from young male crime victims with an immigrant background

ABSTRACT

Interactions between the police and young people with an immigrant background are well researched internationally and are often discussed in the context of discrimination. Such interactions may explain, at least in part, why these young people do not report crimes to the police when they are the victims of crimes. This article reports accounts from young crime victims who have an immigrant background. The young men who were interviewed mainly portrayed their decisions not to notify the police in the context of masculinity discourse rather than using a discourse of discrimination, even though the interviewers asked specifically about whether discrimination or trust in the police influenced their decision. We argue that these young men’s accounts reflect their preferred self-presentations, since a dicriminination discourse may be tied to a victim identity that is incompatible with hegemonic masculinity.

KEYWORDS:

• Crime victims
• Young men
• Ethnicity
• Masculinity

Introduction

Interactions between the police and young people with an immigrant background are well researched internationally and are often discussed in the context of discrimination (Brunson 2007; Fassin 2013; Sollund 2006). The relationships of police and young people with an immigrant background living in a socially underprivileged area illustrate how young people perceive ethnic discrimination to be an issue in these interactions (Pettersson 2014). This point of view reflects distrust of the police, which is associated with a `tendency not to report crimes (Kääriäinen and Sirén 2011; Council of Crime Prevention 2018).

In the present study, which was conducted in Sweden, we interviewed young men with an immigrant background who were subjected to violent crimes by other young people who they described as having a Swedish background. The aim was to investigate how the young men accounted for not reporting the crimes to the police. Based on previous research, we anticipated that their narratives would mainly reflect a discrimination discourse, especially as they described the perpetrators as having a Swedish background. Our assumptions influenced the way questions were posed during the interviews (compare to Järvinen and Mik-Meyer 2014, 43–44; Lund Thomsen 2012; 98). However, even though the interviewer raised the possibility of police discrimination, the interviewees rejected this suggestion and explained their decision not to report the crime in other ways.

Our own research on young male victims who are Swedish illustrates how their narratives contain descriptions of the young men’s own resourcefulness and ability to comprehend the situation, drawing on hegemonic masculinity norms (i.e. ‘manliness’) (Burcar 2013). Instead of finding a ‘discrimination discourse’, we found similar tendencies in this analysis of the attitudes of young immigrant men in Sweden. ‘Being discriminated against’ has similarities to ‘being a victim’, and it can be difficult to reconcile these similarities while positioning oneself as a competent, capable, and strong young man.

This article contributes to the field of studying the reporting of crimes in two ways. First, it considers young immigrant men not as perpetrators, but as victims. As Andreescu (2013) points out, research has mainly focused on individuals with an immigrant background as perpetrators. Young immigrants have represented ‘otherness in youth crime discourse, especially pointing them out as robbers of other youngsters’ (Lindgren 2009). Stories about young people attacking the police or fire brigades are frequently and regularly reported by the media (Hallin et al. 2010). Such depictions have social consequences, both in terms of the self-identity of the group of people (Jacobsson and Åkerström 2013; Council of Crime Prevention 2018; 6) and in terms of policing and surveillance (Wästerfors and Burcar 2014).

Second, our study contributes to this field because it treats the interviews as accounts rather than as reports and because it does not rely on background factors, such as socioeconomic factors and the seriousness of the crime. Qualitative interviews are always opportunities for self-presentation and impression management (Järvinen and Mik-Meyer 2014), and they may be understood as ‘the work of accounting by a member of a category for activities attached to that category’ (Baker 1998, 131). In particular, our study highlights how the work referred to by Baker may involve managing identities and self-presentations in interviews, with individuals referring to multiple selves that may be somewhat incompatible, such as ‘young man’, ‘immigrant’, and ‘victim’.

Research on reporting crimes to the police

Although in many countries, crime prevention and law enforcement authorities try to encourage residents to report crimes to the police, a significant proportion of crimes are not officially reported.¹ Crime victims who do not report criminal incidents to the police often explain that they consider the crime to be minor (Tarling and Morris 2010) or that they do not believe the police can do anything about it (The Swedish Council of Crime Prevention 2016; see also Finkelhor and Wolak 2003; Skogan 1984; Burcar 2013).

Both Swedish and international studies show that there is a lower tendency to report if the victim or the perpetrator is young (Council of Crime Prevention 2018; 59–65; Finkelhor and Wolak 2003). Furthermore, there are differences in reporting according to ethnicity: A massive body of Anglo-American police research has consistently found a wide gap between the levels of trust and confidence of Caucasians versus other ethnic minorities, with minorities being especially distrustful of the police (e.g. McArdle and Erzen 2001; Huang and Vaughn 1996). This level of trust or distrust is associated with the tendency to report crime (Kääriäinen and Sirén 2011). Several researchers have reported that there is a negative relationship between socioeconomically disadvantaged areas in which a large part of the population has an immigrant background and the tendency to report victimization to the police. For example, Black (1976) showed in a now-classic study that the residents of areas with lower socioeconomic status are less likely to use the legal system to deal with conflicts (see also Goudriaan, Wittebrood, and Nieuwbeerta 2006; c.f. Jacobs and Wright 2006; 25).

Researchers have shown that the tendency to manage conflicts ‘on one’s own’ instead of involving the police may promote hegemonic masculine violence in solving disputes (Messerschmidt 2004). Contacting the police may be viewed as being contrary to a tough and street-wise identity and as being associated with a loss of control and with being weak or defenceless (Anderson 1994; Zdunn 2008). In the classic ‘A Place on the Corner’, Anderson (1994) describes the specific values and norms of a group of men in a lower class neighbourhood. In this neighbourhood, if you want to be treated with respect, you cannot show weakness in everyday life. For marginalized young men with an immigrant background, ethnic minority status can function as symbolic capital in a street culture (Sandberg 2008). Stereotypes can be used strategically and ‘…symbolic signs associated with the category “foreigner” can be conceptualized as a form of embodied street capital’ (Sandberg 2008,163, italics in original). To act as the stereotypical ‘dangerous foreigner’ can be ‘an alternative to being powerless’ (Sandberg 2008,165). According to hegemonic masculinity values, it may be essential to establish a masculine self-image by defending your honour. It may, for instance, be important to show off physical strength or to achieve a reputation of strength and power (Anderson 1994; Messerschmidt 2004; Zdun 2008). Canaan (1996) emphasized that the participation of young men in fights is sometimes regarded as a kind of proof of masculinity: it shows that they can control themselves and their opponents and that they can withstand possible physical pain. In a study of a Danish reform program that involved boxing practice, as well as other activities, the researchers illustrate how such a program may be successful because it draws on willpower, autonomy, and challenges, traits that are celebrated in the street cultures that the young men come from (Friis Søgaard, Kolind, and Thystrup 2016). In this sense, the role of victim is also gender-related in that playing down the seriousness of the crime and one’s own victimization may be a way to portray masculinity (Burcar 2005, 2013).

These observations raise questions about how people discursively perform masculinity, for example in how they account for their decisions (Scott and Lyman 1968; Antaki 1994), such as their decisions not to report crimes. Sometimes, presenting narratives of being victims may be useful, as in Sandberg’s (2009) study, when young drug dealers, mainly with an African background, cited oppression or racism or being excluded from the labour market as explaining, in part, why they dealt drugs. In this way, the dealers explained their criminal activity in the context of an external structure that justifies the activity. The drug dealers, however, also underscored that they considered themselves to be tough and smart by posing as violent gangsters. This positioning, as pointed out by Sandberg (2009), can ‘be interpreted as resistance, or a way to reject the degrading position of the victim.’ Sandberg also notes that the specific discourse referred to by interviewees may depend on the researchers’ questions or comments, thereby triggering different self-representations within the same interview.

Materials and methods

The interview material presented in this article was collected as part of a major Swedish research project that aimed to study young crime victims’ retold experiences. Specifically, it aimed to investigate if and how the victims’ immigrant or Swedish backgrounds were highlighted, if and how this background or ethnicity was used to explain crimes, or if the background was perhaps not mentioned at all in the retold experiences.² We were not initially interested in whether the police were notified of the crime. Indeed, that theme was identified serendipitously in the interviews: as is often the case, qualitative material frequently offers more than what was originally anticipated.

When we refer to the interviewees as having an ‘immigrant background’, we use the interviewees’ own categories. Specifically, the young men described themselves as ‘immigrants’ and/or as ‘foreigners’, although they were all born in Sweden. The interviewees described the offenders as being ‘Swedish’ – from what we inferred, this was based on the offenders’ appearances, such as hair and skin colour, and on the language that was used. Thus, what is central in this analysis is not our categorization but rather how the interviewees present themselves and others (c.f. Åkerström and Burcar 2016). Such categories, e.g. ‘Swedes’ and ‘immigrants’, are a common ‘emic’ dichotomy used by young people, according to many Swedish ethnographies (Andersson 2003; Jonsson 2007; Kasselias Wiltgren 2014) as well as according to our own earlier studies. In these studies (Åkerström 2016; Åkerström and Burcar 2 2016), we discussed how contrasting pairs, like ‘immigrant’ and ‘Swede’, may have become part of ‘new ethnic identities’ such as Stuart Hall’s (2000) discussion of how in England, the term ‘blacks’ may now be used to refer to people of African, Caribbean, and Asian origin, as these groups have experiences of exclusion in common. Similarly, Les Back, Sinha, and Bryan (2012) investigated new ethnic identities in contemporary multicultural urban society. We thus want to emphasize that we do not consider these categories as ‘essential’ (that is, beyond construction) or as a categorisation that must become actualized as retold experiences or as accounts in interviews.

It was difficult to find interviewees, so our analysis in this article is based on just seven interviews. Notably, the difficulties of finding interviewees makes it even more important to report the stories that we do have and to discuss them in an exploratory way. The young men, aged 17 to 25 years old, all had an immigrant background. The interviews were carried out by Anna Rypi. As mentioned, finding these interviewees was not an easy task. Rypi contacted the local voluntary Victim Support Organization (BOJ) Middle Scania in southern Sweden, the Malmö Victim Support Centre, the Victim Coordinators at the Malmö Police (which specifically deals with hate crime victims), and immigrant organizations in Malmö. None of these efforts were successful, so Rypi emailed a description of the project to the headmasters and school counsellors at every high school (N = 35) in the city of Malmö, which is the third largest city in Sweden. Rypi received only a few responses from the schools, all of which stated, ‘we don’t have such problems here’ or ‘this subject is too sensitive’. When she asked if she could visit the schools in person and present the project to the students, three of the schools agreed.

Rypi visited these three schools in the city of Malmö and presented the project to the students; this connected her with one interviewee. When she expanded the search to schools in some other cities in Southern Sweden, she found four more young men to interview. Two additional interviewees were found through their acquaintances.³

All of the interviewees were victimized by what they described as perpetrators with a Swedish background. They all described being assaulted, and one was robbed and then assaulted. Their experiences of being victimized varied. For instance, one young man described how he had been chased by a ‘racist gang’, one had been attacked at a night-club along with his friends, one had been repeatedly assaulted by other youngsters when he was alone in the daytime, and yet another had been robbed when he was out walking with his girlfriend.

It is possible that the material we collected was influenced by the institutional context (i.e. the context of school) or by the fact that we were explicitly looking for ‘victims of crime’, i.e. individuals who identified themselves as such. However, as we noted earlier, our interviewees did not really identify with the term ‘crime victim’ but rather negotiated and redefined this identity during the interviews and interactions (also see Järvinen and Mik-Meyer 2014). The interviews were conducted at school, at the city library, and at the local youth centre in 2012. Each interview lasted about one hour and was recorded using a voice recorder. An interview guide that was loosely followed helped guide the interview. The guide included questions about the circumstances surrounding the crime, the experiences of the victims, descriptions of the perpetrators, and questions about actions that were taken after the crime, such as calling for help, talking about it afterwards, and so forth.

Our initial aim was to study how young people talked about their experiences as victims of crimes, with a focus on how they talked about the perpetrators. Going through the material, we observed a theme of not reporting the crime to the police. We sorted out extracts discussing this theme and then focused on how the interviewees explained their reasons for not reporting the crime. We focused on recurring discursive practices, examining instance after instance while developing and revising our analysis. Even though we did not conduct a narrative analysis per se, we refer to the interviewees’ narratives in the text, and we were inspired by Riessman’s analyses of personal narratives (2002). Such narratives are often characterized by noting, in great detail, ‘what she said, what he said, what happened next’ (Riessman 1993, 2). Personal narratives are meaning-making units of discourse in which the interviewees become involved not only in a rhetoric that aims to protect a public persona but also in efforts to make sense of the occurrences. Such narratives can illustrate how the interviewees position themselves and others when they talk about events, their attackers, and themselves.

We analyse both what the interviewees said and the interviewer’s (Anna Rypi) part in the interview. Thus, the interviews are seen as co-constructed (Rapley 2001). For example, on several occasions, Rypi asks the interviewees if they ‘trust the police’, and sometimes she seems to steer the conversation in a specific direction. In other words, the questions reveal specific background expectations or preferences (cf. Scott and Lyman 1968), corresponding to Järvinen’s (2001) discussion of researchers’ ways of imposing reality descriptions on research participants.

Traditionally, ‘leading questions’ are problematic, since the interviewer is supposed to avoid influencing the interviewee. Since we are influenced by so-called ‘active interviewing’ (see Holstein and Gubrium 1995), where the interviewer and the interviewee are seen as co-constructing the phenomena and social categories in question, we do not regard this possible ‘steering’ of the interview as a problem, as long as we are aware of it and as long as we analyse the interview as an interaction. As Holstein and Gubrium (1995, 78) write: ‘The standard concern for contamination is replaced by the awareness of activeness’.

In this article, we include the questions of the interviewer, the first author, in the excerpts, and we analyse the dialogue rather than just the interviewees’ answers to the questions. This approach allows us to study how each party (interviewer and interviewee) makes use of the available resources for interpretation and explanation (discourses and accounts) and to address how this influences the specific interactions in the interviews (Holstein and Gubrium 1995, 50).

Interviewing potentially vulnerable individuals and groups, such as victims, must be done with care and ethical sensitivity. In addition, talking about ethnic backgrounds in a study about victims and offenders can be delicate and ethically problematic. However, we deem the topic to be important, because in Sweden, ‘the villain’ readily brings forth images of immigrant boys living in depressed housing estates. In our study, young men with an immigrant background were instead invited to present their experiences as victims rather than placing them in the social category of offenders, where they are often placed (Hallin et al. 2010; Lindgren 2009).

We carefully and consistently followed the Swedish Research Council’s ethical guidelines (Vetenskapsrådet, n.d.) We informed each young man that participating in the interview was optional and that he could end the interview whenever he wanted, for example, if he felt uncomfortable. We were prepared to instruct them to contact Victim Support or a school counsellor if there were any signs of emotional distress. We were very careful to anonymize the interviews: we used fictitious names for the interviewees, for the specific places, and for other factors that could reveal the interviewee’s identity; alternatively, we omitted the issue or name. The audio recordings and the transcripts of the interviews were only available to us, the three researchers involved in the project. The interviewees were informed about the steps we took to ensure their anonymity.

Incompatible self-presentations?

We all have multiple selves that depend on the various social relationships and situations we are engaged in (Mead 1934/1967, 143), but as Goffman (1959) pointed out, we are also involved in self presentation i.e. how we handle this multiplicity in our encounters with others. At times, the selves that are at stake seem to be contradictory, yet situationally they come into contact with each other. Some argue that this occurs, for instance, when young men are interviewed as victims of crime, and it may explain the rather complicated way they talk about the crime event, i.e. about their own participation during the event and how they, in their narratives, let others rather than themselves describe their injuries (Åkerström, Burcar, and Wästerfors 2011)

Similarly, Chase (1995) showed how difficult it was for minority women superintendents to talk about discrimination when they were interviewed as career women. As career women, they had a settled discourse that implied success and competence. However, when they were interviewed as successful women, it became hard to describe discrimination due to their ultimately favourable accomplishments; this created an unsettled discourse that included retakes and hesitancy. Self-presentations may also contrast with wider societal discourses (Järvinen and Mik-Meyer 2014). Lund Thomsen’s (2012) study of irregular migrants illustrates these difficulties in that it showed that the interviewees’ self-presentations were not in accordance with the view of irregular migrants by some in the public sphere as being undeserving and deviant. Likewise, Rähtzel (2006) notes how many young immigrants who deal with everyday discrimination in the Swedish labour market took inequalities for granted and seemed to have difficulty verbalizing their experiences. The study by Kirkwood, McKinlay, and Chris McVittie (2013) also illustrated this in their interviews with asylum seekers and refugees in a Scottish city that focussed on their experiences of violence. The interviewees were reluctant to use racism as an explanation, and such explanations were used tentatively, reluctantly, or as ‘a last resort’. Greenland and Taulke-Johnson (2017, 91) studied how self-identified young gay men talk about discrimination, and they write that ‘…although our participants did talk about experiences that were troubling to us as researchers, they often downgraded these experiences from “discrimination” into “not discrimination”’. This was related to how they constructed themselves, for example as ‘not a victim’.

In this article, we were inspired by Riessman’s (2002) analyses of identities as performances or self-presentations in interview narratives when we analyse how the interviewees explain why they did not report the crimes to the police. All of the accounts are, as Scott and Lyman (1968, 59) pointed out, ‘a manifestation of the underlying negotiation of identities’.

The accounts that we discuss below, which explain the decisions not to report crimes to the police, are at times interrelated, but they reflect diversity and variety in the available cultural repertoires. We consider if and how each account is associated with the victim’s presentation of self in regard to 1) the individual’s possible self-presentation as a victim (in relation to deciding not to contact the police) and 2) associating the decision not to report the crime as discrimination.

Managing on one’s own

‘Managing on one’s own’ includes associations with an independent and strong actor that does not need to involve official authorities. This, however, does not mean that one relies solely on one’s own resources; rather, it includes a ‘we’, i.e. family or friends. This ‘we’ contrasts with calling the police. One interviewee, Ahmed, who is now in his mid-twenties, describes how he was chased and beaten by a racist gang. The incident occurred some years ago, when he was a teenager, but it has endured as an important episode in his life. When recounting the situation, he describes it in a dramatic way. He describes himself as a rap artist, and his attacker as a leader of his gang of ‘Nazis’. This gang had ‘organized people’ who chased Ahmed and eventually beat him until some people passed by and he managed to escape.

Anna:

Thinking back to what happened: What did you do afterwards?

Ahmed:

I didn’t report it to the police.

Anna:

You did not report to the police?

Ahmed:

I called my girlfriend, and her dad is not to be trifled with. He got really mad you know. He was going to get them. (Laughs) It was like that, I didn’t call the police ‘cause I don’t think they’ll handle it, you know. In those days…

Anna:

Maybe you didn’t trust the police, or?

Ahmed:

Yes I did.

Anna:

You did…?

First of all, it is notable that Ahmed declares without being asked that he did not report the crime. Furthermore, it is his first statement after being asked what he did after being attacked. This is thus not an interaction-initiated response. Indeed, it can be seen as his response to a taken-for-granted cultural assumption that it is expected that one will report a crime. Secondly, the interviewer presumes that this means that he does not trust the police, but Ahmed disagrees. During the subsequent conversation, he explains his actions and his feelings of contempt for the police.

Ahmed:

I did not have that malicious portrait that the police wouldn’t be [there] for me either. (Anna: No, okay.) It’s just that you had a contempt for the police, but that was just a part of one’s teenage years.

Ahmed attributes his contempt towards the police to being a teenager, which he no longer is, and frames it as ‘collective teenage behaviour’. Anna continues to ask Ahmed if he has been discriminated against by the police, and this seems to become a verbal invitation that encourages him to change his mind. As the conversation continues, Ahmed says that he did not trust the police because when he was young, he felt that they discriminated against him. The reason for his change of attitude seems to be that he now defends himself against the image that someone who is discriminated against by the police automatically has racist tendencies.

Ahmed:

I’ve come across policemen who’ve been nice. I had a quite objective view. But I was angry at the police ‘cause I thought they discriminated against me. And I didn’t trust them. No, I didn’t. But it wasn’t like I thought the police were racists themselves. (Anna: No, no…) I wasn’t such that I called all Swedes racists. I have many Swedish friends. It wasn’t at all like that for me. My Swedish friends took on neo-Nazis as much as I did.

‘My Swedish friends took on neo-Nazis as much as I did’, Ahmed says, and he thereby shows that he does not present himself as a passive victim of neo-Nazi violence. Instead, he describes it as an ongoing, mutual conflict, even though he was assaulted on one occasion. It appears to be important to Ahmed to show that he is not racist and that he is open-minded and objective and that he was even when he was younger. If he is against any party, then it is against the neo-Nazis, not against ‘Swedes’ in general.

Although Ahmed says that he has experienced police discrimination, he underlines that that was not a motive for his non-reporting. Ahmed seems to try to guide the interviewer, to characterize him as objective and non-racist in order to counteract a possible unwanted description as being impartial and racist. Two narrative self-presentations are indirectly shown here: not a racist – an anti-Nazi, not a passive victim – but an active opponent in the conflict. There is a third self-presentation, that as a youth who is handling a violent incident on his own. While the latter is emphasized as being crucial in the decision not to contact the police, the two others may also be important, since they appear in the context of the narrative.

Accounts about managing on one’s own are integrated with the descriptions of local morals, which urge young men to keep quiet about local crimes and conflicts due to group loyalty. This can be seen as a part of general social discourse about loyalty (Åkerström 1991), and it is sometimes associated in particular with youth culture (Uhnoo 2011). Ahmed relates his unwillingness to contact the police to an informal rule in the group of friends, i.e. ‘no snitching’: ‘It wasn’t like they (the Swedish friends)… They were like me, you know. We never thought of ethnicity – I guess it was sort of, that you shouldn’t squeal you know. You should handle it yourself.’

Even though he mentions feeling discriminated against by the police, rather than using the discourse of discrimination, Ahmed highlights the ‘teenage rules’ of not snitching. ‘You should handle it yourself’, Ahmed concludes his narrative. A similar approach is shown in Ali’s narrative about how both he and his dad reacted to the severe and repeated assaults Ali suffered.

Ali:

He (the dad) wanted to solve it himself.

Anna:

But what do you think about that generally? Is it good to solve things yourself? Or would you prefer to go to the police?

Ali:

Well, I’d rather solve it myself, with my own hands. No, not with my hands, but solve it myself, rather than involving others.

Immediately after saying ‘I’d rather solve it myself, with my own hands’, Ali corrects and clarifies his utterance: ‘No, not with my hands, but solve it myself, rather than involving others’. This correction may be understood as a disclaimer (cf. Hewitt and Stokes 1975), a way for Ali to make sure that the interviewer does not perceive him, or typify him, as a violent or vindictive person. Ali does not emphasize events or recount responses that could be attributed to his being a victim, i.e. as being vulnerable, weak, or innocent (to name a few of the characteristics that are associated with the term victim; cf. Burcar 2005). He instead presents himself as an independent and strong actor – one who does not want to ‘involve others’. Another of the interviewees, Mohsen, who was mugged, explains that he does not need any social support – for example, crime victim support – because he is supported by his friends.

Anna:

How come you don’t think you need any (such support), sort of?

Mohsen:

I’ve got my friends.

Anna:

Well, all right, have you talked to them about it (the mugging)?

Mohsen:

Yes.

Anna:

Yes what did they say…?

Mohsen:

They said, ‘Let’s go find them’.

The kind of support that Mohsen refers to, i.e. his friends taking on his attackers, is something that the interviewer does not expect to hear. The interviewer (Author1), was prepared to continue the interview with the therapeutic function of ‘talk’, which is associated with a crime victim discourse (cf. Burcar 2005; Hansen Löfstrand 2008). In a similar vein, Davor, who had been beaten by a Swedish gang when he was out with some friends, says that his friends wanted to hit back: ‘They feel that they would do more harm than the police would./ – /…they think ‘we’ll be stronger’, ‘that’s the drive’. Mohsen and Davor, like the other young men in the study, do not express the emotions and manners that victims are ‘expected to’ express, like, for example, vulnerability and the need for support or counselling. Instead the young men express anger, sometimes vindictiveness, but not the need for counselling. Hasan describes himself, in the interview, as someone who is never afraid: ‘I’m that kind of person, I don’t care whatever happens’, he says. But the interviewer is not completely convinced and continues to ask:

Anna:

You were not afraid that they (the perpetrators) were fifteen people? (when he and his two friends were assaulted)

Hasan:

No.

Anna:

You’re a tough guy! (laughs)

Hasan:

Yes, well, we’re there for each other.

Hasan also states in the interview that he and his friends fought back, which is what he means by ‘being there for each other’. The young men frame their experiences as mutual conflicts between themselves and perpetrators rather than framing themselves as ‘victims’ who, in contemporary society, are expected to make use of third parties, such as the police. ‘Managing on one’s own’, instead of contacting the police, could thus be regarded as a way to embody hegemonic masculinity, including an implicit acceptance of violence as revenge.

The inefficiency of the police: ‘nothing happens’

While ‘managing on one’s own’ as an explanation for not reporting a crime to the police mostly involves self-presentations, explanations that concern the police focus on their lack of involvement and on their failure to act. These accounts are often integrated, so that Ali, who describes how his family took care of the young men who had beaten him, also explains that the police ‘didn’t care’. He describes being attacked by a group of young men and how he did not report the crime despite being badly injured. His complaint centres on the long response time after his mother called the police.

Ali:

When you call when it happens, they say, ‘We’ll send a car’. The patrol car arrives after about an hour and forty-five minutes.

Anna:

That’s a long time.

Ali:

Well, it’s a crisis. One hour and forty-five minutes: there’s a lot that can happen during that time.

Anna:

So, you’re disappointed in them?

Ali:

You could have died during those two hours, if you put it like that.

As opposed to the other interviewees, and also in contrast with his earlier description, Ali refers to vulnerability in this part of the interview, but he does so indirectly: ‘You could have died during those two hours’. Ali uses ‘you’ instead of ‘I’, thereby generalizing the experience, rather than recounting it as a personal, unique experience (Adelswärd 1997). In this way, he avoids direct, explicit positioning of himself as a victim who is requesting sympathy. The exposure is, at this time, narrated in relation to the police and not in relation to the attackers. A description of vulnerability in relation to one’s attackers may pose a greater threat towards cultural values of hegemonic masculinity, since this includes an interaction between peers, whereas ‘the police’ is a more anonymous but powerful, social category. This interpretation is in accordance with his next statement, in which he formulates a critical description about how the ‘police system’ works:

Ali:

It’s a sick system the police has.

Anna:

Hmm. In what way?

Ali:

They are not really one hundred.⁴ For example, if you pocket a chewing-gum in a shop, they’ll be there in about five minutes. They’ll be right there. But if it’s a bank robbery, it will take time. And if it’s a violent attack or robbery, it always takes time.

Ali does not associate his criticism of the police with issues of him having an immigrant background, which is visible in terms of his darker hair and skin; he instead refers to his experiences to a general critique of the failure of the police to act according to rational expectations of how the police ought to respond. Such description may be rather common. Burcar (2013) discusses, for instance, how young male crime victims may contrast descriptions of themselves with descriptions of the police: The young men are rational and sympathy-worthy, whereas the police are described as irrational and nonchalant and as not responding in accordance with the moral claims of the sympathy-worthy (cf. Clark 1987).

Discrimination and incompetence: ‘instead of arresting them, they took us’

In the narrative analysed below, the explanation for not reporting the crime concerns discrimination and unfair treatment from the police, as related to the interviewees’ immigrant background. Only one of the interviewees, Tareq, emphasizes this aspect in his explanation of why he did not report the crime. His account is integrated with a portrayal of the police as hypocritical and incompetent, but his final decision not to report the crime in based on the latter i.e. on the ‘unskilled’ behaviour of the police, who target him and his friends instead of the attackers. Subsequently, the culprits had disappeared, so reporting the crime ‘didn’t feel worthwhile’.

Tareq describes how he was beaten up at a nightclub when he was trying to defend a friend. The friend was first attacked verbally by a group of Swedish young men, who then escalated the conflict and began to hit Tareq and his friend. Someone called the police, but when the police arrived, they acted as though the Swedish young men were the victims:

Tareq:

The police arrived, and eh, when they went to arrest someone, they began to take us, ’cause they thought we had started the whole thing (Anna: Oh no.)/ – /So the police began to go towards us and sort of were close to putting the handcuffs on us and stuff and said that we were to be arrested. But we said, ‘Hallo there, wait a bit, it’s we who were victimized, it’s not we who did something’. But then the guys who started it, they were… long gone.

Anna:

Ah, okay, so it was almost only you who was left there when…

Tareq:

(interrupts) Yeah, well nooo, when the police came, the guys (the attackers) were there, but instead of arresting them, they took us.

Tareq says the police ‘were close to putting the handcuffs on us’, even though he and his friends were the victims, and furthermore, the police let the culprits get away. Then Tareq refers to security guards working in the club; they acquire the role of reliable witnesses in his narrative who confirm and validate his version of events (Potter 1996; 133; cf. Åkerström, Burcar, and Wästerfors 2011):

Tareq:

…eh the guards told them (the police) that it wasn’t we who started it.

Anna:

Yeah, ok. Did the police listen this time?

Tareq:

Yes, exactly, but that’s what I think is so wrong. Why do the police immediately have to act against a foreigner?

Anna:

They are a bit racist, sort of?

Tareq:

I may interpret it that way, I don’t know how the others [his friends] saw it, but I got so, eh, mad, I got so mad. Sort of ’cause I’m a foreigner or that all the rest of us were foreigners – that shouldn’t mean we’ve come there to start a fight.

It is the interviewer who uses the formulation ‘a bit racist’. Tareq does not object but does not use the word himself. He expresses himself a bit more carefully by hedging (Lakoff 1972), ‘I may interpret it this way’. Furthermore, he is careful to make his understanding his own, acknowledging that his friends may see it another way. In this way, he distances himself in terms of fact construction, i.e. the formulation is placed low in terms of a hierarchy of epistemic modalization (Fairclough 2003). The listener is not sure whether Tareq is convinced that the police were ‘a bit racist’.

Still, Tareq express strong moral outrage. He repeats that he ‘got so mad’, and his indignation is also seen when he continues his narrative and depicts the police as being hypocritically sympathetic.

Tareq:

…then they started, sort of ‘well, how are you’. Began to pat us on the shoulders, ‘Are you all right?’ and: ‘Do you want to call, do a police report?’ And I just: ‘Does it feel worthwhile? If you’re not gonna – not gonna find them.’

Anna:

Mmm. They (the attackers) had already gotten away

Tareq:

Right…

Anna:

Yeah, annoying….

Tareq:

So, he – they just ‘Yeah, well then, never mind, please yourself’, see, they were just like that.

The police are portrayed as hypocritically kind and caring, both in terms of their sudden switch in behaviour, from the near-handcuffing to patting the young men on their shoulders, and in terms of being fairly uninterested in whether Tareq makes a report. They do not try to convince him, and they quickly accept his decision not to press charges, thus exhibiting indifference.

When the interviewer asks if Tareq filed a police report later, he explains that he did not: it wasn’t worth it, since the police would not find the attackers. Tareq expresses disappointment in the police and in their ability to do anything constructive; the story leads up to this being the reason that he did not report the crime. In Tareq’s story, he and his friends represent victims that the listener can easily identify with, whereas the police are represented as somewhat immoral, prejudiced, and incompetent. Tareq manages to construct and dramatize the morally right versus the blameworthy. The portrayal is rhetorically effective: In common with talk in court, victim rhetoric displays what classic rhetoric terms ‘indignation’. This rhetoric appeals to that which is expected to be morally upsetting by people in general (Johannesson 1998; 42; Rypi 2005).

Avoiding the hassle: ‘you just get a headache’

The two types of accounts discussed above include moral indignation directed towards police behaviour, in terms of them being slow, inefficient, incompetent, and discriminatory. Another explanation for his decision not to report the crime concerns the trouble involved in reporting it. Mohsen, whose narration includes a ‘bureaucratic critique’, is more matter-of-fact in relating why he did not even consider filing a report. Mohsen was robbed by a gang of Swedish young men who took his phone and money while he was walking home with his girlfriend. He explains that he did not report the crime because the reporting procedure is a hassle.

Mohsen:

I don’t like reporting them, you just get a headache.

Anna:

Yeah, okay. Did you feel that the police wouldn’t side with you, sort of, or….?

Mohsen:

They would be on my side ’cause it was me who was the… was the…

Anna:

Yeah, it was you who was the victim.

Mohsen:

But …no one had, they wouldn’t have known who did it – It’s no good, just a hassle

Anna:

Just a hassle, well …?

Mohsen:

Well, paper and calling and police inquiry… So.

The interviewer does not continue with the line of ‘the headache’ and instead introduces another possible explanation for Mohsen refraining from reporting: she suggests that the police might not be ‘on his side’. Mohsen does not rise to the bait. Instead he declares that the police would be on his side. He starts to explain why, indicating that it is because… and he trails off as he cannot choose which word to use. The interviewer then suggests the category ‘victim’, which he does not object to but also does not agree to. The ‘victim category’ might not sit well with him; it may thus be significant that it is the interviewer who introduces this particular identity. Instead of replying to the suggestion, Mohsen continues to talk about the low chance of the police finding the attackers and then goes on to speak about the ‘hassle’ of reporting.

Later the conversation returns to the issue of reporting the crime when the interviewer asks if there may be other explanations as to why he did not want to report the crime, such as lacking trust in the police.

Anna:

Yeah, mmm, I was thinking about what you said about not wanting to report to the police, is it like… Just because it’s trouble to do the paperwork, or is there other stuff like, like you feel that you can’t trust them (the police) or…

Mohsen:

Yeah, (I) trust them.

Anna:

You trust them…?

Mohsen:

But I, I hate to fill in those papers, stuff like that, police inquiries and this and that, don’t like that kind of things. And there was no, I was okay, no damages and stuff.

Mohsen also refuses the next suggestion from the interviewer i.e. that his lack of trust in the police has made him hesitant to report the crime. He insists that his lack of reporting was due to his ‘hate to fill in those papers, stuff like that’, upgrading the claim with the emotional ‘hate’ and emphasizing his statement by using an assertive tone of voice. However, he adds that he was not hurt physically during the robbery. His account for not reporting focuses on avoidance of bureaucracy, something which has been shown in other studies of adolescents and young adult victims regarding decisions about whether or not to report a crime to the police (Burcar 2013; Uhnoo 2011).

Discussion

In this article, we aimed to explore how young male crime victims with an immigrant background explain why they did not report the crimes to the police. They were all subjected to crimes by people that they identified as ‘Swedes’. Research has shown that young people with an immigrant background are especially likely to be targeted by the police (Fassin 2013; Neild 2009; Sollund 2006) and that researchers use discrimination when accounting for distrust that may lead to refraining from reporting crimes (Pettersson 2014). With this in mind, we expected that our interviewees would draw on such experiences and that we would hear stories about unfair police treatment because they had an immigrant background. In fact, the interviewees actively resisted such suggestions.

In the interviews, the interviewer’s expectations were not met; in other words, the young men who were interviewed resisted the interviewer’s initial framing of the situation. As Bloksgaard, Kennedy-Macfoy, and Nielsen. (2012, 73) point out, ‘new and unexpected identifications and dis-identifications may be produced during the research encounter’. It is not unusual for interviewees to negotiate, or even protest against, the researcher’s categorization of them (for example, as them being discriminated against or oppressed). We were inspired by the idea of ‘speaking to’ (instead of ‘speaking for’) the research subject, as mentioned by Bloksgaard, Kennedy-Macfoy, and Nielsen (2012) in the introduction to the special edition of Researching Difference, as this, as they put it: ‘allows for the possibility’/ – /‘of a ‘counter sentence’ (ibid, 71). Thus, when we as researchers ask ethnic minority interviewees to identify themselves in terms of racism and discrimination, we have to be (self-) reflective of the subject position that we invite them to speak from. We must also remain open to new insights of how the interviewees themselves describe their experiences (ibid.) Naturally, we researchers bring our own pre-understanding into the interview, but often we do not clearly reflect on the implications for the conversation. Huysamen (2016, 23), who interviewed men who pay for sex, describes it this way: ‘…I had formulated my own set of assumptions and expectations about […] what participants would tell me…’ Also, of course, the interviewees have their expectations and intentions. During interviews, we produce and perform different discourses through our interactions (ibid.). As can be seen in our material, the interviewer’s suggested interpretations do not go unchallenged. Indeed, the young men do not just accept and follow the interpretations, they present their own understanding during the conversation. These interpretations do not, in general, incorporate a discrimination discourse that drew from stories of unfair treatment by the police.

We did encounter such narratives among the interviewees, but for most of the interviewees, these narratives were not coupled to refraining from reporting the crime. The one interviewee, Tareq, who described the police officers’ actions when arriving at the scene in a discourse of discrimination, integrates his decision not to make a formal report with an instrumental account of ‘no idea’ (as the culprits had disappeared).

Preferring to solve the conflict oneself without involving the police is the most common theme in our interviews. This could be accounted for by youth norms (Ahmed), by the inefficiency of the police (Ali), or by an avoidance of bureaucracy (Mohsen). For most interviewees, these accounts are not associated with issues of ethnicity or with being ‘an immigrant’ or ‘a foreigner’ or with the culprits being ‘Swedes’. Some of the interviewees even explicitly reject such accounts, even when the interviewer suggests them. Most of the interviewees say they trust the police – something that runs counter to the interviewer’s assumptions as explicitly expressed in the interviews. The interviewees explain their decisions using discourses that are common in contemporary society, such as grumbling about bureaucracy (Hertzfeld 1992) and complaints about police inefficiency, which were common in Swedish newspapers when these interviews were conducted.

The hesitancy of the interviewees to report crimes may have been influenced by their immigrant background, that is, by the stories they heard from family or friends or by their own experiences (see, for instance, Andreescu 2013). However, when we listen to their accounts of refraining to report crimes to the police, we do not hear accounts that draw on a discourse of discrimination, with the exception of Tareq. Our study concerns the specific aspect of refraining from reporting a crime to the police, which is not integrated in a more general complaint about police discrimination. (We might have heard stories about the police had we asked such general questions.) Discrimination and distrust of the police are certainly included as themes in the interviewees’ narratives, and the police are criticized, but our point is that discrimination and ethnic background are not used in the interviewees’ explanations for not reporting crimes. The young men instead emphasise how they solve things better by themselves and state or imply that the police are ineffective and bureaucratic.

How can we interpret our finding that most of the interviewees did not use the discourse of discrimination? This discourse is available and is spread among adolescents in relation to how the police deal with young people with an immigrant background (Pettersson 2014). Moreover, the interviewees in this study had extra encouragement to use such rhetoric in that their attackers were described as being Swedes. True, one of them – our ‘deviant case’, who did use a discrimination discourse – explained that the police thought that he and his friends were the attackers instead of the Swedes, but the other interviewees did not use ‘the Swedes’ in their narratives of why they did not report the crime. Instead, similar to studies of young Swedish men as crime victims (Burcar 2005), our interviewees emphasised their own competence, strength, and ability to act and contrasted this with the police, who are portrayed as incompetent.

We cannot exclude the possibility that the reason that (most of) our interviewees do not frame their choice not to report the crime to the police as being related to discrimination is because they take everyday racism for granted (even though the discrimination is unseen and is not expressed) (Essed 1991; Rähtzel 2006; 232). However, our interviewees’ statements distanced them from a discrimination discourse (although they distance themselves from being labelled victims rather than distancing themselves from the discourse itself). Furthermore, experiences of discrimination may not ‘automatically’ lead to simplistic acceptance of an identity as someone who is discriminated against. Hartmann (2011), who studied young men with a Turkish background in Köln, found that the interviewees used an ‘Ausländer’ identity in their responses to experiences of being discriminated against. This was a collective identity that was shared by immigrants of different backgrounds, and it formed a special social capital in that it was positive and affirmative.

In our study, being someone with an immigrant background is certainly an identity that is present in the interviews, but being a young man is emphasized in important although implicit ways. The young men’s narratives are in line with a hegemonic way of positioning oneself as masculine, involving ‘holding one’s own’ and ‘not backing down’ (see, for example, Canaan 1996; Connell 1995; Messerschmidt 2004), as well as being competent, controlled, and able to handle severe strain. Furthermore, the identities of ‘victims’ and ‘criminals’ are not beyond construction; some of our interviewees described incidents when they were the perpetrators of crime. Is it possible that their decisions not to contact the police but rather to ‘handle things on their own’ are related to this? That is, could it be a sign that they are showing street capital, similar to the at-risk youth with immigrant backgrounds in Sandberg’s (2008) study? We did not have the impression that these young men were engaging in gang crimes. Further, although their narratives can be seen as ways to seem street-wise, the narratives allude to the ‘cool guy’ rather than to the ‘dangerous foreigner’. The young men themselves do not invoke marginalization or ethnic minority status in either positive or negative terms.

Many young men can be considered to depend on both definitional and interactional processes. In fact, reports of victimization are much more common among Swedish male prisoners than among men in the rest of the population (Nilsson 2002). Nevertheless, presenting oneself as a victim may be tempting, as it elicits sympathy (Holstein and Miller 1990). These interviews gave the young men such an opportunity, which they rejected. Schwalbe and Wolkomir (2001, 91) pointed out that the interview situation is ‘both an opportunity for signifying masculinity and a peculiar type of encounter in which masculinity is threatened. It is an opportunity to signify masculinity inasmuch as men can portray themselves as powerful, in control, autonomous, and rational…’ Thus, self-presentation as ‘a young man’ may be difficult in an interview if it is embedded in a discourse of discrimination, which implies being victimized and is contrary to being competent and to being the one who acts and takes initiatives.

When reporting a crime to the police in which one is the victim, one’s self-presentation as a young man is at stake. In other words, portraying oneself as being discriminated against as a reason for not reporting the crime to the police may be the same as identifying oneself as a victim in toto. Such an account would touch one’s own self, which is quite distinct from talking about discrimination by the police in general. It may be more important to describe oneself as resolutely acting in a manly fashion than to associate oneself as a victim of crime that evokes pity or to suggest that the police discriminate against immigrants. As has been shown in other areas, such as describing a successful career, it may be difficult to imply strength and competence as well as discriminatory treatment in the same narrative (Chase 1995).

When the interviewees rhetorically ask, ‘What’s the point?’ in reporting the crime, this is a way to describe the crime as not being serious enough to warrant reporting and also a way to suggest police inefficiency. But most of all, the interviewees explained that they did not report the crimes by claiming that they could ‘fix it themselves’. This, we argue, is associated with resistance to adopting a victim identity and was an important subtext or undertone in all of the interviews. This theme has not been a focus in other studies of decisions not to report crimes, which have mostly been quantitative (Berg, Finkelhor, Goudrian 2013; Kärrinen and Sirén 2011; Tarling and Morris 2010). This suggests that subtle issues, such as those we highlight, may be difficult to capture in quantitative studies. It also highlights the need for studies like this one that focus on how people frame their accounts.

Notes

1. According to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brottsförebyggande rådet 2016), only 27% of assaults, 22% of threats, and 19% of harassment incidents are reported to the police. Sexual offenses are the least likely to be reported, with only 9% reported to the police.

2. In this project, nineteen young crime victims who were mainly assaulted or mugged were interviewed using a conversational approach; eleven (ten men and one woman) had a Swedish background, and eight (seven men and one woman) had an immigrant background. Within the project, we also interviewed police officers and social workers who worked at a youth centre and at a support centre for young crime victims. These interviews were conducted in order to get information about ideas and discourses about young crime victims and offenders as well as about various activities that support these groups. This study is analysed in a report (Burcar, Rypi, and Åkerström 2017).

3. We were able to enrich our understanding through a new project that involves one of the authors (Burcar). The project focuses on ethnic minority youth and their relationships with the police, and it uses interviews that were conducted in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland. These interviews are not included in the present article as they do not focus on the same issues. In addition, these interviewees were not interviewed as ‘victims’.

4. One hundred stands for one hundred percent, and not one hundred alludes to something not being quite right.