14 Aug 2007: ISS Today: South Africa: Crime, Punishment and Immigration Control - The Consequences of Viewing Social Problems as Policing Problems

14 August 2007: South Africa: Crime, Punishment and Immigration Control - The Consequences of Viewing Social Problems as Policing Problems

 

Overwhelming shame. This can surely be the only appropriate response to the continued reports about the cold unwelcome that South Africa’s Zimbabweans neighbours have received from South Africa. We South Africans should collectively hang our heads at the failure of our society and state to respond to the humanitarian crisis that has been unfolding on our border for several years now. Yet the crisis presents an opportunity for us to question the way in which we choose to frame social problems as law enforcement problems.

 

Consider the language of the crisis. “Illegals” are those who brave the treacherous journey across the border in the hope of improving their situation. Indeed our first responders are “farm patrols” – civilian law enforcers whose interest is in securing agricultural land from potential criminals – who work alongside the police whose task, in turn, is to identify, arrest and arrange the deportation of illegal immigrants. And so a social problem becomes a security problem, a problem of law enforcement.

 

Seeing the problem this way has consequences that, ironically, contribute to increasing the chances of knock-on crimes and human rights abuses. As we make it more difficult for people to move, so we increase the chances that they will seek the assistance of unscrupulous profit-seeking third parties to assist them. This may involve one or more individual corrupt border officials. More likely it will involve a syndicate which, for a large sum of money, will smuggle across the border those desperate or hopeful enough to pay the going rate. Once in the country the ‘illegal’ is not only vulnerable to xenophobia – more often than not expressed in the time-honoured South African fashion of a good beating - but also to gross labour exploitation. And while the latter is likely to go undetected, the police will be required to respond to the former. The perpetrator of the crime of migration is now also a victim of crime.

 

Likewise, our approach to the problem of ‘human trafficking’ has been framed as a matter for law enforcement. This is particularly true of recent times, since international concern about human trafficking has become framed in terms of the ‘war on organised crime’. However, as human rights activists, certain feminists and those concerned with social justice will attest, trafficking is fundamentally about power relations. Those in a position of power take advantage of those who wish to migrate but for whom the obstacles to migration are so great that they cannot be overcome alone. Indeed, for as long as it is impossible for women who do not have access to resources to move in order to seek a better future, we shall continue to see cases of trafficking, exploitation and abuse, as desperate women place their futures in the hands of those who can work the system.

 

It is unquestionably far easier for us to frame social problems as law enforcement problems. That way we know who has to respond and on whom the responsibility rests when the situation fails to improve – the police. At work is the same twisted logic that drives the annual charade, following the release of the year’s crime statistics, in which the police are taken to task for the high levels of crime in South Africa. There is no denying that a robust and efficient police force, supported both by good relationships with the communities and a quick and effective court system, would go a long way towards dealing with crime. Yet the causes of crime, as any analyst will tell us, are social. Until we shift our thinking and begin to deal with the difficult and messy social causes of crime we are unlikely to see the statistics improving. In the same way, unless we take a humanitarian approach to migration, and stop quibbling about numbers and the difficult politics of our neighbours, we are unlikely to see an end to the human rights abuses associated with illegal immigration.

 

The tendency of policymakers to respond to social problems as if they are law enforcement problems only leads us further and further from finding long term solutions to social dysfunction. This just further undermines human rights and the ability of the police to do their job effectively.

 

Chandre Gould, Crime and Justice Programme, ISS Tshwane (Pretoria)