In Vancouver, there has been evidence of negative perceptions, when it comes to certain cultures being seen as violent.

When it comes to public views on violence, it is dependent on the existing social narrative.

What is Violence?

Langara College sociology and anthropology department chair, Indira Prahst, believes that violence is socially constructed.

“Our understanding of violence is variable in time, in place and in culture,” says Prahst. She also says that people in positions of power can control our understanding of the severity of violence.
Prahst recommends that we look into who controls the definitions of violence because it is in “many ways, a mechanism to control the population.”

Indeed, Gary Thandi, manager at DIVERSEcity and researcher at the Justice Institute of BC, suggests that society tends to notice physical forms of violence, but subtler forms of violence tend to go unnoticed.

“You ‘other’ those people. And really, what you’re doing is alienating a lot of people,” says Thandi.
Thandi agrees with the concept of the ‘othering’ effect. He explains that when an individual from the dominant cultural group does something atypical, it’s deviance on the part of the individual. By contrast, if an individual from another cultural group does something atypical, it’s deviance on the part of the cultural group.

Cultural Racism

Canadian sociologist Yasmin Jiwani defines cultural racism as the tendency to inferiorize cultures instead of race, or make other cultures seem inferior or deviant.
By this account, suggesting that violence is attributable to specific cultural groups would be a form of cultural racism.

Prahst concurs with Jiwani’s interpretation. She believes that there is a form of cultural racism that can occur if violence is explained as a cultural attribute, which deflects from the deeper problem.

Canadian Immigration Report (CIReport), a website devoted to covering the repercussions of immigration and racial diversity on Canadian society, has a different perspective. CIReport suggests that “from an evolutionary perspective, it is natural and desirable to have ingroups and outgroups. This protects and promotes biological and cultural diversity.”

They further explain that having ingroups and outgroups does not automatically provoke negative feelings towards the other, but that a problem with diverse peoples living side by side can result in hierarchization or self-segregation.

Violence and Culture

Thandi believes that for every cultural group, there will be a few people that will bend the cultural norms according to their own needs to justify their desire for control.

Regarding cultural norms and how they relate to violence, Prahst says that we have to think about a norm as a proscriptive behaviour. She iterates that plenty of violent behaviour we see within our society goes unnoticed. For instance, Canada’s involvement in the Afghan war.

In CIReport’s view, the shifting of blame from guilty parties to the socio-political order makes for a convenient means to escape responsibility. CIReport states that “pathologizing the sum of society for the failures of the few very much feeds into our modern love affair with principles of abstraction, rather than…logic and reasoning.”

Media Portrayals of Culture and Violence

CIReport says that “Canadian media is decidedly squeamish when it comes to reporting non-white crime.” It refers to a recent study by a University of Toronto student, entitled Whitewashing Criminal Justice in Canada, in which it was found that in many cases, gathering racial data on visible minority crime is prohibited or suppressed. CIReport says that journalists are being denied such information and reliable data.

Prahst acknowledges that there is a lack of reporting on the ethnicity of criminals and that these statistics are important to document to be able to identify patterns. She says the drawback to this is the racist discourse that can arise from this statistic.

Thandi believes that the media has the right to report the incidence of violence, but he feels that context is lacking. For example, he says that whenever news is reported regarding South Asian males, it tends to be negative. And this negative stereotype has extended to his personal life, when a former colleague asked him about the violence in his South Asian community.

He hopes for a more balanced approach when it comes to reporting news on different cultural groups.

“What you don’t necessarily see [in the media] is the person of colour doing some charitable acts,” he says.

Prahst indicates that in the current geo-political climate, it serves the mainstream media to scapegoat Muslim and South Asians at the moment, because it legitimizes political agendas abroad. In order to move away from cultural stereotypes, Prahst invites us to ask the question, “Who benefits from these social constructions?”