Social Exclusion of Women Refugees in Public Imagination: Underrepresentation and Depersonalisation

Abstract

This paper studies the news images of Syrian women refugees and the representational practices employed in them to question how these portraying practices position women refugees, and in so doing how they act as a support or barrier for their social acceptance and inclusion in the host community. Analysed are the newspaper photographs of Syrian women refugees published in top-selling four Turkish newspapers in 2015. Using a content analysis fed by visual analysis, the ways of visually portraying women refugees is studied by investigating the representational elements and practices in the images, which are subject, theme, camera distance, camera angle and location. The findings reveal that Syrian women refugees are underrepresented and in the rare cases of their appearance, the way they are portrayed position them as distant, passive and depersonalised subjects as part of the masses. The underrepresentation and depersonalisation of women refugees, who are among the vulnerable women group 1) erase the individual life stories and varied lived experiences of women refugees from public imagination and deny the female refugee agency, 2) prevent the emergence of the public talk on the women refugee problems, which in turn 3) prevent the formation of a social understanding and empathy towards women refugees. Thus, it is argued that the ways in which Syrian women refugees are portrayed in the media act as barriers for their social inclusion.