The victim narrative is really scaling new heights in the UK. These are just two examples from today’s Guardian. The first is the quite well-known story about a young British woman who was detained for a few days in the US for Visa violations. The story is presented, at least in the liberal press as someone being victimised. The reality is rather more prosaic. The young woman in question violated US, and attempted to violate Canadian, Visa laws by working on a tourist visa. She had been, according to the article, backpacking in the US and “staying on homestays free of charge in exchange for doing household chores” and was attempting to enter Canada where she would be staying with someone she had met on a website called Workaway and “helping out around the house”. I guess the clue is in the Work part of Workaway. The young woman appears to have collaborated for this Guardian article. There is a certain modus operandi in these liberal articles which are organised around the victim narrative. Naturally, they have to doctor the story. The young woman broke or attempted to break Visa laws in both the US and Canada but that is not the story they want to tell. So, we have:
She had been travelling on her own, staying on homestays [in the US] free of charge in exchange for doing household chores, drawing as she went
The “drawing as she went”, (the young woman is an artist), is supposed to deflect our attention away from the innocent sounding “chores”.
Canadian border officials told her that her living arrangements meant she should be travelling on a work visa, not a tourist one.
Possibly because that is the case. And notice, again, “living arrangements”. But it wasn’t the “living arrangements” which the problem. It was the working arrangements.
she was locked up for 19 days – even though she had money to pay for a flight home, and was desperate to leave the US.
This is also very characteristic of a certain narrative line I notice particularly in the Guardian. What difference does it make that she had enough money for a flight home? She had broken US Visa rules and if you do that in the real world (not the victim world) you may have to suffer some consequences from that. Once you’ve broken the law you don’t get to choose how to resolve the situation.
several young foreign nationals have been incarcerated in Ice detention centres for seemingly little reason
“Seemingly little reason”. Such as for example breaking US Visa rules. Again, the attitude that my comfort is more important than a law.
Burke had been trying to leave the US, rather than enter it, when she was detained for nearly three weeks.
Not strictly true. According to the story in the Guardian she had been in the US for some weeks, left it to try to enter Canada on the wrong Visa and was sent back. Her incarceration in the US was then connected with what she had been doing in the US.
Workaway warns users that they “will need the correct visa for any country that you visit”, and that it is the user’s responsibility to get one, but it doesn’t stipulate what the correct visa is for the kind of arrangements it facilitates in any given country.
An astonishing position to try to put forwards. “It is your responsibility to make sure you have the correct Visa and vaccinations for your holiday” is a perfectly normal line, for example of airlines and travel agents. I don’t know exactly how this website works but. no doubt it connects people from all over the world. They could not follow the details of every Visa rule in every country, and it isn’t their job to do that. If they tried and got it wrong they could be sued, which is probably the main reason they don’t try. It simply isn’t their job to “stipulate the correct Visa”. It is entirely pathetic to suggest that a grown woman is not capable of looking up and checking this information. Furthermore; it is not as if this story is not new. I recall seeing an article in the press some years ago about just how this was a fraught area. (“Workaway homestays”). Surely, this young woman knew at least that it was a bit risky to go in on a tourist Visa?
After six hours of waiting [in US immigration] – and watching dozens of people being refused entry to the US and made to return to Canada – Becky began to feel frightened. Then she was called into an interrogation room, and questioned about what she had been doing during her seven weeks in the US. Had she been paid? Was there a contract? Would she have lost her accommodation if she could no longer provide services? Becky answered no to everything. She was a tourist, she said.
I am quite surprised that she “answered no to everything”. My understanding, based purely on the internal evidence of the article, is that Workaway offers links to opportunities for “homestays free of charge in exchange for doing household chores”. I do not know – but is it really the case that you can arrange accommodation through this website and then turn up and simply refuse to do the chores, and the host would say “fine, stay anyway”? It seems hard to believe.
Becky is much paler than the person my family knew so well. Her eyes are hollower.
One shouldn’t laugh, obviously. But this does sound like it belongs in a novel.
Becky went on one of the detention centre iPads, which had apps allowing inmates to send messages to Ice and check the balance on their inmate account. “I sent a message to Ice straight away saying: ‘I am a tourist. I was just backpacking. I have not outstayed my visa. I’ve only been in America one month and two weeks. I don’t know why I’m here. I want to go home. Please can you help?’”
Well. That was the problem. It seems that she was not “just a tourist” and, again, “backpacking” and “Workaway” are not the same thing.
Whatever the reason, in Trump’s America, a tourist who makes a mistake can be locked up, seemingly indefinitely.
Well, for 19 days, according to the article. And, not a “mistake”.
“I was naive to think that what was going on in the world, or at the border, wouldn’t affect me,” she tells me, her arms folded across her chest. She had believed if she was honest and acted in good faith she would be insulated from harm, but now thinks that might have been naive, too. “If I’d lied, I’d be on holiday in Canada right now.”
But – she wasn’t “honest”. She violated her US Visa and attempted to violate a Canadian Visa. And, while I don’t want to use the word “lie”, as per the above I am still puzzled how she felt able to answer “no” to the question as to whether she would have lost her Workaway accommodation if she had refused to do the “chores”.
Both this young woman “if I’d lied” and the journalist are in the business of manufacturing a victim narrative out of a case which is not, on the face of it a a victim story. Indeed there are victims in this story – the poorer and unskilled people in the US and Canada who might be being offered work as home-helps if tourists weren’t violating their Visas to take this work from them. Which is why, presumably, Visa regulations exist.
I’m not against this young woman particularly. But it is a good example of just this pattern, which I notice more and more these days. It has some typical elements. As well as the claim to victimhood it also minimises law-breaking.
My second example from today’s Guardian is a long article [1] about the rise in people (mostly men) being convicted for Internet child porn offenses. The main idea of the article is that men are being caught up in child pornography (the activity and the convictions which follow) not because they are paedophiles but somehow as a result of being “sucked in” via “normal” albeit extreme porn. The headline sums it up: “I didn’t start out wanting to see kids’: are porn algorithms feeding a generation of paedophiles – or creating one?” One person interviewed claims he never entered child porn search terms into a search engine and he just ended up viewing child porn “by clicking links”. The suggestion is that people somehow get drawn into looking at child porn by looking at extreme porn. Actually; the article has a lot of merit, (especially as regards the way that young people are being caught up in this allow-and-capture approach to child pornography), and the subject is complex. But, on one specific point we do see the attempt to establish a victim narrative. That somehow these men who started out looking at legal porn are victims of “algorithms” rather than themselves, when they ended up looking at child porn. I can imagine that it might be possible that on some websites most of the content is legal but some illegal images appear. But still, “addiction pathways and dopamine” notwithstanding, someone who clicks on such a link (if they exist) and clicks again – is not a victim. (At least not a victim of anything other than themselves).
Notes