On 29 July 2024, a devastating tragedy unfolded in the northern English town of Southport when a man wielding a knife attacked a Taylor Swift dance workshop. Three children were killed. In the hours following, speculation about the identity of the attacker spread and – fuelled by misinformation – the perpetrator was mistakenly identified as a Muslim asylum seeker. A week of rioting then broke out across England, which included racist assaults, violent protests outside mosques, and arson attacks on hotels housing people seeking asylum.

As well as being sparked by ‘fake news’ spread on social media, these riots occurred in the context of widespread anti-migrant and anti-refugee sentiment which has been perpetuated by a tabloid news media obsessed with the idea of a migration ‘crisis’. This sentiment has underpinned an anti-immigration politics which is shaping British responses to people arriving in need of safety – including politicians perpetuating the idea that people arriving to claim asylum are ‘bogus’, plans to off-shore them to other countries, and the ongoing use of indefinite detention.

The tabloid press has a significant hold on public perceptions surrounding migration, given their large readership which has increased with the help of social media. Tabloids rely on presenting sensationalist, emotionally charged news stories to grab the reader’s attention in order to generate profit. They construct refugees as dangerous by ‘othering’ them as a threat and dehumanising them through the language of illegality. This process is racialised, with refugees of colour more likely to be treated negatively.

The tabloid news is heavily reliant on images, as well as on text, to construct ideas about refugees. Particularly in the age of online readership, news articles are typically accompanied by a large number of images, and these images appear when they are shared on social media before a link is even clicked. The images claim to depict reality, but are themselves constructed by the choices of photographers and editors to frame the story in a particular way. And while they are produced to portray a ‘preferred reading’, audiences may adopt or contest this reading to varying extents.

In our research, we sought to understand how the British tabloid news media use images to construct meanings associated with refugees, and in particular the role of audience in co-constructing the meanings of these images.

Key to our findings was the gendered misrecognition of refugees of colour by the British tabloid news media and its audience members. Refugee men of colour were represented as dangerous and threatening ‘others’. This was done in two ways. Firstly, the image of the lone refugee man was particularly prevelant. He was presented as criminal through the use of images framed as ‘mugshots’, and through other features associated with criminality  such as courtrooms, police officers and balaclavas. Secondly, men were also commonly presented in a large, anonymous group who were photographed at, or near, borders. In these images, the men were represented as threatening through their large group size. They were also often photographed in ‘hoodies’ – which have consistently been used by the British tabloid media to symbolise the criminality of young men of colour – and sometimes with border guards and police officers or carrying objects that could be used as weapons.

Meanwhile, refugee women of colour were primarily represented as passive mothers, lacking agency and being contained at a distance. The women were typically photographed in camps, and with objects suggesting domesticity such as blankets, toys and prams. They were also sometimes photographed with female celebrities and aid workers, suggesting their vulnerability and need of help. While this is undoubtedly a more positive image than that of the refugee men, it still works to ‘other’ the women by keeping them distant and silent. They are misrecognised as being solely mothers rather than having a voice and experience of their own. By silencing these women, the media, alongside politicians and humanitarian organisations, produce distant refugee women and children as the ‘ideal victims,’ meanwhile refugee men who are given agency and proximity in the images, are not represented as refugees at all, but as dangerous others ‘invading’ ‘our’ space.

Importantly, media audiences, for the most part, seemed to accept these preferred readings. The focus group participants in our research associated the refugee men in the images as threatening others. Lone refugees were identified as criminal and guilty while large groups of refugees were presented as breaking in and threatening ‘our’ space. In both cases, the men were never recognised as refugees, and were instead misrecognised as criminals and ‘illegal’ migrants.

In stark contrast, the images of refugee women and children were met with sympathy by the focus group participants who recognised them as ‘genuine’ refugees. The children in the images were consistently compared to children that the participants knew while the refugee woman was discussed solely in her role as the ‘mother’. The focus group participants contrasted the presence of the mother with the absence of the father with participants guessing that the father could have abandoned the family or been killed. Again, women were not recognised as individuals with their own lives and stories, but were misrecognised as solely mothers and caregivers.

Our research, therefore, finds that images in the British media play a key role in the othering of refugees. This othering is achieved in different ways, primarily based on gendered misrecognition. While we couldn’t address it in this post, Ryan’s extensive further research has shown that it is also heavily shaped by racism. The intersection of the tabloid news media and social media means that this anti-refugee sentiment is spreading at a much quicker rate than ever before and with often disastrous consequences, as the August riots demonstrate. This sentiment is not unique to the UK – as Donald Trump’s recent re-election to the US presidency, partly on the promise of the mass deportation of migrants, shows.  Our research highlights the importance of addressing images, and not just words, in challenging these ideas.