Elite law journal under fire over ‘racism’

A criminology journal is under pressure to retract a study of violent crime by Sudanese-born youths, amid claims the author, an African-Australian, is racist.

African-Australian academic Stephane Shepherd. Picture: Janine Eastgate

A bitter row has engulfed some of Australia’s most senior criminologists and lawyers, with accu­sations of racism thrown at an academic who published a study pointing to high levels of violent crime by ­Sudanese-born youths in Victoria.

The attacks have been all the more incendiary because the author of the paper, Swinburne University researcher Stephane Shepherd, is an African-Australian.

Dr Shepherd is a Fulbright scholar, an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, a member of the Eastern Regional Advisory Committee of the Victorian Multicultural Commission and author of dozens of academic papers on race and crime.

Last September he and co-­author Benjamin Spivak published a peer-reviewed work in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology that in ­recent days has become the subject of acute controversy.

The authors argued that higher rates of African-Australian youth imprisonment were most likely because of an increase in ­violent activity by some members of that group rather than because of police profiling.

The study found there was a significantly higher rate of “crimes against the person” — such as robbery and assault — by South Sudanese-born youth compared with Australia-born youth.

If police were unfairly targeting young African-Australians, lesser public order and drug offences would also have been expected to climb, but rates for these less serious crimes have remained stable and relatively low for South Sudanese-born youth.

The authors explicitly noted that “the overwhelming majority of Sudanese-Victorians are law-abiding” and their findings “should prompt concerted efforts to better address specific community needs”.

The study has, however, been condemned as “racist in terms of its methodological approach” by some academics and activists.

Melbourne Law School senior fellow (Indigenous programs) Amanda Porter demanded the editors and editorial board of the ANZJC “do something about the racist trollop (sic) that appears on the regular in your not-so-­academic journal”.

“The benefits of publishing must be weighed against the harms, including perpetuation of racist stereotypes and impacts for communities who live with heavy-handed policing everyday,” she said.

Dr Porter has held fellowships at Harvard, the Australian National University and the Centre for Criminology at Oxford University. Dr Porter said Dr Shepherd had conflated “offending” and “rates of crime”. In other words, he included individuals who had been charged but not necessarily convicted.

“Isn’t it a basic lesson in Criminology 1001 and Laws 1001 that one is innocent until proven guilty?” she wrote on Twitter. “Dude get a law degree! How was this crap not picked up by ­editors??!!!!”

Melbourne University criminal law academic Jeremy Gans agreed with the study ­authors that estimating crime rates based on convictions only “would have omitted some perpetrators whose cases did not progress between charge and court for various reasons … The authors are entirely correct to say that that could underestimate offending rates (as they would with rape, domestic ­violence, theft etc.)”.

Nevertheless, the criminology journal, a publication of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology, is under pressure to retract the study or publish a ­rebuttal, with some prominent ­academics urging action and some members of the editorial board dissociating from the piece.

Melbourne University criminologist Alison Young, a member of the journal’s editorial board, suggested Dr Porter should write an open letter about her concerns and invite people to sign it.

Monash University Associate Professor in Criminology Rebecca Wickes, an associate editor of the journal, said: “I did not endorse this publication and I do not find a continued focus on these particular statistics helpful or intellectually insightful.”

The editors of the journal have defended publication of the study, saying there was no basis to claims the study lacking in academic rigour or unworthy of publication.

“We are at a loss to understand how, precisely, the article could be construed as racist,” co-editors Andrew Goldsmith and Mark Halsey told The Australian.