17 years in a refugee camp: on the trail of a dodgy statistic
You find the same figure being quoted all over the world, by all sorts of different sources, and not just in English and French: in this Turkish news article from just two weeks ago, ‘Angelina Jolie stated that the average period for which refugees live in refugee camps was 17 years’ [Angelina Jolie, mülteci kampında mültecilerin yaşadıkları sürenin ortalama 17 yıl olduğunu belirtti]. Any statistic that’s so freely quoted by so many different people deserves a bit of critical attention, especially when no-one ever gives the source. And as it happens, my friend Eleanor Davey and I did a bit of digging around about this one last year.
The point of this post isn’t to downplay the seriousness of protracted refugee situations, whether the people caught up in them are encamped or not. Nor is it driven by a desire for accuracy. (Well, okay, a little. “Factual Inaccuracy Found On Internet!”) The problem with this untrustworthy figure—bandied around endlessly despite being deeply problematic, over a decade out of date, and not actually about refugee camps—is what it does to refugees themselves. Like the image of ‘the refugee’, like the identikit photos of refugee camps (subject of a future post, as mentioned in the caption to the one at the top of the page), this figure reduces the enormous complexity of protracted refugee situations, and the much greater complexity, richness, and difficulty of the lives of the people living through them, to a mere cipher. It gives those of us who aren’t refugees a sorry little fact to wring our hands over—one of those things we can feel good about feeling bad about—then set aside. When people use it, they’re not really talking about refugees at all.
►https://singularthings.wordpress.com/2015/07/04/17-years-in-a-refugee-camp-on-the-trail-of-a-dodgy-statist
#manipulation #fact-checking #asile #migrations #chiffres #statistiques #réfugiés #camps_de_réfugiés #médias #journalisme