Ethnographic research conducted over 2011/2012, regarding the way in which a group of 8-10-yea-old children socially constituted the ‘other’ (in this instance, sub-Saharan African migrants), considered how these children related stories to one another of their dangerous encounters with ‘the black man’ (l-iswed). In these stories, the children constructed elaborate tales of kidnapping and danger, which they claimed to have experienced at the hands of the villains in their stories. While a number of stories were clearly stretched or completely fabricated, they contributed to a powerful discourse where black men were regarded with apprehension and occasional horror.

Rather than considering these narratives as ideas the children would have inherited from their parents as forms of coercive discipline (reminiscent of childhood folktales involving ‘il-Babaw’), the research argues that the children used these stories as a medium for addressing the prominent features in their social world, including their personal anxieties, concerns, values, and aspirations. A number of the children who were informants in this ethnographic research lived in socially marginalized conditions, experiencing varying degrees of poverty and/or social exclusion. In constructing the ‘black man’ as a villain, and making themselves the heroes of their stories in turn, the children socially distinguished themselves from those who were widely portrayed as social filth, and put themselves forward as the antithesis of this image, as individuals possessing positive and revered values which were socially desirable by contrast.

The research study illustrated that those who are socially marginalized may themselves turn against those who are symbolically constructed as ‘lower’ to them. In the midst of this process, there is a failure to address overarching conditions of poverty in which people are unequally valued and hindered in their ability to lift themselves out of the circumstances of their own poverty and social exclusion.

Dr Attard conducted the above research in fulfilment of a PhD in Anthropology Research at Brunel University, conferred in 2014. The degree was carried out following the award of a STEPS Scholarship, part-financed by the European Union – European Social Fund (ESF) under Operational Programme II – Cohesion Policy 2007-2013, ‘Empowering People for More Jobs and a Better Quality of Life’