News Agencies – March 28, 2012
Nearly 60 percent of the French say they distrust youth from the ‘banlieues’, France’s impoverished, immigrant-dominated suburbs, according to a new survey that has laid bare the country’s divisions. “The results are extremely worrying,” Thibault Renaudin, national secretary of Afev, the organization that published the poll.
The poll conducted by Afev shows that while 75 percent of the French have a positive opinion of young people, 57 percent have a negative opinion of youths from impoverished suburbs. Renaudin says French authorities and the media are partly responsible for this negative image. Renaudin says the poll also reveals French racial divisions, given that many banlieue youths are from immigrant backgrounds. “They are always reduced to their origins, multiple, different and dangerous.”
