The outpouring of public sympathy for Kosovo refugees is often accompanied by vilification of Serbs. What is the role of the media in this process and what impact does it have?

The television tells them their people are aggressors and war criminals, some of their teachers treat them with hostility, some of their classmates are mates no longer. A neighbour shouts insults across the fence. They feel unwelcome, unaccepted and unacceptable. They fill with anger; some lash out, others silently withdraw.

They are Serbian refugees. Having fled to Australia in order to escape the violent excesses of group identification, once again they find themselves condemned solely for their ethnicity. The media's reporting of the progressive disintegration of the former Yugoslavia - most recently the conflict in Kosovo - has resulted in the demonisation of Serbian people. As the most vulnerable members of their community, Serbian refugees and particularly their children are suffering the greatest impact of the media's need for simplicity. Sympathy extended to other refugees is not only denied them but is replaced with condemnation.

Of course demonisation is not new. The process of comparing individuals or groups to demons, or portraying and perceiving them as evil, wicked and inhuman has long been a feature of relations between and within groups. Damnation of entire groups requires the perpetuation of negative stereotypes, where the individual's identity is subsumed by that of the group. No diversity is admitted. The demonisation of ethnic groups prioritises and denounces an individual's ethnic identity above all else. In doing so the many aspects and rights of the individual are lost to the mass.

The advent of modern media has extended the reach and so the impact of this process to miserable effect. The way in which modern news is made encourages a polarised view of conflict where complexity is compromised for comfortable certainty. Rapidly assembled stories, shallow research with little sense of history and the amnesiac qualities of day to day reporting lend themselves to archetypal formats of good and bad. Television in particular, the main source of news and information for most people, does not lend itself to communicating complexity. This in turn encourages inaccuracies, misrepresentations and the omission of important qualifiers.

So it is not surprising that the reporting of modern conflicts frequently creates demons in opposition to its heroes. To cite but one example from the last decade, the reporting of the Gulf War effectively demonised the Muslim world in general and Iraqi people in particular.

In relation to the Balkans there has been no shortage of simplistic generalisations. The media has freely and frequently spoken of the Serbian people as one undifferentiated mass. Serbian civilians and refugees have been included more often than not with Yugoslav armed forces and paramilitary units. "Serb" has become shorthand for aggressor. All Serbian people in the broadest sense are thus implicated in the evils perpetrated in their name, allegedly with their support. Thus many Serbian refugees in Australia have had to face the sneaking belief of others that they got what they deserved when they were driven from their homes, as if individual rights can be invalidated by a perception of collective guilt.

There has also been no shortage of inaccuracies and omissions. For many nights the television reported on the desperate plight of the Kosovo Albanian refugees. In this reporting there was, rightly, an attempt to convey the tragedy of their refugee experience. But wrongly, the media presented the exodus of Kosovo Albanians as singularly unparalleled in post World War II Europe. This ignores or forgets the hundreds of thousands of Serbian refugees forced to flee Bosnia and Croatia during the various conflicts that raged there over the last decade.

The demonisation of Serbs has been further advanced by the media's preference for stereotypes in place of understanding. The Balkans in general and Serbs in particular are depicted as uniquely and inescapably trapped in cycles of ethnic hatred and violence, a so-called "Balkan mentality". Clearly, the Balkans do not have a monopoly on violence, nor for that matter, on suffering.

There are many more illustrations of the media's demonising work, its relentless efforts to force the reality of conflict into the make-believe mould of simple goodies and baddies. The point becomes that truth is not the only victim of demonisation.

The psychological and social impact of demonisation on Serbian refugees, while persisting still, was at its most marked and manifold during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. At this time the media's demon-serb message was the loudest and Serbian refugees at their most vulnerable.

Many Serbian refugees were overwhelmed with fear and concern for relatives exposed to NATO's bombs. Most worrying were relatives who were refugees in Serbia and Kosovo and housed in disused army barracks – "legitimate" targets during the conflict. While they watched images of war on the television, many were revisiting their own perilous and hopeless flight, nursing the grief of their own traumatic experiences of separation and loss. Unable to help their relatives in any way, often unable to contact them, they felt again the helplessness they recognised and dreaded. Some of them, suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, experienced a re-emergence of disabling symptoms they had previously tamed.

Demonisation was fuel to the fire. Angry at the bombs; angry at their own sense of impotence; angry at those who taunt them and their kids, and angry at the media's spectacular silence at the time of their own tragic exodus from their homes, they felt doubly persecuted. Voiceless because they were refugees and voiceless again because they were the perceived perpetrators, their pain went unacknowledged. Trying to come to terms with the reality of their own experiences, they were being told those experiences were invalid; that they had no right to sympathy.

Most of us are aware of the benefits of sympathy, of how comforting and healing it is to feel understood. Demonisation worked to deny Serbian refugees what they needed and deserved. Instead, they had to contend with the resounding message that some refugees were more deserving than others. Their own ability to empathise with the suffering of others was often undermined by their need to defend and preserve their sense of self, leading some to defend the indefensible done supposedly in their name. Dealing with their own guilt: for surviving; for not being the parent that they once were; for not being able to help those at a great distance from them, they were then compelled to feel guilty for being Serbian - to carry guilt which was not theirs to carry. Demonisation thus effectively re-traumatised these people because, at a time when they were feeling most like victims, they were being seen most like violators.

The impact of demonisation however, is arguably most damaging to the young of this community. Like all refugee youth they are dealing with the regular and difficult developmental task of establishing an independent identity from their parents while also struggling to define themselves within an unfamiliar language and culture. Caught in those impressionable years between the demands of their traumatised parents and the crush of school ground conformity, they are often desperately divided. Their distress is often further compounded by their own and their parents' traumas.

Added to this heady mix is the effect of demonisation. As rapid language learners, they are trying to deal with parent-child role reversals, but with the additional burden of translating the media's unwelcome messages. Should they protect their parents? Should they share in their anger, or should they believe what the media is telling them?

Like the rest of this generation, they are oriented strongly toward the electronic media. But, savvy as they are, their untested faith in and reliance on the media as their primary source of information leaves them bewildered when they find themselves the targets of its negative attention. Some feel betrayed - probably not for the first time; others feel a heightened sense of dislocation and alienation - rejected before they have begun. Still others feel shame and guilt and pull away from family, denying that they are Serbian or wishing they weren't, bearing responsibility, again for that which is not theirs to bear. Many feel angry. Often without the ability to articulate their position as adults might, and even less the opportunity to do so, these kids wound most readily.

The question for nearly all these kids is how to escape the bombardment: the media's messages; the endless talk about it at home; the accusations at school. How to live again in a peaceful and happy home.

Demonisation does not bring peace and happiness. By creating cycles of over generalisation and defensiveness, it reinforces ethnic prejudices on all sides and results in feelings of persecution, disenfranchisement and anger.

It is important to remember that demonisation - a kind of dehumanisation - at its end point allows people to torture and kill one another. It is not a process that leads to anything positive but rather leads us down a very sinister path. Basic social psychology readily predicts this tragic trajectory of group antagonism and exclusion.

Fermentation of suspicion and hatred one might expect on battlefields - Balkan or otherwise - but not within the borders of peaceful and multicultural societies such as Australia. If we wish to avoid the violent excesses of group identification within our borders, we need to be wary of what we take from the media. We need to disclose what the media so easily conceals. In the face of demonisation, it is our individual responsibility to recognise and respect the human rights of all individuals, by virtue of their and our humanity.