Women's Views on News |
| Researcher wore veil for four weeks Posted: 20 Oct 2016 02:23 PM PDT
Last week Birmingham City University criminologist Dr Imran Awan and Dr Irene Zempi, lecturer in Criminology at Nottingham Trent University, presented research in Parliament highlighting their research into Islamophobic victimisation. Speaking before the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Islamophobia on 12 October, as part of Hate Crime Awareness Week, Dr Awan and Dr Zempi shared the findings of their most recent research which saw the researchers adopting identifiable Muslim identities in Birmingham and Leicester, before the UK voted to leave the EU in June 2016. Speaking to the Conversation, Zempi explained that she is an Orthodox Christian who for her PhD research examined the experiences of veiled Muslim women who had been victims of Islamophobia in public spaces. She carried out 60 individual and 20 group interviews with veiled Muslim women – and then some of the participants suggested she wear the veil in order to see for herself the level of abuse and hostility that they suffered on a daily basis. So she decided to wear the veil for four weeks as part of her daily routine in public places in Leicester. She experienced name-calling, swearing, threats of physical violence and derogatory forms of humour. Underlying all these forms of verbal abuse was a clear sense of anti-Muslim hatred and hostility, made apparent through the language used by the perpetrators. Typical examples of name-calling included "Muslim terrorist", "suicide bomber" and "you lot are terrorists", indicating that the perpetrators perceived veiled Muslim women as a security or terrorist threat. The comments and gestures that perpetrators made were often threatening. On one occasion, she was walking on the street in Leicester when a white man came up close and started making explosion sounds at her. He asked her: "How many people have you lot killed in the name of Islam?" She also experienced verbal and non-verbal sexual harassment in public. For example, unknown men on the street made sexual comments, often followed by sexual noises. In some cases, these individuals shouted: "Take it off!" Awan, who was also threatened and insulted, and Zempi have made a number of new recommendations in a short briefing about their research, starting with the need for the public to intervene and assist victims of anti-Muslim hate crime. During their experiment they both saw bystanders who saw them being harassed but did not intervene. Victims of such hate crimes do not necessarily want physical action – just a phone call to inform the police what they have witnessed. That research was carried out before the EU referendum. Evidence shows that hate crime surged in the UK in the weeks after the EU referendum vote, and still remains at significantly higher levels than a year ago. Reports of hate crime have risen 58 per cent in the aftermath of the EU referendum vote, according to the National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC). Police have linked the spike in hate crime incidents immediately after the June referendum directly to the Brexit vote, saying people had taken the vote to leave the EU as a 'licence' to behave in a racist or discriminatory way. The public needs to intervene and assist victims of anti-Muslim hate crime.  |
| One year of work could improve race equality Posted: 20 Oct 2016 01:23 PM PDT
The British government could make progress on many of the recent United Nations demands to improve race equality in the UK in just one year, the head of the UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination said recently. Anastasia Crickley, who chairs the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (#CERD), said that many of her committee’s recommendations, which were announced in August, could be implemented by Theresa May’s government within the next 12 months. Crickley was speaking at a seminar in London last month organised by the Runnymede Trust, an independent race equality think tank. The UN committee had found that Brexit had fuelled a rise in hate crimes, and it criticised the UK government’s counter-terrorism Prevent initiative for profiling Muslims and creating an atmosphere of suspicion, and, Crickley pointed out, leading to the victimising of Muslims in the UK. There was, she said, a duty on public figures and the media to “explicitly reject hate speech” and celebrate diversity. She renewed her call for the UK government to collect ‘disaggregated data’ on the impact of any and all of its policies on all communities that the policy would affect, and said that the UN was concerned about the “differentials in outcomes for people of African descent” in housing, health and employment in Britain. In addition, the UN committee report found that the British criminal justice system disproportionately targeted BME people, that there were higher rates of unemployment for African, Caribbean and Asian people, and they faced disproportionate low pay and workplace segregation. The report also found a lack of any 'objective baseline' benchmarking of the '2020' BME employment initiative and lack of access to justice because of legal aid restrictions and a recent increase in employment tribunal fees. Crickley also called upon non-governmental organisations to keep up pressure on the UK government to act on the CERD report. The Runnymede Trust led a coalition of 70 NGOs on the state of race inequality in Britain, and its director Dr Omar Khan gave evidence to the UN committee in Geneva. You can read the NGOs' report here. Crickley also pointed out that the litmus test for the proposed new British Bill of Rights would be whether it 'enhanced rights and protection for all citizens' including minorities. Soon after the UN’s CERD report was made public, the UK's equality watchdog, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), released a report on race which exposed the deep inequality and divisions in British society. Prime Minister Theresa May responded by announcing a race equality audit. The EHRC’s chief executive, Rebecca Hilsenrath, welcomed the audit, but warned that it would not be enough without action to address racial inequality. Hilsenrath said that the Equality and Human Rights Commission would continue to keep the pressure on the government ministers to respond to the UN report, adding that the EHRC was becoming “a more muscular regulator”. Given that Crickley maintains that many of the UN committee’s recommendations could be implemented by Theresa May’s government within the next 12 months – and thus a lot of people's lives improved – please support her, and push for this by contacting your MP and drawing it to their attention. Thanks.  |
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