Memorandum submitted by Save the Children
HATE CRIME
LEGISLATION
Save the Children, as the leading international
children's rights organisation working with children and young
people in the UK and overseas, welcomes the opportunity to feed
into the current consultation process on Hate Crime in Northern
Ireland. Our submission addresses two of the three areas within
your terms of reference:
1. The effectiveness of proposed changes
to the law; and
2. The effectiveness of measures taken by
Government agencies to tackle prejudice.
One of the core organisational values of Save
the Children enshrined in Article 12 of the United National Convention
of the Rights of the Child, is to ensure that the voice of the
child is included in any public policy or decision-making likely
to affect them. As a methodology, this process is sanctioned by
government in the current local legislation (Section 75 of the
Northern Ireland (1998) Act) whereby statutory bodies are duty
bound to promote equality between persons of different ages. We
would encourage the Committee to meet and consult directly with
children and young people. Within this context, we enclose a copy
of a recent report with children from minority ethnic communities,
Radford, K 2004 Count Me In, and would like to raise the following
concerns based on our research findings.
ASSESSING EFFECTIVENESS
OF EXISTING/PROPOSED
CHANGES TO
LAW ON
HATE CRIME
We would ask that terminology be more clearly
defined. We advocate that when the legislation refers to racism,
this de facto is understood to include anti-Semitism, Islamophobia
and is furthermore extended to include expressions or acts against
individuals who are asylum seekers or refugees for whom the current
legislation provides no cover. This request is based on the sustained
reporting and observation of increased incidents of acts and language
of abuse being directly targeted at young people in Northern Ireland
based on these four categories defined by ethnicity, faith or
social groupings.
The quotations below are drawn from our work
with young people who have directly experienced acts, which we/they
feel should be considered as hate crime:
"He fired a pellet gun at me two times,
and shouted `Go home, we don't want no asylum seekers here'."
"For a while there my Dad was receiving
razor blades in the post addressed to The Jew."
"When you're out playing wee lads attack
ya . . . it's because we're different people in here, because
I'm a Traveller" (Mongan 2001)
"They're just ignorant, they shout out Paki,
even though I'm a Sikh—they don't know what they're even
saying."
— We recommend that the term racism
is clearly defined to explicitly include anti-Semitism, Islamophobia
and is further extended to included expressions or acts against
refugees and asylum seekers.
EFFECTIVENESS OF
MEASURES TAKEN
BY GOVERNMENT/RELEVANT
AGENCIES TO
TACKLE PREJUDICE/SUPPORT
VICTIMS
We reference the findings of Jarman & Tennant
(2003) whose research reveals the extent to which homophobic bullying
in schools remains unreported and unchallenged. We have organisationally
responded to their work through resourcing and supporting aspects
of the resultant anti-bullying work in schools undertaken by Rainbow,
the leading non-governmental organisation for gay and bisexual
men in Northern Ireland. While this research is not yet published,
we recognise as familiar the findings of Carolan and Redmond's
(2003) previous research when we quote
"One young person cited an experience of
being in a youth group and was told "Gay people should burn
in hell'".
Save the Children would point out that despite
individual schools having a duty to enforce a bullying policy,
to date it is not possible to gauge the extent of homophobic,
racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic bullying in schools (Jarman
2003) given the lack of monitoring and disaggregation of forms
of bullying. Currently no-one within the education sector is charged
with publishing data on bullying. Our current work (Radford: 2004),
copies of which are included, urges Government to take steps to
ensure that measures are put in place within the education and
continuing/further education sectors to ensure that differentiated
data on the types of bullying is recorded. Without such information,
the education sector will clearly be disadvantaged when feeding
information into any unified hate crime reporting system. This
limited material will, in turn, result in a potential gap in the
overall level of information available that records the victimisation
of children and young people.
— We recommend that schools and youth
services be encouraged to actively challenge homophobia with the
same rigour as is applied to racism.
— We recommend that all schools record
all instances of bullying in a way that clearly records and represents
the level and type of bullying.
— As a method of measuring trends and
progress, we urge government to collect, monitor and publish this
information at frequent intervals and no less than every three
years.
In conclusion, Save the Children welcomes the
recent debates to include acts of disabalism within the legislation
and would endorse this. Due to the continuing persecution of marginalised
children, Save the Children urges the Northern Ireland Affairs
Committee to urge government to take make explicit speedy and
decisive actions to bring forward this important legislation.
24 June 2004
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