Hate incidents can be verbal abuse, harassment, bullying, or intimidation, physical attacks, hoaxcalls or messages, online abuse and many more. Hate incidents are motivated by ill-will and prejudice (writes Foysol Choudhury).
The term ‘hate crime’ can be used to describe a range of criminal behaviour where the perpetrator is motivated by hostility or demonstrates hostility towards the victim’s disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity.
The recent attack on two shopkeepers in Edinburgh who were physically, verbally and racially abused by group of teenage gangs. The thugs reportedly shouted, “why did you come to this country”?
The Police dealt with the matter well by making arrests and charging those responsible. The area was subsequently patrolled,
The local Chief Inspector and her team continue to deal with anti-social behaviour in the area and a community impact assessment continues to be in place with the additional police patrols planned to continue over the school holidays.
Another recent issue has been the rise of racism towards the Chinese community due to the coronavirus outbreak in China. Ken Chung, a British-Chinese comedian, posted: “Less than 0.001% of Chinese people have coronavirus yet more than 99.999% have already experienced coronaracism.”
Even though there have been very limited cases reported in the UK of this virus, there has been a rise of racism which goes to show the prejudices in society. People of Asian origin are being treated differently either by not sitting next to them orrefusing to attend classes which has Chinesestudents to even refusing to sit next to them on public transport.
Another student from Edinburgh said how someone had shouted “coronavirus” at her whilst she was on a walk and it made her very upset and scared in case it led to anything physical.
Hate can also be one religious group being intolerant of another because their ideologiesaren’t the same. In Edinburgh and overseas there is hate being spread in many forms and some of the current activities include hate speech, violence against one group and policies aimed at intimidating and singling out that group solelybased on religious
Hate in any form will not be tolerated: ELREC aims to reduce inequalities in our society and always promote good culture of human rights and work towards elimination of discrimination in all its forms.
Hate shouldn’t be tolerated in any form, please report it.
We also urge the Scottishgovernment to do more to tackle this issue in Scotland and make it compulsory education in schools by raising awareness and putting practical measures in place to eradicate this as much aspossible, both in schools and the general community.
Foysol Choudhury MBE
Chair, Edinburgh & Lothians Regional Equality Council
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