Racism and discrimination

These weren't subjects that I initially planned to write about here, but the way things have happened I need to say more.

Racism is a serious issue, but it needs to be seen in the context of wider discriminatory practices. One example of discrimination among many is the dalits of India (also known as the untouchables). A quarter of India's population is dalit, but they are systematically abused by many people (including the police, the judiciary, landlords and businesspeople) according to this Human Rights Watch report (see especially chapter VIII: The Criminalisation of Social Activism).

This is not racism, although it is very close structurally to racism. This is the legacy of more than 3000 years of religious and intra-racial segregation, discrimination and abuse. So much so that many Indian people (those in the caste system as well as some dalits) cannot even see the discrimination. And those who dare to speak out are likely to suffer.

It is very often the case that people who suffer discrimination of whatever sort also end up having difficulty communicating their problems. I'm not just talking about the dalits here, but about people in the UK with learning disabilities or mental health problems, working class people, people with few formal educational achievements, poor people, children, old people, people from minority religious groups, ill or disabled people, people who are not heterosexual, or people from minority ethnic communities. For a whole range of reasons these groups of people are more likely to suffer from discrimination, and are less likely to have their problems listened to or seriously addressed.

I am fortunate in many ways. I don't belong to any of these groups. I have a strong voice. I have been able to help some people to speak out and get results.

Ironically when I was working for Social Services & Health, a role where it is important to be particularly aware and careful of potential political implications of everything you do, I got the message that seior management did want advocates to challenge their staff and services. They recognised that there were inevitably people who were not receiving the services they were entitled to, and that these people often didn't have the resources to make effective challenges on their own.

Now that I am helping the Wakefield Children and Young People's Strategic Partnership to develop a Code of Practice for Children's Complaints, there are clear messages being developed about the importance of complaining for children and organisations alike.

Racism is a small element of this wider picture, and I take it as seriously as I do everything else. It is as wrong for a police officer to stop and search a car driver for the colour of their skin as it is for a doctor to not spend extra time making sure they can hear what a woman with a speech impediment is trying to say to them.

The police are doing well in some ways. Following the Lawrence inquiry they have a good definition of racism:

Recommendation 12 of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry Report states that the definition of a racist incident should be:

"any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or by any other person"

Source: Crime Reduction Toolkits

This is good because it depends on the perceptions or feelings of people, rather than objective and independent evidence which is often difficult to obtain. It has problems becasue it's hard to understand in some ways, especially if you're immersed in the legal system. It is also problematic because we can accept that an incident is racist, but feel that every other point about it makes it impossible to act on (someone wrote 'packey' [sic] on your car, but there are no witnesses and no leads). There is also a good report from Civitas (pdf) that questions the value of the Macpherson definition of 'institutional racism'.

In my quiet advocate's way, I want to work with the police on facing these real issues. They come from the stories of actual people, and they cannot be resolved through traditional policing methods which rely on objective evidence that can be judged in court.

'Quiet?' I hear some of my readers asking... I think I have been writing in a quiet way. Maybe not the headlines: I wanted people to read, but perhaps in retrospect the headlines prevented them from paying proper attention to what they were reading. But the stories themselves are quiet: a young man is quietly taken into custody, records quietly fail to appear, he quietly declines to complain, Shaun and I quietly try to speak in court and are quietly ushered out, Ronelle quietly says 'I used to think the Police were here to help us, but now... now I don't know... I don't think they're very helpful really'.

For years I've been hearing complaints about the police, and usually I'm left trying to help people address problems they can do something about, maintaining the quiet.

These stories remain a quiet protest, a quiet call to action, because I am not shouting about the deaths in police custody, I'm not shouting about the weapons the UK police have issued that international law bans armies from using (CS Gas is a chemical weapon banned under the Geneva Convention), I'm not shouting about the discriminatory record of local police forces around the UK (this report has already been quoted, there's the MacPherson report, Racism still blights police despite post-Lawrence improvements, Police 'frozen solid' in addressing racism, report finds, and many others).

The stories I hear are usually too quiet to get anywhere, but I write them here because I think these quiet and relatively uncontroversial stories are the place to start to make positive changes.

I'm not shouting, and when the original story that started all this (for this blog at least) is republished with the relevant follow up, when the current fuss has died down, I am still hopeful that most people will be thankful that the issues are being raised in this simple way.