Written by IRR News Team
A new report by social media activists on the spike of hate crimes immediately after the referendum on EU membership should prove uncomfortable reading for the Home Office.
On 26 July, the Home Office unveiled its new Hate Crime Action Plan. Home Secretary Amber Rudd not only cited a surge in reported incidents following the referendum vote to leave the EU, but called on the nation to ‘come together and stand united against those who use hate to divide us’. But a new report compiled by activists from three social media platforms and published by #PostRefRacism will prove uncomfortable reading for the new Home Secretary. In its analysis of 645 racist and xenophobic incidents reported to them following the referendum vote, #PostRefRacism draws attention to the divisive policies of the previous Home Secretary. In 2012, Theresa May had promised to deliver policies based on creating a ‘hostile environment’ for irregular migrants, through, for instance, ‘Go Home or face arrest’ vans. Far from being a ‘unifying force’ the Home Office’s ‘insider-outsider’ messages have created the conditions whereby racism can be normalised.
Post-referendum racism and xenophobia: the role of social media activism in challenging the normalisation of xeno-racist narratives (download here, pdf file, 5.8mb) is a factual account of the lived experience of racism felt keenly, post-referendum, by BAME communities, whether born in the UK, long-settled or from newly-arrived communities, up and down the country. Several hundred people were so angered by incidents of hate that, at very short notice, they attended an emergency meeting in London called by The Monitoring Group. As this report shows, cases reported to social media platforms were largely verbal abuse, though incidents involving physical violence or threats of violence accounted for 14 per cent of cases, within this:
- Abuse aimed at people with non-European BAME backgrounds made up the majority of reported incidents – nearly a third of the total – with ‘South Asians’ reporting the most incidents (16 per cent). Around a fifth of the abuse aimed at this group was also Islamophobic.