Hate Crime - would you report it?

We are fortunate/unfortunate to have a very small number of hate crimes reported to us. Fortunate because we genuinely do appear to live in a fairly cohesive city with a lot of tolerance and mutual respect for differences. Unfortunate because we suspect that a small but significant number of cases go unreported for a whole host of reasons and that means that our tenants could be living in fear and desperation.

In an effort to widen knowledge about how Wolverhampton Homes can help if tenants are the subject of abuse or violence because they are perceived as different, we engaged actors from the Gazebo Theatre Group in Bilston who staged a frighteningly real set of scenarios about hate crime at our Get Togethers this month.    

The Get Togethers, which are attended by more than 200 tenants each quarter, are an excellent way of generating debate among tenants who are not otherwise involved and getting instant feedback on why the hate crime numbers are relatively low.

The actors played a single mother whose gay son was the victim of abuse and her friend. The mother is understandably distressed by the abuse of her son. She has a go at the perpetrator's parents but then finds the situation becomes a lot worse, with excrement pushed through the letter box, abusive graffiti daubed on the walls and threats of violence. With help from her friend, our terrified single mother is eventually persuaded that telling Wolverhampton Homes and allowing us to investigate was the only way forward.

We discussed with tenants afterwards whether they were aware of what social landlords could do in this situation and whether they would report hate crime if it happened to them. Very few people believed that landlords would get involved in cases like this - a real lesson to us that our leaflets and poster campaigns don't really get taken on board.

The sessions did a lot of a good by reassuring people that they would get a sympathetic hearing and that any action taken would be agreed with them first but many remained doubtful that they would report hate crime to either us or the Police.

On the way home from one of the sessions last week, I thought, what would I do?  Would I ever be brave enough to report someone who was targeting me personally or members of my family for abuse and hatred? I like to think I would but I can't be certain. Would I if my child was at risk? Not so easy is it? 

As usual, tenants came up with the best ideas for encouraging people to come forward. Let everyone know about successful evictions and prosecutions. Reinforce all the time that race and other hate crime are viewed with contempt and will not be tolerated. Above all, demonstrate to tenants who do report hate crime that we are on your side and will protect and support you to the best of our ability.  

The picture above shows the two actors from Gazebo Theatre mid-performance.

A friendship to last a lifetime

On an uncharacteristically muggy evening last Thursday, nearly 30 of our youngest tenants met my colleagues and I to begin what I hope will be a long friendship. 

As anyone who works in housing knows, it is mightily difficult to encourage our younger residents to have their voice heard on housing issues. We are all too familiar with the usual suspects of tenant involvement - immensely valuable though they are, but they tend to be white, 60 or 70 something and have been a tenant for some 30 years. We wanted to make a special effort to get views from newer, younger people who may have a perspective we are missing. This is not about replacing one set of tenant views with another but about getting a range of views.

Two of our Future Jobs Fund employees put an enormous amount of energy and creativity into recruiting them and I was pleased to see the room so busy.  I met some people who I immediately thought of as tenant board members of tomorrow, brimming with ideas and the enthusiasm of youth. One young woman, Kelly, particularly impressed me. She had thought up some really challenging questions for me and had some innovative ideas of her own. 

It turned out we had both only been in Wolverhampton a few years but had immediately fallen in love with the people and the general laid back feel of the city. As a single parent with a baby (but engaged to her son's father, getting married next year), Kelly felt older people on her estate looked down on her and made quite wrong assumptions about her behaviour and lifestyle. In fact, she and a girl friend spend a lot of time chewing the fat about what makes a good community and what they might do to help.

She asked me if Wolverhampton Homes would perhaps train up people like her to work with younger people as she already wanted to put something back into the community. I have already put it on my list as something to explore and discussed it with the head of our Local Neighbourhood Partnership which also wants to harness the potential of volunteers. 

Not satisfied with asking me difficult stuff like which person living or dead would I most like to meet (!) - I said Mr Blair on the basis that I still want to know why we went to war - Kelly particularly wanted to know what we are doing to engage 7-16 year olds in council housing. Like many ALMOs we have a range of really exciting projects that we support for example the Timken social enterprise or Goalz (a project with Wolverhampton Wanderers Football Club) but is this really engagement? If I am honest, it’s about trying to prevent antisocial behaviour and control the kids during the holidays! 

We have been struck by the lack of basic life skills amongst our youngsters - managing money, dealing with applications/benefits, cooking, managing a home or garden, dealing pleasantly with neighbours and so on. So for our first young tenants get together we focussed on managing money, particularly how to borrow money sensibly and avoid loan sharks.

Shock tactics worked well here. We showed a video of a young man talking about his l6 years (yes!) of indebtedness to an unauthorised lender who drove him almost to the point of suicide.

I was hugely impressed by how keen the young tenants were to make a difference in their area and learn new skills which they will take with them for life. We can learn so much from them and I look forward to seeing our friendship develop over the years to come.

You can see some more photos of our young Get Together on our facebook page (and we'd love it if you liked us while you were there too!).