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Human rights: everyone, everywhere, everyday (2011)

Race Discrimination

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The following opinion pieces have been published by the President and Commissioners. Reproduction of the opinion pieces must include reference to where the opinion piece was originally published.


Human rights: everyone, everywhere, everyday

Author: Graeme Innes AM, Disability Discrimination Commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission

Published in ABC Unleashed, Tuesday, 29 March 2011


The theatre of war is, I imagine, a nerve shredding, ultra high pressure place to operate.

As a civilian, I can’t say so with any authority, having never been a participant in either war or combat.

I can’t imagine the place you would have to go to in your head or the mental attitude you would have to muster to take part in and get through a combat mission.

Using my imagination, however, I suspect things are sometimes said - under extreme pressure - that you would not ordinarily say, or approve of, in day to day civilian life.

If racist comments are made under these circumstances, they are uttered in a particular context – that of war. That of combat.

It may be understandable, but nevertheless, wrong.

However, when these comments are transplanted from that arena to another, unrelated one, such as cyberspace, it becomes a different story.

The context changes.

The audience changes.

You may not be talking to a single person or a small few.

On social networking sites, such as facebook, this might be what you think you are doing. But you are not.

Social networking sites like facebook and Twitter are sites where content is shared – something that is easy to forget when you are using them.

When you post a comment on one of them, if people like it for any number of reasons, they can share it with all their ‘friends’.

Like the fast-spreading bacterium of the Bubonic Plague, you could suddenly be speaking to – be infecting – millions and millions of people.

I use this analogy of the Bubonic Plague because we are not dealing with benign comments in situations such as the one that played out in our news outlets last week.

Vilification is the use of comments that humiliate, insult or offend people. Racial vilification is when such comments are racial in nature.

So, just as the bacteria spread throughout Europe in the Middle Ages to create the Bubonic Plague, racially vilifying comments can also spread in all directions like a disease through social networking sites until, left unchecked, they create a different sort of plague.

That plague is a plague of hate. In this case, racial hatred or race-based hate.

What I am describing is, of course, a worst case scenario.

The point is that comments such as those posted in facebook by some Australian soldiers serving in Afghanistan certainly include phrases and descriptions that would be racial vilification. They are cyber-racism.

Social networking sites are just that – networks. Comments you make on them can end up far, far away from the place you made them and you cannot control the use to which they are put or the types of people who embrace them.

It was extremely reassuring to see that the Defence force come down hard on this issue. It was also heartening to see that prominent people on both sides of the political divide and in other areas of public life also made it clear that there is zero tolerance for such racial vilification.

This might go a significant way to preventing it from happening again. But it will not stop the disease spreading once it has started.

As fellow facebookers, when we witness the spread – the sharing – of these comments, we have two choices. We can be a bystander and do nothing, despite the fact that we might disapprove. Or we can do something – we can intervene and voice our disapproval of the comments, of the act of sharing them and of the trouble sharing them can likely cause.

When we witness this sort of behaviour online, just as in the real world, we become complicit. Whether we support it or we do nothing, we are complicit in allowing it to continue.

Taking action is not as easy as it seems. We often fear repercussions or lack faith in the mechanisms, such as complaints processes, that are used to take action.

But all the research shows that taking such action has a real and positive benefit for both the person and the community affected. That speaking up discourages the perpetrator.

Like any coward, if they realise their actions are unpopular with their audience, the impetus to continue is reduced.

So speak out in cyberspace when you discover you have become a bystander. Make a complaint – to facebook – to ACMA – to the Australian Human Rights Commission.

That is just one simple thing we can all do – one step we can all take to push back against the proliferation of hate in cyberspace. Because if we don’t stop it, ultimately it will spill over into the real world.

We must say no to cyber racism. We all have the antidote in our hands – or keyboards - to stop the plague.

Graeme Innes is Australia’s Race Discrimination Commissioner.