Least resistance fails to end blight of bigotry

Severin Carrell, Scotland on Sunday

However, on housing estates across Scotland, the opposite is most often the case. Racist and abusive families stay happily in their homes. At the same time, black and Asian tenants whose lives they have shattered are shunted off to another estate, another neighbourhood, and, perhaps, some fresh abuse.

For many observers in the housing and racial equality agencies, racism is one of the only places left in the overheated world of law and order where evil is frequently allowed to triumph. It is often a victory for inaction, indifference and taking the easiest path.

Instead of housing officials or police putting resources into tracing those who light the matches which ignite the doormats, uncap the spray can for their obscene graffiti, or carefully handle dog excrement through the letterbox, the targeted family is given somewhere else to go. They are the ones forced to pack up.

Take the case of Aisha Khan, an Asian woman living in a council tenement in Glasgow until she fled on police advice in April. The abuse started within days of moving there in the spring of last year when a white neighbour began inciting her children to attack Khan's children, including a son with severe special needs. The neighbour also racially abused her.

In June last year, Khan, whose name has been changed for this article, wrote in a diary she was asked to compile: "I opened my door to find rubbish strewn on my front doorstep. Someone had emptied the bin bags onto my doorstep. I cleaned it up. I didn't call the police because after the (previous) time I called them, the neighbours had turned against me. If I called them again, it would make things worse."

Her complaints to the council were matched by rival allegations from neighbours about excessive noise during her son's sporadic temper tantrums - allegations a housing department official decided were more believable than Khan's. On November 5, she found lit fireworks had been posted onto her doormat, leaving scorch marks on the door.

Then came the "bomb-bags", a toy which sells for about 20p and is full of citric acid and bicarbonate of soda. The devices explode loudly after being activated by pressing the bag.

English police and trading standards officers believed they should be outlawed as they burn skin. The ten bomb bags thrown into Khan's house stained and soaked the walls and carpets.

Some calls to the police were greeted with shrugs. If they did arrive to investigate, the neighbours would renew the abuse and harassment. In December, however, after pressure from social workers, the Glasgow council agreed to offer her a "management transfer" for the Khans to another multi-storey in a different area.

This offer was made despite pleas from an educational psychologist and a doctor that her son with special needs was at significant risk in a high-rise. She declined the offer and endured continuing harassment. In late March, she was seriously assaulted by a neighbour's child outside the tenement.

She and her three children immediately moved back to her mother's. A week later, she returned to the police to find her flat had been broken into. The police advised her to stay away.

This kind of case falls neatly into the area that Scotland's councils, housing associations, police forces and prosecutors all promised they would tackle when they publicly endorsed a campaign initiated by the Commission for Racial Equality in January.

The Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, the Scottish Housing Minister Raymond Robertson, Scottish Homes, the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland, the Crown Office, and the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations committed themselves to root out racism in housing. They would, they promised, be taking tougher action against the perpetrators.

But as of this month, recorded cases where racist tenants have been evicted in Scotland are few.

There has been a noteworthy example in Hilltown, Dundee, where the council threw out racist families after the CRE began an investigation into racist attacks on the estate. In Edinburgh, a family of active neo-Nazis were evicted in the early 1990s after a sustained community campaign, but there is little more to report. Glasgow has yet to see one eviction for racial harassment.

"The persistent failure of councils to do anything about these problems is forcing people out of the council housing sector," said Robina Qureshi, director of Positive Action in Housing, the Glasgow-based agency backing Khan's case. "Councils across Scotland talk about complaints procedures and monitoring of racial incidents, but these cases keep on happening.

"Some people are being moved from area to area, transfer to transfer, so the problem continues. Whether they rehouse people or not, they have got to tackle the perpetrators."

Many activists in the race equality movement turned to a statement in January made by Douglas Sinclair, the chief executive of Cosla, who said: "It's easy to have fine words.

Translating those words into action will be the acid test." This, the activists say, is precisely the issue. They see a yawning gap between policy and practice in Scotland's housing agencies and police forces.

Take Taseem Hussein's case, highlighted above. The police who investigated her complaints asserted to their superiors and council housing officers they thought she effectively suffered from paranoia, was using the 999 emergency number for trivial complaints, and had a problem because she believed everything bad which happened was racially motivated.

In an affidavit following a clash with her neighbours, one officer claimed: "I have reason to believe that other officers have attended similar disputes which Mrs Hussein invariably alleges are 'racial' in character which are never substantiated as such. I suspect that she may be adopting this practice to get preferential attention."

All these incidents breach the policies of the force involved, which state that police are not to make personal judgements on whether an incident is racially motivated. Her local council had also sent two senior officials to a national conference on racial discrimination in housing in Edinburgh in May 1991.

Each delegate was given the new code of practice from the CRE, which set out the legal duty of housing providers to protect their tenants from racists.

According to Chris Oswald, director of the Fife Racial Equality Council, this multi-agency approach has so far only helped police and councils react to incidents rather than prevent them. "I'm not aware of any area where there has been a concerted multi-agency approach which cracks the problem in Scotland. I don't think it's perceived to be a big enough problem."

Martin Verity, the CRE's senior officer in Scotland, generally agrees. "It's a question of adopting a policy and putting in the resources to implement it. People need the realisation by the authorities that the racial dimension makes any attack worse; it's a double attack.

"We would like to see local authorities giving practical support in gathering evidence which will be used to take action against perpetrators.

"That goes for housing, social workers and the police, but all these things need resources.

They need money."

This apparent deficit in Scotland was further illustrated last week when the Department of the Environment issued tough and detailed new guidelines for housing providers in England and Wales on tackling racist tenants. South of the Border, the government is also introducing new powers of arrest to restrain anti-social behaviour and is making repossessions easier and quicker. The Scottish Office, a spokesman said, has no plans to follow suit.

According to Maggie Chetty, director of the West of Scotland Community Relations Council, there has been limited change with many Scottish housing providers improving their procedures. Several housing associations around Glasgow now employ black workers, and Scottish Homes has an innovative scheme to train 12 fully-salaried black and Asian housing specialists.

However, these changes are restricted to urban areas. "Because of low levels of awareness in rural areas and seaside towns across the agencies, they don't have the skills and training.

What we need to do is hone people's skills in rural areas, so we don't have people turning up in cities like Glasgow for help after suffering the most awful harassment for three or four years."

The most recent police statistics suggest the problem in Scotland is worsening. Figures compiled by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary show that last year, Scotland's eight police forces recorded 832 racial incidents compared to 299 in 1988.

These figures require a degree of caution. Strathclyde, a force which covers over half Scotland's minority ethnic population of more than 64,000 people, recorded only 230 incidents last year, whilst Lothian and Borders, which has roughly 13,000 black and Asian residents, recorded 288 incidents. Equally, the likelihood that Northern Constabulary's single recorded incident last year, for a minority ethnic population of 1,330, is an accurate reflection of racism levels in the Highlands is minimal.

"Our interpretation would be that there probably is an underlying increase, although the actual level of incidents is, we're sure, much, much higher," says Verity.

A recent study by a Heriot-Watt University postgraduate student, Catherine Palmer, supports that claim. Backed by Lothian and Borders police, Palmer interviewed 32 people who reported racial incidents last year and 26 white people who reported similar, non-racial incidents about their attitudes to the police.

Some findings undermined stereotypes. There were similar levels of doubt that the police were fair or truthful amongst both groups, and similar numbers believed the police unfairly stopped and searched people.

Where the differences emerged was in the number of unreported incidents.

Palmer found that 70% of the black and Asian people questioned had failed to report more than ten incidents of racial abuse because they felt they were too numerous to mention. "Quite a shocking result was that nearly 60% of the ethnic minority group also said that things got worse after reporting," she added.

Glasgow's housing director, David Comley, believes cases such as the Khans illustrate several dilemmas facing housing agencies. Since the vast majority of publicly owned housing stock is now of lower quality and rented mainly by low-income families because the best and larger homes have been bought up under Conservative "right to buy" policies, better and safer public housing is now in very short supply.

But the major problem with evictions, he believes, is that it takes roughly nine months before a court date is set and even longer for the hearing. Until then, the victim and the harasser still live side by side. "Is it a good idea to expect them to live across from the perpetrator whilst we go into court when almost certainly the person going to court knows who's complained about them?

"At the end of the day, I'm not a police force. I can't police places 24 hours a day. I agree in principle, of course, we should chase perpetrators as quickly and vigorously as we can (but) it's easier to say we should move the perpetrator; it's tough to realise."

Because of the cost and upheaval caused by local government reorganisation, the new councils are finding it challenging to formulate better policies on racial discrimination.

Nevertheless, Douglas Sinclair at Cosla concedes the convention has yet to consider drafting national guidelines for Scotland's 32 councils on tackling racial harassment. There is nothing about it in Cosla's new strategic plan.

Sinclair does believe councils could be doing more. Cosla, he promised, would carefully consider putting in best practice advice in its strategic plan if agencies like the CRE or a member council asked. "I don't think harassment is an issue which is confined to urban areas. It's an experience that isn't confined to one part of Scotland, and all councils need to be alive."