Czech survey shows that young people have double standards about Roma

A survey conducted by the MEDIAN agency for the HateFree Culture initiative, which is being implemented by the Human Rights Section of the Czech Minister for Human Rights, Equal Opportunities and Legislation, reports that more than half of young people surveyed in the Czech Republic believe that hatred on the Internet is so commonplace that there is no point in responding to it. The initiative is now set to establish in-person contact with people in regions throughout the country.

According to the survey, which was conducted at the end of 2014 using a representative sample of 1 000 people aged 15-25, young people in the Czech Republic also have double standards about Roma. Half of the respondents, selected at random, were asked to evaluate situations in which the questions mentioned Romani ethnicity, either directly or indirectly, while the other half were asked questions where Romani ethnicity was not implied.  

The questions were otherwise identical. What was the result?

When youths are noisy on a bus, 64 % of respondents claim that it bothers them – but when they are identified as ethnic Romani youths being noisy on a bus, that number rises to 77 %. An impoverished mother of triplets deserves welfare according to 71 % of respondents – unless she is described as Romani, and then only 40 % believe her deserving of state support.

A boy should be sentenced to a jail term without the possibility of parole if he robs a newsstand, according to 35 % of respondents, but when the boy is described as Romani, 47 % of respondents agree with such a sentence. When asked to imagine that they are landlords receiving a phone call from a woman named Anna Veselá, 69 % of respondents claimed they would lease an apartment to her even if her family were larger than usual – but Erika Demeterová, whose surname is considered Romani, would only have luck with 31 % of respondents.  

The respondents were also more strict when it came to judging whether a worker taking a rest was messing around or just taking a break, depending on whether the worker was described as Romani, and when a girl was described as being slapped on the street by an older man, respondents characterized the incident as an assault only when she was not described as Romani; when she was described as Romani, they believed the incident was one in which the man was either admonishing or resisting her. The analysis also confirmed the findings from a previous survey showing that persons who have immediate personal experience of Romani people tend to evaluate situations less stereotypically than those who have no such experience.

It has been repeatedly proven that youths who receive their information primarily from electronic communications with their family and friends through social networking sites also fall for hateful hoaxes spread through the Internet and are generally more critical of various groups in society, the Roma in particular. "The analysis also demonstrates that the dissemination of hateful, misleading information through social networking facilitates a certain passivity among those who use such communications tools. Many of them consider such information offensive, but they are frequently not active at all when it comes to responding to it," says the coordinator of the initiative, Jaroslav Valůch.

Young people most frequently claimed to ignore such messages because they did not consider them worth responding to (55 %) or because they were afraid to express an opinion other than the one held by the majority (35 %). Another frequent response given was "I would comment if I knew the correct argument to make", confirming that young people often lack the necessary arguments with which to counter such hatred.

"Judgments on whether racism is being perpetrated by the majority or by Romani people were related, among other things, to what exactly hate violence or racially motivated attacks are understood to be. Respondents who consider financially motivated crimes committed by Romani people against non-Romani people to be the same thing as hate violence (specifically, a case in which a Romani person is described as robbing a non-Romani taxi driver)  frequently state that racism does exist here and that it is especially perpetrated by Romani people. Those who know how to distinguish a financially motivated crime from hate violence equally blame both the majority society and Romani people for manifestations of racism, on average," comments Daniel Prokop from the MEDIAN agency.

Another finding is interesting in light of the Paris attack on the editorial offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the discussions about freedom of speech it sparked. Eight out of 10 young people surveyed agreed with the claim that an individual has the right to be protected from hate speech (e.g., on the Internet) even at the cost of restricting freedom of speech.

During the survey the respondents were also given several jokes about various groups (LGBT people, Roma, etc.) and asked what they thought of them. As many as eight out of 10 respondents labeled the jokes as insulting and racist, but at the same time, more than half also stated that the jokes were brave and "articulated the essence of the matter".

The HateFree Culture initiative has been responding to these findings and others since November 2014. It will now be shifting from the media and online space into the real world.

"We are launching the HateFree Zone brand, which is a network of places like cafés, sports facilities, theaters, etc., that declare themselves open to everyone irrespective of ethnicity or any other kind of group membership. We want to show that despite the impression that hatred and intolerance are dominating the public space, there is a large community of individuals and institutions here who are refuting that impression. Together with the DOX Center for Contemporary Art, we will also launch an open tender for artists and the general public to submit artistic projects about coexistence or xenophobia to them. The artists will have the opportunity to show their work on a special website, www.hatefreeart.dox.cz, until the end of April. We will then choose projects for realization in public spaces of major cities around the country. Next year DOX will present an extensive exhibition of all the works in collaboration with us," says Lukáš Houdek.