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Smear, defamation, violence: Diversity project workers feel threatened at work

2022-05-18T10:26:54.198Z


Anyone who works full-time in projects for more social diversity is often exposed to hatred and malice. It is now becoming difficult in some places to find employees at all.


Enlarge image

Demonstration against racism (in Hamburg, 2018): Diversity as a target

Photo: Romy Arroyo Fernandez / NurPhoto / Getty Images

They work professionally for social diversity - and are therefore threatened.

Employees of state-funded projects that deal with topics such as anti-Semitism, Muslim hostility and racism reported in a survey ranging from discrediting, slander and defamation (54 percent) to physical assaults (8 percent).

In several cases, the organizations were also confronted with hacker attacks and other forms of cyber attacks.

Damage to property, insult and vandalism were also mentioned as forms of threat.

The survey was carried out by the German Center for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM).

For their 2020 study, the researchers first contacted those responsible for 68 model projects that received funding from the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs’ program »Live Democracy!«.

In addition to the above, the projects funded under the heading »Diversity Design« also deal with topics such as antigypsyism, homophobia and transphobia as well as »opportunities and challenges of the immigration society«.

Of the 50 organizations that completed at least part of the online questionnaire, about two-thirds said they had "confronted specific, imminent threats" in the past 12 months.

Those affected stated that the majority of the threats came from the right to right-wing extremist spectrum, which also includes so-called Reich citizens and conspiracy believers.

Jewish initiatives have also described hostilities from the Islamist area and isolated attacks from the left-wing extremist spectrum.

Organizations that position themselves against transphobia also reported attempts at defamation "from the bourgeois-conservative center".

The model projects funded under the heading »Diversity Design« include a project entitled »Meet a Jew« by the Central Council of Jews in Germany, a project in Halle an der Saale that promotes the participation and participation of young migrants in East Germany as well as an initiative that has set itself the task of "establishing, qualifying and strengthening queer educational projects in structurally weak regions".

The researchers come to the conclusion that the threats are not only psychologically stressful for the employees of the projects, but also impair the work processes.

Dealing with threats, security precautions and agreements with security authorities and other actors are time-consuming and thus severely restrict employees in their work.

There are also difficulties in recruiting staff.

In some regions of East Germany in particular, it is difficult to recruit employees for work critical of racism, especially those who themselves have a migration background, the people concerned told the scientists.

According to DeZIM, committed organizations and their employees need “effective and consistent support”.

This is the only way to prevent “direct and indirect attacks from leading to a sustained retreat from civil society engagement”.


mh/dpa

Source: spiegel

All business articles on 2022-05-18

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