Violence, racial harassment and council tenants: Reflections on the limits of the disputing process

Abstract

This paper outlines a recently completed study of racial harassment on council estates in an area of East London. The study is based on a wide ranging assessment of the effectiveness of anti‐harassment procedures operating in the London borough of Newham, a borough in the forefront of innovation in anti‐racism procedures in both the public and the private housing sector. The centrepiece of the study is an analysis of the experiences of a group of 30 families living in Newham council accommodation, through a series of open‐ended interviews carried out by researchers from the ethnic minorities, attached to the project, over an 18 month period. The 30 families were members of diverse ethnic minorities ‐Punjabi, Gujerati, Bengali, Afro‐Caribbean ‐ all of whom had experienced prolonged and serious racial violence in and around their homes. What the families shared in particular was a refusal to suffer in silence. Living in a borough with a strong commitment to protecting its tenants from racial harassment, and to punishing the perpetrators of such violence, they had all sought to use the council's grievance policy and procedures to the full, and furthermore to engage the specialist police unit, the Newham Organised Racial Incident Squad (NORIS), in protecting their interests. Our research reached the conclusion that in most respects, despite good intentions, the policies of the statutory agencies have failed. In this article, we provide an overview of the study, its background, and its methodology, and highlight some of the report's main conclusions.