Anti-Racist Social Work with Offenders

Black and minority ethnic groups (BMEs) are over-represented among people processed by the criminal justice system. According to the Institute of Race Relations, BMEs are 28 times more likely to be subjected to Section 60 ‘stop and search’ powers than white people. In 2013–2014, the majority (59 per cent) of those stopped by the London Metropolitan Police under these powers were Black British and Asian British. Most ‘stop and searches’ do not lead to arrests: 86 per cent of the 539,788 that occurred in 2014–2015 did not. Racist attacks against black people have continued to rise, despite hate crimes being defined a specific offence in the UK. Hate crimes are offences committed against the person on the basis of their identity, that is who they are, and what they stand for individually and collectively, and an assault against humanity. Hate crimes against those who have been racialised have risen substantially since the Brexit vote on 23 June 2016 (Isaac, 2016). British black and Asian communities tend to be labelled ‘deviant’ – run by irresponsible parents, drug-runners, criminal individuals and international criminal gangs, and configured as threatening in the popular imagination. These caricatures underpin the worldviews that the English Defence League (EDL) and British National Party (BNP) use to intimidate black and minority ethnic communities, and foment a sense of grievance within disadvantaged majority communities. Donald Trump capitalised on this to secure the presidency of the United States (Reilly, 2016), making race relations between majority and minority communities more difficult than they already were (Reilly, 2016).