This week we are launching Eradicate Hate: an anti-racism campaign devised by students to address racism on campus and ensure that students of colour are properly supported.

The campaign is to educate the community at UEA on what constitutes racist behaviour, to create an anti-racism culture on campus, and to inform students on how to report racist incidents and get support.

Recently, UEA launched its new Report and Support portal. It’s a place for students and staff to report incidents of harassment, assault, abuse or bullying of any kind, and is a place to seek support if this has happened to you. We think it’s a really good tool, and we want to work with UEA to make sure students get the right support through this system.

We were successful in our lobbying to make sure UEA introduced Report and Support as quickly as possible, and we’ll continue to push to ensure students who report incidents through this system get the support that they need. We believe the University should make sure those who report racism are kept up to date with how the issue is dealt with, and that the University should publish its figures on how many cases it receives, how it has responded to them, and how quickly. Through Eradicate Hate, we’ll be lobbying UEA on these issues and many others.

Eradicate Hate forms part of our commitments to diversity, empowerment and anti-racism at uea(su), marking clearly that any form of racism is unacceptable. We know that we have more work to do, and Eradicate Hate is just the beginning: it forms part of our broader commitment to tackling exclusion, harassment and bullying on campus, both within UEA and uea(su).

Racist behaviour may include:

• verbal abuse like name-calling and offensive jokes
• bullying or intimidation
• physical attacks
• threats of violence
• hoax calls, abusive phone or text messages, hate mail
• online abuse for example on facebook or twitter
• displaying or circulating discriminatory literature or posters
• malicious complaints for example over parking, smells or noise
• microaggressions

Microaggressions may include:

• touching someone's hair
• crossing over to the other side of the street to avoid someone from a different ethnicity
• being treated less favourably or with more suspicion in a shop than a white person
• ignoring someone's messages in a group chat
• offering more support or help to white students
• talking over people with lived experiences of the issue

Our launch event will be taking place on Thursday 30^th January at 13:00 in the SU Hive, opposite Unio, where we’ll be hearing from students who created the campaign, and raising awareness of how to report racism and harassment on campus. Everyone is welcome: we need our whole community to come together and Eradicate Hate!

We know it’s important that you are taken seriously if you report an issue. If you experience racism or any other type of harassment any of uea(su)’s venues you can report it to a member of security staff or come to our advice centre in union house. All our venues staff have been trained to deal with reports of this nature and they will make sure you are taken seriously. Alternatively, you can report through the Report and Support online tool, where you also have the option to report anonymously: reportandsupport.uea.ac.uk