This week marks one year since a video went viral of two white boys perpetrating a racist, physical and verbal attack on a 13 year old Black school boy in Carlisle.
We urge you not to look for the footage. Not only is it triggering for viewers, it may contribute to further trauma for all those involved.
A whole year. And the perpetrators have still not been charged.
The Impact
A violent and racist hate crime of this nature has an enormous impact – especially on a young person. Trauma like this will be felt for the rest of their life. Not only does it affect the individual and their family and friends, there is a ripple effect across the wider community.
Black people in Carlisle and across Cumbria live with with the horrifying knowledge that this form of extreme racism has happened in their area and could happen again.
The figures for 2024 show that hate crimes in Cumbria have gone up 16% on the previous year. Of these, racist hate crimes went up 25% and made up 60% of all hate crimes in Cumbria. When you add to this the wider picture of an increasingly normalised far-right narrative in our communities, and the racist, anti-Black, Islamophobic and anti-migrant rioting we saw in August – there is real fear among Black and Brown residents which is not being recognised or acted upon.
Incidents like this one can be prevented
Aside from the delays in this case and there still being no justice, we are extremely concerned by the lack of action being taken to prevent further attacks of this nature from happening in our county.
It’s not enough to just be looking at this from a hate crime perspective, as many at policing (and council) level continue to do.
We have been calling for our councils to take action, and to finally tackle racism at its roots.
Attacks such as this one are preventable and there are often opportunities to intervene at an earlier stage to stop racism from escalating to this level. Perpetrators often engage in covert racism – things like racist jokes, microaggressions, and general racist views – which go unchallenged. This enables racism to escalate into incidents like this one.
Repeatedly, teachers reach out to us for support as they just do not feel equipped and resourced to intervene at an early stage. From working with schools we can say that teachers are not trained to an adequate level on racism, or anti-racist practice, and schools rarely have a policy in place to deal with racist incidents. This isn’t fair on teachers, and opportunities are being missed to safeguard Black and Brown children from racism, and to prevent children from developing racist viewpoints which can lead to them perpetrating attacks such as this one.
Currently, many young people across our county are growing up with exposure to normalised racist beliefs, making it only a matter of time before something like this happens again.
Lack of action
Since we formed in 2020 we have been calling for anti-racist action to tackle racism at its roots. After this attack we stepped up our efforts, and we have again pushed even harder after the racist riots shocked the country last August. At every stage, we’ve faced obstacles, inaction, and a frustrating lack of urgency to tackle this issue.
We have made some good progress with Westmorland & Furness Council and we are at the final stages of securing funding from them to enable us to employ an Anti Racist Education Lead (AREL). The AREL will work with schools in the Westmorland & Furness boundary, supporting staff to better understand and tackle racism. A portion of the first year’s funding is about to be granted and we will begin this work when the remaining amount for this year also arrives. If all moves forward as hoped, it is undoubtedly a positive step , but it has taken a whole year for this to happen, during which racism continues to seriously impact young people. We have been frustrated at how slow-moving things are.
Despite the fact that last year’s attack happened in Carlisle, Cumberland County Council have declined to work with us on addressing racism in schools. They stated that their approach to addressing racism among young people will be undertaken in a different way in collaboration with the Safer Communities team.
We are yet to see any evidence of this happening, or evidence that this work takes an anti-racist approach.
Our concern that no real action is being taken has been confirmed by the fact that we are seeing an increasing number of enquiries from teachers, parents and even pupils in schools across the whole county, including Cumberland, asking for our support. This includes enquiries asking for support in dealing with extreme racist incidents and views among primary school children.
If we want to stop what happened in March last year from happening again, preventative action must be taken.
