On Your Side is a new, UK-wide support and reporting service for anyone in the UK who identifies as East and Southeast Asian who has experienced racism or any form of hate. This free and essential helpline runs 24 hours a day with native-speaking interpreters to ensure all service users get the necessary support. The consortium consists of 15 mainly Southeast and East Asian community organisations across the UK with the 3 lead partners being, Stop Hate UK, Protection Approaches, and End Violence and Racism Against East and Southeast Asian Communities (EVR).
The Chinese Community Wellbeing Society is a community organisation that BSWN has supported through the Make it Work Programme (MIW). MIW’s aims are to support Black and Minoritised care organisations to successfully bid for adult social care contracts. They are dedicated to supporting the health and wellbeing of the Chinese-speaking population in the South West of England by providing services for health and social care needs.
One of the services that they provide for the community is a helpline called the ‘Chinese Lantern Project,’ which is a free support line across the South West for the Chinese-speaking community. They are 1 of 7 of the Casework Advocacy Support Partners for On Your Side. Within their work, they provide equitable information to Chinese communities in Bristol and the South West, particularly those who are vulnerable to isolation and exclusion due to racism, language, and cultural barriers.
Our BSWN Creative Communications team interviewed Joe Hui, Chinese Lantern Project Manager about the importance of the need for this new reporting service.
Photograph of Joe Hui, Chinese Lantern Project Manager in our Social Enterprise Incubator.
How has the increasing hate crimes towards the East and Southeast Asian community since COVID-19 impacted the community and your organisation?
Well, hate crime towards our community has always been there, so it's nothing new. Once COVID started spreading around the world and became a pandemic, there were a lot more comments, remarks, and insinuations towards the East and Southeast Asian community. It really was targeted towards anybody who looked Chinese, even if they weren't Chinese. We knew of, you know, people who were Korean, Malaysian, or Philippino having various comments directed towards them throughout the South West area that we cover.
When the pandemic became the pandemic in the early days, our community was blamed for causing this. There were remarks being made on buses, and remarks being made outside universities. There was also violence directed towards some of our community. We've heard of people being beaten up. You know, and one of them was in the national news. There was a university lecturer at Southampton University, which was splashed across the media. So that was quite prominent.
“We heard about children making remarks to Chinese students and pupils, things like, you know, “go back home,” “you brought the virus with you” or “I hope you haven’t got the virus.””
Hate crime and more specifically, racism has always been directed towards our community because as an ethnic minority community, you know, even when I was at school I suffered it both at school and at work. In those days it wasn't as recognised. In our community we tend to hide these things, not saying anything about it or reporting it because many of our community members do not want to get to the point of having to ring somebody like the police and give out their names. A lot of them ran catering businesses like takeaways and restaurants. So their priority is to make sure that business is running because that's their life and obviously their income. Their priority is just to carry on. And this would have been the same before the pandemic.
You already have a free helpline in the South West, the Chinese Lantern Project. How did you then become involved with On Your Side?
As an organisation we've been going since 1989, so we’re a well-established community organisation. The hate crime project started with two London-based Chinese community groups who were working with an organisation called Protection Approaches. They reached out to similar organisations so as an organisation based in Bristol covering the South West, we were asked if we'd like to get involved.
Initially, it was producing booklets and information to give out to the community. So Protection Approaches provided information to us and to all the network of about 24 organisations in the UK. We got involved and produced our booklet based on their information. We translated it into both simplified and traditional Chinese; which is for Mandarin and Cantonese speakers, as well as in English. It was just using the information and the building consortium to go out and give out information and inform the community about what a hate crime is. A lot of our community, even though they might suffer, may not even know what a hate crime specifically is. Hate crime covers the other types of hate issues and topics as well in our communities.
So that's how we got involved and that was back in 2020. It then became more prominent in 2021 as things developed, just as the group built up. The next stage was trying to get funding to develop this into a more organised setup because it was just a collection of organisations at the time, but making it into more of a national website and a national helpline. This is where, once it got funding, the On Your Side website and the On Your Side helpline were set up, which was then dedicated with staff recruited who could speak some of the East and Southeast Asian languages.
What do you deliver as a casework advocacy support partner for On Your Side?
Because we already had our own helpline and we had our own casework team, we decided to use some of the experiences from the work we had already done outside of the hate crime work. They asked us whether we could provide some people to do some casework with because the On Your Side helpline itself is a national helpline website service so anybody from whichever part of the country could ring directly to them. We have our own helpline therefore if somebody wanted to contact us they could contact us directly. And the whole point of us being involved with the casework is that if somebody rang from the South West area or the Bristol area they would be redirected, if need be, to the various regional organisations because they would have the contacts of other organisations within their area and the support which may be required for that particular case.
We are working with partners, somebody in London will be able to get in contact with the right support, whether that’s support for women, refugees, or non-documented people. So that's why we were involved in their casework so that we can provide this essential regional support to the national helpline service.