Together
with its local club Goole AFC, Premiership high-flyers
Everton FC and the charity ‘Show Racism
the Red Card’, EITI is at the forefront
of a national campaign to fight racism within
football: multilingual hotlines for reporting
racist abuse at matches.
Racist abuse at football
matches is against the law and should be reported
to the club or the police. However, there are
times when football fans from ethnic minority
communities receive or observe racist abuse,
but lack sufficient English language skills
to be able to notify the authorities. The multilingual
anti-racist hotline service tackles this problem
by enabling supporters to report incidents
in their own language.
The service was introduced
by EITI and Goole at the beginning of the 2004-05
season. The campaign was given a major boost
in February 2005 when Everton became the first
Premiership team to take up the hotlines, staging
a high profile launch at their FA Cup tie against
Manchester United.
Everton's Race & Diversity
Manager, Alan Johnson, explained: "We
have a growing fan base that is increasingly
becoming more and more diverse in terms of
ethnicity.
“It is essential
that we recognise this and put in place services
that help facilitate and promote the needs
of such diversity. The EITI provision will
be rolled out to clubs up and down the country
in the near future, whilst the FA have also
been approached.”
20 free-to-use, non-English
hotlines are available, each of which corresponds
to a particular language. Callers hear a recorded
message - in their own language - inviting
them to report any incidents of racist abuse
occurring at matches. This is a confidential
service, and callers may choose not to give
their name or telephone number. An English
transcript of each call is sent to the appropriate
authorities (in most cases, this would be the
club involved with the incident). |
