Equality and Diversity - Building a Culture of ... - Equality Authority

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Equal Respect
Factsheet
Stereotyping
People with
disabilities
and their concerns are either invisible,
marginalised, or depicted by negative
stereotypes in the media. The world as
represented on television fails to include
them as a significant element in society.
They may feature occasionally in news
or magazine programmes but they rarely
appear as regular characters in drama or
other popular television forms.
(National Disability Authority)
Many Muslim women
share the experience of facing an entire set
of assumptions about their faith, politics,
preferences, education, class, and so on,
based on whether they choose to wear a
headscarf or not. (Sahar Ullah, 2012)
Whilst any ethnic group living in
Ireland can experience racism, the
evidence suggests that
black people
living in Ireland are most likely to
experience racist discrimination,
harassment and racially motivated
crimes. (EU Agency for Fundamental
Rights, 2009)
Stereotypes about why people are
homeless, the type of people who
become homeless and assumptions
about their behaviour can affect
the services available to them. For
example, the opening of a hostel for
homeless people
is opposed by other members of the
community. (Department for Social
Development N.I., 2009)
Prejudice
Numerous studies have shown that Irish
and Northern Irish people do not want to
live beside certain groups of people. In a
survey of almost 5,000 Irish post-primary
students, 42% said they would not be
happy to have Travellers living near them.
(Tormey and Gleeson, 2012)
Education
School text books have very
little content which relates to
minority ethnic groups, people
with disabilities, or people
from other minority groups.
Over 20,000
young people at second level are lesbian, gay or bisexual, and every
class will therefore have an average of two students who are LGB.
Yet this sizeable number is still largely invisible in any meaningful or
positive way (NUI Maynooth and Gay Lesbian Equality Network, 2010)
sECTION 3 EXPLORING Equality 71