What You Can Do After A Racist Attack - A Guide For Victims, Relatives And Witnesses
After recent incidents game developer Mia Sari prepared a useful guide with legal support by Spirit Legal: What You Can Do After A Racist Attack - steps you can take, explanations on the process of reporting a crime and the organisations that can offer help legally, emotionally, and financially after you experience a racist attack in Germany.
This guide intends to give general information for victims, relatives and witnesses of discriminatory experiences and racist incidents. It is there to provide you with basic information about the legal steps you can take, explanations on the process of reporting a crime and the institutions and organisations that can offer help in this difficult situation.
Table of contents
- What you can report
- What to do if you or someone you know experienced a racist attack
- Reporting the incidents
- Who pays for the lawyers
Why This Guide Exists by Mia Sari
A friend of mine told a story of how he got beaten up by random strangers when he was waiting for a train in Berlin. All of this happened because his skin color is brown. When I asked him if he reported this case to the police, he just shrugged and said, "I don't speak German. And those people have already gone so fast. What can the police do?".
And I have heard a lot of other racist incident stories, from verbal abuse like name-calling to threats of violence. However, these cases are often unreported. Language barriers, immigration status, and complicated & expensive legal procedures are all deterrents from reporting a crime.
This is why I created this simple guide to provide the steps you can take, explanations on the process of reporting a crime and the organisations that can offer help legally, emotionally, and financially after you experience a racist attack in Germany.
About the author Mia Sari
In 2019 Spirit Legal invited Mia Sari to OTMR Conference in Leipzig. In her impressive session, Mia Sari reported on the development of her app Just Juno. She herself grew up as a girl in conservative Indonesia. She learned about the role of women as supporters of men. With later trips abroad, she was able to emancipate herself from the patriarchal structures and got to know a different world. Because of this process, she now wants to playfully get girls themselves to question gender stereotypes.
The focus of the Just Juno app is female role models who have to overcome challenges in multiple choice interactions. The app is still in development and they are actively seeking testers for it. The exchange in the session was characterized by how differently and frequently gender stereotypes occur even in Western society.