Help is available for students who have experienced discrimination or a hate crime or incident (on campus or off campus).

The University and The Students’ Union at UWE have a zero-tolerance approach to hate incidents and crimes. 

Discrimination

Discrimination is when an individual or a group of people is treated less favourably than others based on one of the nine protected characteristics in the Equality Act (2010). These are:
  • age
  • disability
  • gender reassignment
  • marriage and civil partnership (in employment only)
  • pregnancy and maternity
  • race
  • religion or belief 
  • sex
  • sexual orientation. 
It may have a very damaging effect on those individuals who face it.

Hate incident

A hate incident is any incident perceived by the victim, or any witnesses, as being motivated by prejudice or hate towards any aspect of a person’s identity. You do not have to be a member of the group the hostility is aimed at.

Hate incidents are motivated by one of the nine protected characteristics in the Equality Act (2010), mentioned above. The incidents take the form of non-criminal offences like social media bullying or verbal comments. Hate incidents themselves don’t break the law.

Hate crime

A hate crime is a criminal offence. This is because the incidents themselves are prosecutable offences like physical assault, burglary, threats on social media, vandalism on your property, hate mail or fraud. What makes it a hate crime is the perception of the victim or witnesses of it being motivated by prejudice or hate based on one of the nine protected characteristics in the Equality Act (2010), mentioned above.

All forms of hate-motivated abuse are upsetting and traumatic. Experiencing hate crime can be a particularly frightening experience, as you've been targeted because of who you are, or who or what your attacker thinks you are. Unlike non-identity related offences, the attack is very personal as you’ve been specifically targeted. This can be harder to cope with than a crime that is motivated by money, for example.
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There are two ways you can tell us what happened