Hastings Is No Place For Hate event in East Sussex on March 9 2024

The event took place in Hastings Community Hub and was a free event by Hastings Heart for the LGBT+ community and allies.

Transcript

00:00 The idea of an event like this today is to bring a lot of different organisations together

00:05 and to basically talk about hate crime.

00:08 And so a lot of the agencies here give support to the LGBT community,

00:16 but we've also got other organisations like Victim Support

00:19 that give a more generic support service to hate crime.

00:24 And one of the things we've got to look at is not only just about LGBT,

00:28 which is the main primary focus today, but also we have race, religion,

00:32 and also women can be victimised as well, or because of their gender.

00:38 So the idea is we're looking at sexual orientation, that type of thing.

00:42 So anything where people feel threatened, harmed or intimidated,

00:46 we want to know about that.

00:48 We want people to feel that they can report that to us in confidence

00:53 and also to feel comfortable in doing so.

00:55 Because if we don't know about these issues,

00:57 then obviously we can't acknowledge them, we can't investigate them,

01:01 we can't put more resources into dealing with those issues.

01:06 So if people do suffer hate incidents, then the best thing is to call us.

01:11 If it's urgent, then it's happening right away, they can call us on 999.

01:16 If it's not so urgent or it's an incident that's already happened,

01:20 if it's too late, then they can also call us on 101,

01:23 so we can give them a bit of support,

01:24 but also we can give them options that are available to them as well.

01:28 But the important takeaway from that is that

01:31 if we know that hate crime is happening in certain areas,

01:34 then obviously we can manage that better

01:37 and then put more resources into those areas to look at prevention

01:41 and deal with things in that way.