Hate speech, hate crime, and racism appear to rank low on police’s priority list. Many people who have turned to the police to report such a crime are usually surprised by the following fact: slow response and reaction; your case may never see the light of a day in court. A shameful case is that
Read on »Posts Tagged: hate crime
27-year-old Iraqi: “An asylum seeker is an animal and becomes a human being in Finland until he gets a residence permit”
TOPLINE In November, an Iraqi asylum seeker called Ziad* from Jämsänkoski heard the court sentence a man who had threatened him the previous year with a knife and called him a vitun pakolainen (f**king asylum seeker) and vitun ulkomaalainen (f**king foreigner). KEY FACT The verdict? A one-month jail sentence and a 700-euro fine paid to the victim. KEY
Read on »Remember the Muslim youth violently attacked by a group of enraged townspeople of Teuva?
Remember Fares Al-Obaidl, 19, who was chased and violently attacked on Saturday, June 7, by a gang of angry residents of Teuva, a town in Western Finland? Six months have passed since that terrible incident, and no charges have been brought yet against the alleged attackers. “The fact that I know nothing about my case
Read on »Dear White People of Finland: What happened in Kannelmäki last April?
Migrant Tales insight: This story was written by a member of the Somali community and edited by Migrant Tales the following week after a young Somali Finn was knifed and killed at the Helsinki Kannelmäki train station. The letter will be published as charges against the suspect will be apparently made public by the police
Read on »Was the stabbing of an eighteen-year-old Somali Finn a hate crime?
Migrant Tales asked in April after the tragic death of an eighteen-year-old Somali Finn in Helsinki on April 26 is treated by the police as a hate crime. What is equally surprising is the total news blackout on social media by the police as if communities affected by what happened don’t have the right to
Read on »The toothless response of the police and society to human trafficking is similar to other social ills like racism
A column by Helsingin Sanomat gave a realistic view of human trafficking and why there it continues unhinged. One problem that the column cites, and which is a problem concerning other racist crimes committed against migrants and minorities, is fear of the police. The column, which exposed some of the shortcomings of protecting victims of
Read on »The assault that happened in Teuva against a Muslim should be treated as a hate crime
THIS STORY WAS UPDATED The mayor of Teuva Veli Nummela, the town’s newspaper Tejuka were straightforward about the attack against a Muslim in early June in the western Finnish town of Teuva. Nummela wrote in a blog about the anti-racism work done at the town’s schools. “We will evaluate these practices [anti-racism] at the beginning
Read on »Racist harassment of a mother and daughter in Helsinki’s Malminkartano
I spoke to a distraught Iraqi mother who told me how she was harassed, even shoved and pushed by six people who threatened to kill her in the Helsinki neighborhood of Malminkartano. Why? Because she and her daughters are Muslims. “I was traveling with my nine-year-old daughter on the train from Vantaa and got off
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