Processes of Discriminartion

4 of people and the visible discrimination against them from the rest of society. This comes in many forms; in the UK it can be seen in the housing of mentally ill people in special hospitals rather than community rehabilitation. Worldwide the process of invisibilization has been used to hide the rights, problems as well as the identities of ethnic minorities and indigenous populations. ‘The invisibilization of the indigenous in Costa Rica has been pervasive and with it, so has been the blindness to their needs and the loss of their culture’ (Aragón, 2010).

The penultimate process in Thompson’s (1997) eight processes is Trivialisation. Farlex (2010) defines Trivialisation as ‘to make or cause to appear trivial’ and example of this couple be a tabloid press publishing headlines that make the effects of immigration on the native population seem much worse than they actually are.

The final process is Stereotyping, properly one of the most used and known processes of discrimination. ‘Stereotypes are the extreme misuse of categories: a person is judged on the basis of one quality, e.g. age, sex, culture or occupation, when people of, for instance, the same culture vary considerably in personality’ (Myers et al., 1998).

Examples of stereotypes can assuming that a black young person entering your youth centre will try to steal something or has been smoking cannabis. Many stereotypes exist including that of young people from low income families or areas are assumed to be more likely to cause trouble and that more affluent young people are ‘snobs’.

Stereotypes exist, and their existence can lead to prejudice and if a person acts on their prejudgment of another it becomes discrimination. As stereotypes are rife and heavily maintained by family, society, media etc. they are one of the biggest causes of discrimination within the UK, Europe, and possibly the world.

One of the most controversial theories on a process of discrimination is legitimation.

Legitimation is defined as ‘Being in accordance with established or accepted patterns and standards’ (Farlex, 2010). What must first be established is that legitimation is a process, process that has the ability to legalise or make discrimination a social norm. It is a normalisation method that attempts to make discrimination acceptable. Legitimation is usually perceived as a legal act or document but it does not always have to be a legal process, it can be the acceptable norm within family, friends and social groups whether that is a small church group or the European Union. Such norms within a society can be formed due to many different reasons such as fear, morality, legal issues, biology and culture.

Fear promotes security norms within social groups a recent example is the increase and general acceptability of Islamophobia in Western countries post the 9/11 tragedy.

Security norms a fluid and changeable or at least the main focus is regularly changing, it was only 10 – 15 years ago that instead of being dark and Islamic, having an Irish accent and being Catholic made you the focus of security discrimination. Legitimation can be seen within the youth work setting in the bureaucracy, in centre based work especially a youth support officer has to state how many ethnic, disabled and what genders attended. Numbers also have to be stated on how many of these groups took part in activities offered; words are used like disabled, ethnic, inclusive and mainstream.

Some people within the service think of this as positive discrimination, whereas other seeing it as keeping the barriers active by keeping the names in regular use.

There are moral norms that appear from legitimisation as well, examples include that of