Nomada report eng

NOMADA Association for Multicultural Society Integration SUKURS – to Support People Exposed to Hate Violence

„Do you have a problem?”

Hate Crime in Wrocław Report based on research conducted from July 2010 to February 2011

Editor:

Marcin Starnawski Author:

Marcin Starnawski, Katarzyna Pawlik Cooperation:

Anna Galik, Marta Jamróg

Wrocław 2011

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Content 2. Hate Violence – perspective of respondents.....................................................................................3 2.1. „Definition of the situation”..............................................................................................3 2.1.1. Obstacles of living in Poland..............................................................................4 2.1.2. Life in Wrocław: its overall atmosphere and security issues............................13 2.2. Hate Violence experience................................................................................................21 2.2.1. Forms of violence.............................................................................................21 2.2.1.1. Verbal provocations and other forms of non-physical violence........21 2.2.1.2. Physical violence...............................................................................26 2.2.2. Places and occurrences.....................................................................................29 2.2.3. Perpetrators.......................................................................................................32 2.2.4. Categories of persons exposed and particularly vulnerable to hate violence..34 2.2.5. Response strategy..............................................................................................39 2.3. Seeking and experiencing help........................................................................................46 2.3.1. Individual help..................................................................................................46 2.3.2. Institutional help...............................................................................................48 2.3.3. Autonomous self-help environment..................................................................56 Annex.................................................................................................................................................60 Table 1a. Characteristic of interviewers – immigrants and ethnic/national minorities......................60 Table 1b. Characteristic of interviewers - institutions and alternatives groups activists....................61 Questionnaire......................................................................................................................................62

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2. Hate Violence – perspective of respondents Gathered empirical data allows analyzing the problem of hate violence in the perspective of immigrants and members of national, ethnic and religious minorities through the prism of five categories. First of all the issue of perception of the interviewees on their experiences in Poland, attitude towards Poles, cultural perceptions of reality, feeling ‘at home’, sense of security, etc.

Generally this aspect can be described as definition of the situation. It is as it seems a key element in understanding the perspective of people at risk of hate violence. Reconstruction of some common definitions of the situation gives an insight into not only a question of social awareness, but also allows to specify the "footsteps" of interpretation and explanation taken behaviors and response strategies for different types of experiences as well as aspirations and needs for changing their own situation1. Secondly, experiences directly related to violence motivated by hatred. This normally applies to actual acts of violence, but we should not exclude the experiences defined as an emergency when an individual or group expects that it may become the object of an attack, despite the fact that such an attack can be perceived as “something felt in the wind”. We are taking into account a wide range of situations: from a verbal or ‘symbolic’ harassments, through various psychologically and morally destructive forms of harassment and humiliation, to physical attacks, including, prodding or pushing, as well as beatings resulting in wounds, body injuries or health impairments. In the category of experiencing the hate violence we also place observations regarding exemplary circumstances of such events, places and perpetrators. We also bring nearer a hypothetical list of categories of persons particularly vulnerable to this kind of violence. Thirdly, the issue of response strategies undertaken to respond to experienced violence. Fourthly, the issue of aid: how people exposed to violence seek support from the environment and how this assistance is provided. Fifthly the question about, what do people who are exposed to such violence need, to gain a greater sense of security and understanding of their situation by the environment, be able to pursue justice as victims, and finally perceive the conditions of such change in the socio-cultural environment, which would allow to create an atmosphere conducive to a greater tolerance and enabling integration based on rules of equality and dignity. These categories, of course, do not exhaust the range of issues related to the situation of people experiencing hate violence or people exposed to it., however, they allow to gain a significant insight into the experiences as well as ways of thinking and acting of relevant participants included in this study groups/social categories. This seems to be crucial for more effective activities aimed at combating hate violence and help those experiencing it.

2.1. „Definition of the situation” Defining the situation by a person exposed to the hate violence is an important part of their experience. Along with ‘objective’ conditions, which include, among others economic and political conditions, the legal system, social structure and processes and the prevailing cultural patterns creating a specific atmosphere of the place where you live (country, local community, etc.), we should pay attention to the ‘subjective’ interpretations of experiences related to the fact of living in Poland. According to the conventional thesis of the sociology of knowledge and social psychology, human consciousness is a product of a complex social context determining their social position.

Therefore we can expect that the specificity of the experiences related to belonging to a particular group or social category would lead to such a definition of their situation, which would not appear (or would be less likely) in the case of individuals/groups with different experiences. Differentiation according to the criterion of ‘immigrant/local’ or ‘minority/majority’ draws attention to the possible 1 About the issue of "definition of the situation, " wrote the sociologist William Thomas: Every self determined act of behavior is always preceded by the stage of research and consideration, which we can call the definition of the situation . In fact, on the definition depend not only specific acts; gradually the whole policy of life and personality of the unit itself as a result of a series of such definitions. "See. W.I. Thomas, "The definition of the situation, " [in:] W. Derczyński, A. Jasińska-Kania, J. Szacki (ed.) Elements of sociological theories, PWN, Warszawa 1975, p. 67

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existence of different definitions of the situation. According to W. Thomas: “There is always a rivalry between the spontaneous definitions of the situation, formulated by a member of organized society, and definitions, which are provided to him by the society in which he lives” 2.

We can also probably expect, that the deeper and the more stable integration of members of the group with the ‘dominating’ community, (which consists primarily of atmosphere of acceptance from the "majority" environment) the fewer problems will arise in the context of differences in assessment of their own experiences of immigrants/minorities from ‘non-problematic’ self image of the rest of society. By analogy, therefore, the more obstacles and barriers to integration and the greater the exposure to stigma, discrimination or threats of violence of a racist or xenophobic nature, the more likely the definition of the situation in terms of critical evaluation of one’s own experience in dealing with the environment. Adopting the perspective, outlined in the Introduction, of problematization of ‘ongoing intolerance’, we primarily focus on the experiences and opinions, presenting obstacles and negative experiences of interviewed people, which, of course, does not mean that they are not unique or exceptional experiences and opinions. We present the ways of defining the situation discussing firstly the general difficulties associated with the life of immigrants and minorities in Poland. Then we present examples of statements relating specifically to those people’s lives in Wroclaw.

2.1.1. Obstacles of living in Poland The factors that may make the experiencing of living in Poland difficult or burdensome and creating a situation in which a sense of danger from the environment may appear include: • • •

•

•

• •

short stay in the country (the shorter, the greater the likelihood of obstacles in ‘finding oneself” in society); low linguistic competences in the field of Polish language 3 and poor knowledge of the socio-cultural realities of the country - it means a more difficult integration and greater exposure to tensions or conflicts with the environment; uncertain or less favorable legal status in comparison with the citizens of the Republic of Poland (no documents authorizing the legal residence or legal paid job, lack of citizenship of the Republic of Poland, not accepting the certificates of education from another country by the Polish authorities, etc.); the adverse socio-economic status (especially the lack of permanent or reliable source of income, poor employment conditions, a daily financial difficulties particularly for individuals or families with children, lack of insurance, difficult living conditions, poor education or lack of qualifications to initiate a satisfactory or relatively well-paid work, etc.); experience of prejudice and discrimination (in different areas of life: for example, the labor market or in the workplace, at school or university, in ones dealings with the institutions - such as offices, courts, the police - in public places, informal contacts, e.g., neighborhood, or random social contacts ‘on the street’ etc.); relatively strong sense of cultural difference and/or social distance, encouraging a feeling of alienation or a sort of ‘incompatibility’ with the realities of a new country; sense of reluctance from the environment.

2 U. I. Thomas, „Definition of situation”, op. cit., s. 68 3 24 people in the trial group (almost 2/3) confirmed having communication problems with Polish language, from which 10 in everyday situations and 14 „ often experience communication misunderstandings”. Communicational difficulties are mostly declared by respondents from outside Europe (15 people), that is over 80% respondents from outside Europe and 2/3 of those declaring language difficulties.

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These issues were appearing in the statements of our interviewees. Often several things were pointed, sometimes combined with each other. On the subject of language difficulties as the primary barrier in the new country, having to learn the new realities and a sense of being ‘like a child’ spoke the interviewee from Latin America: I was 23 years old when I came to Poland. In Bogota I finished my studies (journalism) and I had some standard of life. Coming here, I didn’t know the language, I wasn’t able to ask about simple things, fix myself in a new country. It wasn’t about the culture, mainly about the communication. I felt like I deleted 20 years from my life. I was a child again. It was hard for me and for us as a couple.

I became a boy and my girlfriend had to lead all our life. It was hard time for us.

(Interview10) A student from Tanzania spoke on the difficulties posed by a language barrier in the context of the functioning at the university,: The biggest problem for me and for people that I spoke with was this that professors do not care if you are a foreigner or a Polish person. That means that the language they use in classes is as if you were born here. In college of Polish we didn’t learn technical language, but only the basic one: how to speak and write, and the teacher there used simple words to make us understand. At the University it is different: professors speak fast and use vocabulary that during the first lectures you understand only “good morning” and “good bye.” (Interview 2) Another student (from Cameroon) stressed the importance it had in his life to learn Polish for a better entry into the realities of Polish culture: I've also experienced culture shock, a new language, a different way of life, etc. I think, that I have started to get to know Poland only when I learned the language.

Then I began to understand the Poles. (Interview 8) The feeling of alienation may be associated not only with the language barrier, but also with entering into everyday life based on entirely new rules of operation. For example, for an interviewee from Colombia that ‘clash with reality’ was the need for registering in a place of residence: (quote) The issue that most interviewees paid attention to was the legal status.

Typically, this involves the fact that the lack of Polish nationality or citizenship of another EU country is an impediment in the daily operation and makes the desired objectives impossible to achieve. Respondents from Ukraine spoke about it explicitly: Sometimes the obstacle is my nationality, at least I think so. (...) For example my doctoral studies. First of all, I cannot participate in most of the grants and scholarship competitions since the regulations are clearly stated (i.e. the Polish citizens and/or persons of Polish origin). The second thing, graduate students do not have a clearly defined financial position. I was admitted to college on the basis without remuneration. The confirmation of admission was an indication that a positive credit last year gives me the opportunity to study free of charge in the following year. After a year it turned out that this rule works only for students but not for graduate students. The best solution is to get the Polish citizenship, or an annual application writing for exemption from fees. This is the situation I had on mind while writing about nationality. (Interview 27)

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But I have, however, lower right. You see what I mean. I would be able to have a steady job now, but I cannot, because I can have my work permit renewed only once a year. And now I have a contract until April. And I do not know what will happen. I don’t know whether the director will want that. Especially, because I will be a student. (Interview 25) Previously quoted Colombian spoke of difficulties in recruitment due to different procedures for workers from outside the European Union countries. In this context he stated that he felt discriminated as a non-EU citizen: Looking for a job was difficult, because no one knows how to hire a person who is not from the European Union. (...) I feel discrimination in institutions because I’m from Colombia, not from the EU. I don’t have the same rights like people from EU countries.

Unfavorable legal status often means more difficult economic and social situation for immigrants. A student from Belarus (Interview 20), who has been living in Poland for four years and is relatively well integrated with the environment (a positive image of Poland and Polish people, knowledge of Polish language, a sense of security and good treatment especially in college), said that, although she can achieve her goals in a new country, she must fight for it harder. In order to finish her studies she needs to raise money and she is convinced that it would have been easier if she was a Pole. She believes that she doesn’t have the same rights as Poles. She cannot sign a contract of employment, has no right to vote, and cannot apply for a social scholarship. Although she has a health insurance through the student's status, she does not know how to obtain it after graduation.

Another aspect of the difficulties of life in Poland is connected with a direct experience of prejudice and stereotypes, as well as discrimination. Although experiences themselves do not have to mean hate violence they create an atmosphere conducive to a distance towards the environment, and even alienation. Stereotyping seems to be an important factor in so that it was mentioned, even by those who felt relatively well in Poland. An example can be two interviewees from the former Soviet Union countries (Belarusian and Ukrainian). In their case we can speak about experiencing the stereotype or prejudice associated with the negative image of the ‘East’ as a culturally backward area: Q: Is the fact that you come from Belarus affects how polish people treat you?

Re.: No, I mean it all depends on the person with whom you talk to. For example, I had no problems, I have many friends here, but you know, the point is that, for example, many Poles do not realize that Belarus is a normally functioning country, it also bugs me that sometimes they don’t differentiate between Ukraine and Belarus, they perceive the East as one country. Or, for example, they asked me whether I have the Internet. You know such absurd things. (Interview 22) People would still say: you have Ukrainian education, and it’s not the same as Polish one. I was shocked and therefore I wanted to validate my diplomas. And this is strange, because in our country there was no such thing, that you do not want to attend lectures. They were all compulsory and I had all those lectures, etc.

And here there is half less of everything. I do not feel that I know less than other workers. I believe that I am a good worker. (Interview 25) Sometimes people pointed out prejudice and discrimination in the labor market. One of the interviewees from Ukraine (Interview 24) mentioned harassing the Ukrainians in the workplace. An 6

example, which she described, was a situation in which a group of women had to escape from the harvest of strawberries because they were treated badly there. The interviewee from Rwanda described the situation in which his application was rejected after submitting his photos. He made conjectures that this could be related to his skin color: Once I applied to a company, I sent them my CV, they called me back and I talked with their manager. He asked me to send my photo. So I did. And that’s it. He never answered. It can be because of the fact that I am Black, but maybe no.

(Interview 6) Also discrimination in public places was mentioned. An interviewee associated with the Ukrainian community (Interview 23) expressed the opinion that one of the signs of discrimination against Ukrainians is that railway schedules have the Ukrainian city names written phonetically in Russian rather than Ukrainian. For a man arriving from Ukraine it is not indifferent. The interviewee claimed that the Polish institutions sometimes humiliate Ukrainians who are not able to read the name of their capital correctly. Personal experience of discrimination – also in polish railways context – was shared by an interviewee from Mexico. She expressed the belief that her situation was related to a prejudice of a cashier at the railway station, motivated by hostility to her as a foreigner (audible accent and the way of speaking in Polish), and as a person with "non-Polish" appearance (she tried to explain it with a prejudice against Roma group, to which she believed she was assigned: Once, I had some unpleasant cases, yes I had. Once I remember, it was precisely at the railway station. Because I work in this language school, and I think two years ago there was something I had a trip to Rawicz (a city in west part of Poland) . I was going there once a week because that's where they are located. (...) But once it was just that something has changed on the railway. And so fast and intercity trains, and it was such confusion. Nobody knew how much it costed.

And I remember that I got the information before by phone, but not a precise one.

So I went to the cashier, but first I wanted to confirm how much this subscription ticket costed. And this gentleman has sent me to the cashier # 3. I asked why. He said that this is where the information was. I told him that I did not need information; I just wanted to confirm how much was this ticket? because I knew how much it was. And he told me, "So if you know how much it costs, then why you are asking?" I answered him calmly that I just wanted to make sure. He said it probably cost 80 zł. I gave him the money and he said he would not sell. I asked why. He replied: "I do not want." I told him I wouldn’t move until he sells the ticket. He closed the window and went away. And then I was very angry and upset. (...) I asked where I could file a complaint. Of course, they’ve sent me to the information. I started to explain to them what happened there. And there was nobody who would speak English. I was very nervous and I wasn’t able to speak Polish then. I had to wait for someone who spoke English. And then a lady said to me: ‘I’m sure you misunderstood, it must have been a break time, you misunderstood, because you speak Polish badly’. I got very upset. (...) And then I remember that I asked what to do. And this lady said to me, please go to the checkout # 3 And I asked: ‘And why to the same cashier?’ ‘That's where you can write a complaint’ - she said. I went to the cashier, said that I wanted to write a complaint. I had to explain what I meant. She gave me a book and I wanted to write a complaint. I could speak Polish but didn’t write very much. And I wrote it in English. Once it was written, I gave this document, and the lady said to me: ‘Why did you write it in English?’. I replied to her that I cannot write in Polish.

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And she said to me: ‘But I don’t know if anyone will understand it’. I still haven’t got any answer on this issue.

Q: Why do you think you’ve been treated like that? Because you don’t speak Polish? Because you’ re not Polish?

Re: Of course my pronunciation isn’t perfect and he knew I wasn’t Polish. Maybe he thought I was a Gipsy. I have dark eyes and dark hair and I don’t speak correctly, so I could be associated with Gypsies. Even after he closed the window, he opened it after and was servicing other people, but I was not serviced.

(Interview 30) Some interviewees talked about situations in which they experienced discriminatory treatment by the authorities, especially police officers and border guards. Such practices were described by one of the interviewees as ‘harassment for no reason’. It could be an intentional halt on the street with the intention of checking documents, often prolonging in time and preventing the realization of previous plans (as in the case of forced cancellation of the trip in the first story cited below). It can also be intruding by officers at home and unexplained questioning of a person's neighbors or roommates. An important aspect of such experiences is the feeling of being deprived of one’s dignity (‘It's not fair, and against human rights’) and a sense that such ‘visits’ may pose a threat of the environment (‘what if the neighbors were racist?’). The three statements illustrate the problem: I was trying to go to Poznań and the police just stopped me at the train station.

They wanted to see my residence card. I asked them: “What for?” You are not immigration officers”. But I showed them. Everything was OK, my card was valid, but they wanted to confirm it with the Governor’s Office. My train was leaving and I said to them: “Please, give me the card. It is valid.” But they said that I needed to wait. I said that I was going to Poznań and that it was important for me, and that they could keep the card and send it to me by mail – my address was there. But they did not let me go. Harassing without any reason. I could feel that they were tough on me because I am black. (Interview 4) I really didn’t like the situation when the police from the immigration office (the Border Guard) stopped me in the street and wanted to check my residence card and my passport. It was cold and I spent with them more than thirty minutes because they were checking my documents. And my papers were fine. That was so embarrassing for me. One time they came to my dormitory and I wasn’t there, and they were asking my roommate about me: where I was and other questions about me. I think it is not fair and against human rights that they come to a place where I live, not making appointment with me. They can call the Governor’s Office, department of immigration, and ask if I have a residence card. This kind of situation frustrates me because they check me as if I had done something wrong. I don’t think it’s OK to treat foreigners like that in Poland. (Interview 9) The first year, when I submitted the documents - because everyone who comes has a permission to stay for half a year or a year - fortunately I got a year. The first year was not a problem, in the second year they gave me permission for two years. I lived in Poland for two years, then we went to Mexico. Except that I had a problem: when I got my residence card for two years, I had a right to be outside of Poland for six months. But nobody told me. And I was there for ten months. And as I was in Mexico, I thought that everything is in order. Then I lost my time and they started to count from zero. I’ve been here three years, I have a temporary stay. I went to my mother in law, lived there, and then they rang the intercom and 8

my mother- in-law answered. The police came. He asked me how long I was married, my husband's birthday, child’s date of birth, if we had any affluence. I did not understand these questions. Because these important dates, I understand.

But affluence? What did he need that for? He just said: 'You do not have to worry about it, because you got good reviews from the neighbors‘. From the neighbors?

Why did they ask my neighbors about me? And what if those neighbors were racists? (Interview 30) The difficulties encountered by foreigners in Poland may be associated with relatively strong experiencing a cultural difference or a sense of social distance. Many other interviewees related to this issue. While these voices may be regarded as a kind of colloquial generalization, it seems to be an important element of the ‘definition of situation’ in regard to the integration with a ‘local’ environment and perceptions of life in Poland through the prism of categories such as ‘familiarity/strangeness’, freedom/restriction, openness/reticence, acceptance/intolerance, etc. This is also related to the sense of security in an environment which is not always well understood on one hand, and which does not always understands the problems and needs of immigrants on the other.

These statements of interviewees, that express criticism of certain aspects of social and cultural life of Poland, show a relatively diverse picture of the country and its people. Sometimes these are images of a society ‘not opened enough’, sometimes of a country which was ‘influenced by the West too much’. Some people emphasize the ‘excessive religiosity’ of the Poles, and others criticize ‘superficial’ religion, while others seem to try cut themselves off from attitudes conflicting with their own definition of morality or ethics. Keeping in mind that these are subjective interpretations of their own experiences, it is worth to quote some of these voices, because they seem to have some common elements. Usually, these are not completely personal opinions, but beliefs created in discussions and opinions exchange among the other immigrants. They consist of an image certainly biased, however, not without reasons given in the personal experiences of interviewees. They give an insight into the perspective that can be described as a ‘point of view from the outside’ or an ‘outside look’ - a look valuable to the Polish society, offering it a kind of socio-cultural ‘mirror’ providing with knowledge about it ‘localized’ in the experiences of those who for various reasons do not feel fully a part of it or who for various reasons, were denied the right to full membership.

What is a picture of the specificity of life or a ‘cultural climate’ in Poland given in speeches of immigrants? An interviewee, living in Poland for four years and coming from Denmark (Interview 33), claimed, for example, that she saw a lot of social differences in Poland and that strong ties (including family) occurring among the Poles may impede making friends because the Poles already have their friends, and she’s been in the country for a relatively short time. Therefore she has many friends among foreigners, who - she claims - often talk about the bureaucracy, difficulties in learning Polish language and communication barriers with the officials, because the latter often do not know, for example, the English language. In addition, she said that the Poles lack “openness and spontaneity”. An interviewee originating from Ukraine (in Poland for several years, has a Polish nationality), when asked about what bothers her most about the Poles, she replied: “a tunnel vision, little flexibility of views” (Interview 28). In the same way about his impressions of Polish culture - emphasizing its ‘conservatism’ - an interviewee from Canada spoke: Sometimes I’m fed up with the Polish culture, for me it is strange sometimes. It is not opened nor cosmopolitan, it is not a country like that. Normally, as I lived in Barcelona, Amsterdam, it is a great difference. (...) Poles have such a closed mentality, because it is such a conservative country, for example, it is a Catholic country, and I know that even people as they are not believers, they were born into a Catholic family and it has some effect on their mentality. I see here that women 9

always cook, men have to repair thing and these are such cultural stereotypes. I do not like it very much. Or there is always such a situation: it's my boyfriend, my girlfriend. This is such a sexist patriarchy. Now, I hope that Poles, as they will get back from other countries, it will change, because they’ll see how people live there - in the West. (Interview 31) Statements of other interviewees turn attention to the inconsistency of the definition between the situation of immigrants and the Poles in the context of experiences at the professional level or in society. One of them talked about a discomfort experienced in the workplace: (...) At work people still treat me like this: ‘And you’re Ukrainian’ If I do not get involved and backbite the Director with them or something then I am ‘not normal’ or something else. (Interview 25) Also, when describing relations with the people with whom she lived, the interviewee mentioned that if there were differences in customs (in this and the above-cited cases do not necessarily reflecting a cultural difference), she experienced stigma and rejection as a Ukrainian: For example, I had such a situation in the apartment, my roommates because they were party people. (...) In the beginning they were tolerant and kind for me. But then it turned out, that if I do not drink or something there, well, goodbye. I’m Ukrainian, so I’m not ‘one of them’. I signed up for dance class and I felt wonderfully there, I was realizing myself there. I would go there so I didn’t sit with them. (Interview 25) Another interviewee asked about what is lacking in her relations with the Poles, spoke of a ‘subtle’, not exactly an obvious difference in behavior, describing it as the difference between people from “the West” and people from the “East”: This is a subtle , sometimes I don’t know how to describe it ... Because it is not just my feeling. I don’t know… in Poland, by the proximity of the West, everything is so driven, with the rhythm of life, the rhythm of conversations, for me, when I arrived and I did not know that Polish language, the Poles would speak very quickly and I could not understand them. But I don’t mean that slowness. We are fluent and melodious - people from the East - and we interact slowly and smoothly with each other. And this is what I miss in Poland, what I felt later. In the beginning nothing was missing, but really, at some point I felt that I miss the slowness and closeness. (Interview 28) A student from Senegal also spoke of differences he felt about the Poles, as well as difficulties associated with overcoming the barriers of language and manners: It is something in people’s faces that makes you ask yourself: why do these people have a problem with me? I was thinking that maybe they have a problem at home or some problems, but later on this kept going, so I know that this is the way that most people here are. The language was also a barrier. So I was going to school, after to shop, sometimes party and sleep. (...) Beginning was hard, you don’t know people and no one talks to you. I changed everything: culture, food, way of thinking, way of doing things. Different environment, atmosphere, everything is different. Just to find yourself and put yourself inside, is not that easy as some people think it is. (Interview 3) Critical opinion about the 'Polish mentality' also expressed a Polish woman of Tanzanian origins:

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I think that [the Poles] prance and have a very big pressure to be the best in everything they touch. Majority of them is secretive and depressed. They love to complain, to show their discontent, to talk about the weather. Much of them just pretend to be Christians, they are baptized, etc., but go to church only to admire the architecture, if at all. Poles as a nation have negative impact on other living among them. It makes me not to want to work hard, develop, enjoy the little things. I like the Poles, but very few. (Interview 29) These fragments of speeches above show that the relative alienation associated with the negative assessment of the ‘dominant culture’ and a sense of ‘incompatibility’ to the environment may be accompanied by a feeling that the environment or a substantial part of it is reluctant to the person who is an immigrant or belongs to national, ethnic or religious minorities. The last interviewee (Interview 29) stressed that it is particularly detrimental for her that she felt discriminated as a Polish one (she lived in Poland since childhood) - because of her appearance she found herself in situations where people were assuming that she do not know the language, would talk ‘nasty things’ to her, people ‘on the street’ as well as the employees of institutions. The Polish lack of openness to foreigners was also noted by a student from Ghana (Interview 12). He stressed, however, that this is particularly true with men, because, in his opinion, women in Poland are more interested and opened to people from other cultures. On the other hand, another interviewee was talking about a ‘general impression’ of resentment and superiority of Poles over the Ukrainians: Generally, I get the impression that the Poles expect from Ukrainians to behave like servants. They expect that people will humiliate themselves in their presence, because they came here to work, etc. And they are annoyed that someone is opposing and does not allow such treatment. (Interview 25) This respondent also mentioned intolerance based on religion, which she encountered - as an Orthodox – from Catholic parents of the children she works as a teacher with: For example, religious beliefs, because I am Orthodox, and I have to accompany children to a Catholic church every Sunday ... And that was a problem even for Poles. They do not want to accompany their children, because some of them are non-believers. For me it makes no difference which church I go to, which church I accompany a child to. I just go. But they look at me like why an Orthodox came to a Catholic church. (Interview 25) Respondent coming from Latin America described a situation in which a friend of her husband broke a contact with him when he learned about his plans to marry a Mexican woman: I had a situation related to my husband. He had friends, they hung out, such a group of people, they knew each other from high school days, etc. And one of those friends (...) said that he cannot be friends with my husband anymore because he is getting married with a Mexican one. (Interview 30) Negative experiences from a period of living in Poland may affect not only the image of the country, but also redefine one’s attitude towards people in general, change attitude to the world and transform everyday life behavior. An example which seems to be well illustrated by this kind of impact of difficulties of living in Poland, is a case of a student from Cameroon, who described the arrival to Poland as ‘the worst thing in his life’ and talked about what changes have taken place in him for this reason: The worst thing that happened to me, was coming to Poland. For a simple reason.

For me, the most important thing in life was a human being, that’s how I was 11

raised. Today it really changed me. For the worse. I was an optimist by nature.

Today, I am rather pessimistic. Today, when I look at a human being, first I’m estimating how much harm could he cause me? This is very sick. Really. I have already stopped going to church in Poland, although I’ve been playing the saxophone in the church since the age of nine. I experienced a lot of harm in the Polish church, too. (...) I stopped playing the saxophone since the bishop said that it was not a cabaret. I've come to the point where I prefer to talk to my Polish girlfriend in English in public places, because then I am less noticed, because then she is no longer a ‘Polish prostitute mixed up with Black’. When you know the whole world and you travel a lot, that seems ridiculous. (Interview 8) The attitude, expressed in the last cited passage, for people not familiar with the experience of being exposed to hate – motivated violence, may seem incomprehensible. One may ask whether that lack of trust shown by the respondent is justified and whether it is associated with excessive ‘sensitivity to’ the responses of the environment. Analysis of the collected material allows giving the following answer. This ‘sensitivity’ is an integral element of the definition of the situation of immigrants and members of minorities, and it results from the accumulation of a particular type of experience: negative stereotyping and stigmatization coming from the environment, as well as experiences of discrimination. An interviewee form Ukraine quoted above (Interview 25), who spoke about religious intolerance she has experienced from the Catholics, admitted that no one told her anything directly, but added, ‘but I feel it, I see how people react’. A student from Senegal, which differs from the surrounding with his skin color, described the feeling as follows: Every single day, wherever I go, people are staring at me. It’s normal now for me.

This didn’t change at all. (Interview 7) It's a common perception of the respondents. It comes down to the statement: I feel that when someone is looking at me, they give me a hostile look, they have a 'problem' with who I am, how I look, how I talk, where I come from, etc. In other words, people experiencing the hate violence, or who are subjected to or in contact with the behaviors that are close to this violence or are fertile ground for it (stereotypes, an overall atmosphere of lack of cross-cultural openness, etc.) are aware of the stigma, which is ‘given’ to them by the surrounding society. The stigma they feel is not just something that is stuck in the minds of the ‘majority’, but a reality which at different times may appear in the form of abusive behavior damaging their mental and emotional condition, threatening them severely morally and physically, sometimes also being life-threatening. The feeling that the environment is reluctant or hostile may be further reinforced by the conviction of indifference to the problems of immigrants and minorities. A man living in Wroclaw, having his origins in Cameroon (Interview 8) expressed the belief that Poland downplays the problem of racism: “I'm horrified that trivialization. It has become so natural that you wonder how it can be”. It seems that these remarks are coherent with the opinion of another interviewed person, who takes part in social leftist-feminist initiatives. She mentions high levels of chauvinistic attitude in the Internet, that influences the public opinion and creates a huge part of socio-cultural atmosphere in our country: I often read Internet forums. I must say that the level of aggression there is horrifying. Vulgarisms and abusive statements are being used frequently and the reaction to various racist and homophobic slogans, aggression towards people in difficult situations is striking. I’m talking now about the gazeta.pl, onet.pl and tvn.pl forums, where you can add comments to the news posted. It’s mainstream media. It surprises me, that being visited by millions of people every day they don’t guard the level of discussion. I don’t mean censorship, because it’s not the case. It’s the appalling level and violation of any limits. (Interview 38)

12

Do the difficulties which have to be faced by immigrants in Poland, discourage them from living in this country? Responses and, above all, the decisions will inevitably vary to some extent in individuals’ own rationalizations of the situations. For example, for a student from Wroclaw, with origins in Ghana (Interview 12), who happened to have experienced verbal and physical racist violence, the priority is to complete his studies and return to his country of origin - he would not want to stay in Poland. For the Cameroonian cited above, also having a painful experiences associated with racist attacks, the situation in which he found himself, created a dilemma - to stay in Poland among relatives or to escape from what is hostile in Poland?

It was my most difficult philosophical dilemma in that period. What can I do to avoid such a situation? And then I panicked: what’s next? I have the closest people in Poland, my best friends, my girlfriend, but I don’t want to live in Poland.

(Interview 8) A woman living in Wrocław, having her origins in Mexico, didn’t have a similar dilemma, because for the sake of family she decided to tie up to Poland permanently. However, she expressed concern about the image of the country in the context of low linguistic and cultural openness: I decided to live in Poland. My child is Polish. I am connected in some way with the country. And I feel sorry that if this does not change, and the tourists will come for this championship [Euro 2012] I don’t know what they will think about Poland, as hardly anyone here speaks English. (Interview 30) The quoted persons, even if in their legal context, as not being Polish citizens and are not considered to be Poles (and most of them do not feel that way), in the context of where they live, they definitely are - as it should be stressed –Wrocławianer. Their experiences, views and concerns are related, in substantial part, to a local community, among whom they live and to which they have every right to belong. We devote the next part of this study to perspectives of life in Wroclaw.

2.1.2. Life in Wrocław: its overall atmosphere and security issues.

How do immigrants and members of other minority groups perceive the city, where they live studying, working, starting up families and raising children, participating in cultural or religious life? What do they think of the comfort of living in Wrocław? Do they have a chance to integrate with the local community? What’s their evaluation on this topic?

In the inquiry we’ve asked about the possibility to realise professional goals. From among 35 people, who shared their opinion on that question, only 7 confirmed following their professional plans. All of them (6 men and 1 woman) come from European countries. The majority – 17 people (10 men, 7 women) stated, that although they see the possibility to do so, they don’t realize their professional aspirations (11 people from outside Europe). Another 10 people (5 men, 5 women, 7 from outside Europe) claimed they had no perspective of occupational fulfillment in Wrocław. One person was not interested in doing so – probably because of the attitude towards living here as a temporary state. We’ve also asked about the comfort of living in Wrocław. The respondents referred to the following aspects: sense of security, economic standards, personal freedom (in which freedom of speech and possibility to “be oneself”), education accessibility, cultural life anf freedom of faith. Furthermore we’ve asked to respond to the statement: “Wrocław is a city open to different cultures and foreigners”. Another task was to collect opinions on the question of safety. The following table shows a simplified pattern of the answers ( we combined the “very high” and “quite high” answers as positive, and “very low” and “quite low” as negative). The table also shows the average life quality level – starting from the lowest rated (economic standards) to the highest (education).

13

Table 2. Quality of life in Wrocław Marks (number of people) a

Average b

negative

positive

Economic standard (N = 35)

10

25

2,80

Freedom of faith (N = 34)

11

23

2,88

Sense of security (N = 35)

9

26

2.97

Personal freedom (N = 32)

6

26

3,09

Cultural life (N = 35)

4

31

3,31

Education accessibility (N = 30)

2

28

3,40

„Wrocław is a city open to different cultures and foreigners” (N = 35)

3

32

3,26

„Do you think Wrocław is a safe place for foreigners?” (N = 34)

13

21

-

F a ct o r in q u al it y of li v e

a Combination of radical and moderate ans verse “very”/”quite” are combined in the columns. The number shows the quantity of people, who responded to the given issue.

The question was: What’s your opinion on sense of security/economic standards/personal freedom/education accessibility/cultural life/freedom of faith in Wrocław. The values to the variable: 1 very low, 2 quite low, 3 quite high, 4 very high. The higher the average, the nore positive the opinion on given aspect of life in Wrocław. The second from the end question sounded “How strongly do you agree with the statement: „Wrocław is a city open to different cultures and foreigners”. The values to the variable: 1 I strongly disagree, 2 I somewhat disagree, 3 I somewhat agree, 4 I strongly agree. The values in the last row show the yes/no answers. b

The conclusion driven from this table is that most of the respondents had a positive opinion on Wrocław. This can suggest, that we have some kind of “integration potential” in our city. It’s worth noticing though, that there is a discrepancy between opinions on freedom of faith and personal freedom – depending on whether or not the respondent came from Europe. From among Europeans only 2 people rated freedom of faith in Wrocław as low, and none of them rated personal freedom as low. In case of immigrants from outside Europe it was 9 and 6 respondents who gave these answers. Particularly alarming is the fact that although most of the respondents rates their safety as high or rather high (low marks came from 3 people from Europe and 6 from outside Europe) more than one third (13 people: 7 Europeans and 6 non-Europeans) stated that Wrocław is not a safe place for foreigners. Although the trial group cannot be treated as representative we can assume, that the question of safety in local environment can be one of possible barriers for integration. Wrocław’s picture, as a place not safe enough for foreigners can derive from distrustful attitude towards other citizens. It seems that so long as the image of Wrocław doesn’t change into more inviting, open and modern, it won’t be adequate to what some institutions, local organizations, media, authorities and citizens aim for.

There is some eventual integration barriers that are worth a closer look at. We’ve asked what foreign citizens of Wrocław lacked in contacts with other people living in the city. There was a couple of choices. Only 6 people (in which 4 from Europe) stated that they felt no deficiency. The others pointed to: no possibility or Wrocław citizens’ will to start a friendship or acquaintance with foreigners (10 people, from which 7 from outside Europe), lack of knowledge of foreign languages among Poles (9 people – 8 from outside Europe), lack of openness to other cultures and traditions (6 people – 4 from outside Europe), no will to understand other customs (5 people – 3 from outside 14

Europe), Wroclawians have no desire to help out in everyday life (5 people – 2 from outside Europe), “coolness” in contacts with others (4 people – 3 from outer Europe). We haven’t noticed any significant differences between answers of men and women while examining the questions mentioned. We’ve made a careful conclusion that the integration process is more difficult for people from outside Europe.

Some opinions suggest, that Wrocław is a relative friendly city and value better than other places in Poland, where they lived before. Two students from Africa compared their current residence and other places. A interviewee from Tanzania lived before in Łódź, where he was learning Polish and a interviewee from Nigeria lived in Poznań and in Nowy Sącz (a city in a south Poland): Łódź (a city in a center of Poland) was a shock for me: dirty streets, strange people, not nice. When I came to Wrocław, it was different: people speak English, the city is beautiful, and this is the place where I want to study. People in Wrocław are different, more tolerant comparing to people in Łódź. I think in Łódź there are more poor people, skinheads, and at whom can they throw their frustration? At foreigners. (Interview 2) In Poznań I experienced acts of racism. I was asking people about location and they told me “go back to your country” or they gave me wrong directions laughing from it. Many times I felt that the way people looked at me, they has something against me. In Wroclaw it is different for me, but like I said, I have been here only for a few months and I don’t have much free time to walk around ‘cause I am busy at the University. Many people in Wroclaw speak English and that makes contact with Polish people much easier for me. I’m happy because of that.

There are a lot of foreigners in Wroclaw, so people are much used to them. In Nowy Sącz I was only one black person and it was really tough for me. People were staring at me all the time even though they had seen me many times before in a shop, in the streets, everywhere I had gone. Specially old people looked at me with this message: “Oh my god, who is she? What is she doing here?” But in a wrong way, really. They were not happy to see me around. With the younger ones, I think it was curiosity about me, maybe they saw a black girl for the first time and I didn’t feel that they wouldn’t want me there. In Wroclaw I didn’t have any incidents of this kind. (Interview 9) A more ambivalent estimate of life in Wrocław presents an interviewed person from China (interview 15), who came to Wrocław six years ago. Here he found a job in an international corporation and learned Polish. Although he stated he felt relatively secure and good in Poland – the same as in other European countries – he expressed the opinion that Poland wasn’t so open for immigrants as United States or Germany. He talked about his friend who had come to Poland seven years ago and had been one of the first Chinese which is discussed immigrants in Wrocław and there had been some publications about them in local press and TV. Some years ago people often looked round him and laughed at his talking. But now he finds that „everything is OK”.

But not all of the interviewed persons and not at every aspects shared a positive view of Wrocław. For many of them, their arrival to Wrocław was the first contact with Poland at all, like it was for a student from Ghana quoted below. Asked about his first impression of the city where he was studying, he responded: Strange. Cold people. People who look at you and they are cold. You can see on their faces that they have a problem with you. When I was in a different country or in Ghana, you meet people in the street and they are not cold. They mind their 15

own business but they are don’t look as if they had a problem with you. (Interview 3) A frequent target of criticism they were difficulties in contacts with a local bureaucracy, especially with the Department of Civil Affairs and Foreigners (Wydział Spraw Obywatelskich i Cudzoziemców). Although some of examined persons emphasized that, in recent years, this situation has begun to change, i.a. thanks to a greater presence of English-speaking personnel, they still complained about the bureaucracy and in some cases about unfriendliness to foreigners: These guys are there, and it looks as if they don’t want to help you. When I’m going there, it is hard to see my inspector, they always keep me waiting because they are busy, phones keep ringing and they don’t pick them up. (Interview 4) It seems to me that there must be some twenty floors underground to store all these documents. I’m shocked why there is no computerization. Why I must provide them one and the same set of documents when they just have it in their archive? I can provide current documents, but I must fill them and look for permit every year. It’s shocking. I’m very happy that I’m living near the Lower Silesian Governor’s Office (Urząd Wojewódzki). But if someone is outside Wrocław I don’t know how he makes it. You can go five times to the Governor’s Office and receive no information and receive no documents, because somebody forgot something.

(Interview 25) It seems that I have a luck, I know that there are these difficulties and I’m so close to them, but in recent years I hadn’t difficulties resulting from my accent or my different origin. However my “luck” here in Wrocław was that I always met with terrible problems in local offices, all the officials, at every level, they hated me “since hello”.. Sometimes I got out with tears, it was really tragic. [...] They were sending me to another person, to another department – it’s a very good method for them, but I was going from one room to another and achieved nothing.

I heard talking like: they came here and now they’re demanding God knows what.

But it was some years ago. Now it happens more rarely”. (Interview 28) Very meaningful is the attitude of the group surveyed towards the institutions with which they mostly had contact with: Provincial Office (Department of Civil Affairs and Immigration), the Office For Accommodation Registration (presently called Citizen Service Center at the Civil Affairs Department of the Municipality of Wroclaw) and Deans Offices of Wroclaw Universities.

Respondents were asked to rate three aspects of the activities of these institutions: personal satisfaction from their work, the ability to communicate with staff in English or the native language of the respondent, and the general ability of these institutions to work with foreigners. The following table (Table 3) shows that in the context of the overall preparation for work with foreigners, the three institutions get positive opinions. Wrocław Universities Deans Offices are rated relatively best in that case. It is true that the number of positive assessment and preparation to work with foreigners at the Accommodation Registration Offices are also high, but due to the low number of respondents in this group these figures should be treated with more precaution. In the case of both the Department of Civil Affairs and Foreigners' of the Regional Office in Wroclaw, and the Accommodation Registration Office, a small number of people declare the possibility of reaching an agreement with the employees in a language other than Polish. This fact should be considered as one of the major barriers to the integration of foreigners in Wrocław, especially at an early stage of their stay in Poland, It is difficult to expect the immigrants to use the Polish language - often perceived as difficult to learn in a short time - even to the minimally useful extent in dealing with the authorities, whose work deals with the key issues concerning the formal status of newcomers.

16

Although, as stated before, the number of interviewees could not be regarded as representative, the figures obtained illustrate the existence of previously mentioned "integration potential" of Wroclaw, although it appears that the language barrier may hinder it.

Table 3. Opinions on some of Wroclaw’s institutions a to

work

Communication in languages other than Polish– „yes” answers

16 (61%)

9 (35%)

Number of positive marks c 18 (72%)

Office For Accommodation Registration (N = 12)

12 (100%)

1 (8%)

10 (83%)

2,92

Dean’s Office (N = 27)

21 (78%)

17 (63%)

24 (89%)

3,15

Civil Affairs Department of Municipality of Wroclaw (N = 26)

a

Capability foreigners

Satisfaction with institution’s work– positive marks b the

with

Average mark d 2,76

The number (N) in the left column takes into account people who reported contact with given institution.

The column shows the number of people who answered "yes" to the question about satisfaction with work of the institution. In parentheses are shown the proportions of respondents satisfaction among people who had contact with the institution. b

The column shows the number of people declaring that the institution is prepared "very good" or "fairly well". In parentheses are shown the proportions that among people who had contact with a given institution, the possibility of respondents declaring that they were communicating with the staff of a language other than Polish (in English or in their native language.) c

Values of the variable 1 - totally unprepared, 2 - poorly, 3 - fairly good, 4 - very good. The higher the average value of the more positive assessment of the institution. d

Different minority groups living in Wrocław present specific difficulties of their own groups.

A good example could be experiences of Ukrainians told by the director of Honorary Consulate of Ukraine in Wrocław (Interview 35). She mentioned that at least once a month some Pole comes to the consulate and complains that “the Ukrainian flag is on the consulate” and expresses reluctance to Ukrainians with saying: “What You have this consulate here for, we don’t want Ukrainians here, go back to Ukraine”. Director of consulate also told that many of older Ukrainians often don’t talk in their own language on the street in fear of misunderstanding or stigmatization. Another interviewed person from Ukraine admitted that she met with xenophobia expressed by her dentist: “My dentist is a racist [...] when I’m asking him about something, he don’t listen and talks: ‘In our country we don’t say “sir” but “doctor”. In that way he regularly remind me, that I am from somewhere else”. (Interview 16).

The Roma are another minority group that experiences bias, discrimination and unfriendly attitude in Wrocław . One activist of Roma association (Interview 21), talking about obstacles for integration of that community, compared situation in Poland with experiences of Polish Roma in other countries: “The Roma were going abroad earlier as the Poles and they had been treated there better than the Poles. Sometimes the Poles abroad also are treated bad. But we, as the Roma are treated better than in Poland. We are going to schools with Black people, with Indians, and we get on with them, but in Poland we don’t.

(Interview 21) Asked if he finds that in Wrocław a problem of racism against the Roma community is serious, he told: Yes, it is. You must live with it, because you must to do so. I have some friends for many years and we’re standing and talking, we’re holding our hands. But when some stranger comes and asks: ‘Who is he?’ My friend says: ‘He’s not my friend, he’s a Gypsy’. He stresses that difference, that I am different. He might say that I 17

am his friend or colleague. But no. At once he says that I’m a Rom. I always say that we as the Roma are here treated as the fifth category of the citizens.

(Interview 21) As another example of unequal treatment and stigmatizing of the Roma in the local community of Wrocław, he described experiences of the children in schools: You know, in school children easily can play and talk with each other. [...] Parents make problems, when they say for example: ‘Don’t play with him, because he’s a Gypsy’. And when this child is indoctrinated in that way, it will no longer play with a Rom child. Teachers do the same: emphasize on every moment, that these are Rom children. (Interview 21) Disappointment and unwillingness towards further living in Wrocław (and generally in Poland) is expressed also by Wrocław residents from Africa, who are among the most exposed to discrimination and racial hatred motivated violence. An interviewed person from Cameroon, asked whether, after five years of living in Wrocław, he finds this city as safe for foreigners, stated: No. I don’t want to live here. That’s because I have a family that lives in different places of the world, I travel a lot and I know, I can compare where I feel good or better. It causes problems in my private life, because I must to settle down. Next year I want to return to New York City and stay there permanently. It’s time to choose the place to live for me. (Interview 8) A Pole of Tanzanian origin admitted that she found living in Wrocław “not bad”, but sometimes “unpleasant situations” happen to her. Asked about possibilities of realization of her life plans in Wrocław, she responded: To some extent, yes, for example I achieved to find an apartment and I can develop myself intellectually. But social interactions are another case. When I came here, to a big city, I hoped that people here are accustomed to ‘chocolate faces’. But I was wrong. I want to feel myself just like everybody else, for example not to excite sensation in places where I appear. It’s very uncomfortable situation when you enter to some room and everybody is staring at you or ask about very personal issues, that usually people don’t ask at first meeting. (Interview 29) Among difficulties that she met in Wrocław, she mentioned: difficulties with finding an apartment, because landlords refused her with no reason; asking about her passport or permanent residence card when she is going by tram (in these situations people in a tram usually fall silent and focus the attention on her); street vendors don’t give her free newspapers, because they think that she don’t know Polish. She also noted the bias in contacts with official institutions: Usually everybody wants to be pleasant, they want to represent their institution well. Sometimes officials in these places, not knowing that I know Polish very good, make some unpleasant comments. On one occasion some doctor five times asked me if I’m sure that I understand everything, he asked about issues completely unrelated with my problem, for example where I from, what I’m doing here, who are my parents and if is it sure I’m a Muslim. I think that such behavior is inappropriate. [...] I never know if person working in some institution is biased or not, so I must be double attentive not to provoke him. (Interview 29).

For another example the interviewee (from Wrocław, a participant in "alternative" sociocultural activities) shows that, regardless of national origin, the basis of incorrect treatment may be the appearance, difference of opinion from the one commonly understood as "normal". Respondent 18

has experienced anti-Semitic reactions because of his… beard: Well, I was fucked, but the times were different. The worst thing was when a normal woman, a clerk, came to me and said, "You Jew!". It was worse for me than if a Nazi attacked me, because in that case I knew how to react. At that time I had the worst "adventures" because I was taken as Jew. The worst was while looking for a job. (...) I have a high school diploma, which I'll never use as a base for my work. So I searched on the bottom shelf (...). (Interview 37) Another respondent, also a person living in Wrocław "counter-culture environment ", of Canadian origin shared some examples of intolerance due to the difference of manners, as well as violence against disabled: All the time people say to me: "Eh! You bitch! You slut, scum!"(...) One guy who is disabled, there was such a situation where there were some hooligans, a guy sat on a bench and got beaten up. And my colleagues asked what happened. And people say to us: "Uh, in Poland this is normal.. (...) A long time ago on the "Bermuda triangle" there was a lot of football fans, I was alone, and I just heard "we’ll kill him". I ran away. (Interview 31) In the analysis of "situation’s definition " of people exposed to hate crimes, a statement previously made by a participant of socio-cultural scene in Wrocław "alternative" is worth quoting.

The respondent lives in Wroclaw all his life. A significant part of the interview was devoted to his description of to the local history of conflict between the subcultures of the extreme right and the libertarian community. To a large extent, this conflict was marked by growing violence of neo-Nazi movement and the ultra-right groups against punks, anarchists and other people related to the"alternative" artistic scene. Respondent admitted that, ultra-rightist violence was not present in Wrocław even in the late 80s: I can remember how this shit came out that as the first skinheads were just little apolitical hooligans. It seems to me that is my opinion that it was the late 80s, they were still apolitical, certainly did not specify themselves as such. Maybe they were racists. They certainly haven’t shown it, or did not wear any racist symbols, but nevertheless Celtic cross has appeared as their sign, only that - at least then the general opinion regarded it as a symbol of skins. Maybe they were against anarchists. (...) It was still communism, so they were all against the commune.

For example, I was at the demonstration [against the communist regime] and there were quite a lot of punk rockers along with the skins.

This problem began to grow along with economic and political transformation in the early 90s: Their violence has grown very rapidly in that period, you know - I lived ten minutes walk from the Rynek and I didn’t go there or in the area for two or three years at all because I feared that I would be attacked and defeated, and usually end up in hospital. There was a group of 30 to 40 of us in the area and every day someone came with bruised face, it was common, really. Once in a while someone would get beaten hard and suffer head traumas so that he landed at the emergency. It was also the PWN [Polish National Community – nationalist group] and Tejkowski, which came into wide step in this company, I'd say footballish-criminal-hooliganish ... some kind of block dudes, that is social lows.

It began to buy them with that racism in style "Poland united” (...) When I left school it was already fucked. Disaster. (...) At the time almost none of the punks came to Wroclaw. Because it was already at the station ... People were getting 19

beaten up three times going from the station to Rynek - it’s two kilometers distance. And this is the real thing. For the first time at the station, fuck, the second time, fuck, near “Sląsk” cinema, and the third time, fuck, in Rynek or in the area. There was aggression towards all. At it started against the punks, then against everybody, bikers and others. All who looked different. You could get beaten for velour shoes or a military jacket. And hippies, who they harassed even before. Hippies were always tormented. But then they attacked anyone standing out from the crowd .

(Interview 37) This statement points to the social (class) background of extreme right organizations violence growing in the 90s. To some extent they recruited young people from a mass dissatisfied with the deterioration of their situation on a wave of economic transformation after the collapse of "real socialism." This could also involve some kind of "confusion" in a situation of cultural dissemination in the period of democratization, of the new behavior patterns, especially among the younger generation, who wanted greater freedom and openness. Ultra-nationalist ideological leaders' statements directed the anger caused by the marginalization of social and cultural change against "freaks" which include not only the foreigners and members of ethnic or national minorities, but also those whose lifestyle, music taste and way of dressing is different from traditional Polish pattern. Quoted respondent also referred to the situation that occurred in later years. He replied to the question whether he recently experienced right violence: No, but I see them and know that they are there. And if they are visible it means they feel confident. They were always there, unfortunately. (...) In my opinion they are just warming up now. Eighteen months ago they were still quiet, but working all the time. The Lower Silesia is full of strict Nazis. They also now all going in Nazism, they are not "Polaczek" [Polish nationalists]. It seems to me they are more dangerous. A lot of it is strictly Nazi bands from Lower Silesia. (Interview 37) He added that although in his view, the "alternative scene" is not threatened so hard as before compared to several years ago, a frequent object of extreme right-wing violence are now foreigners: Well, it seems that the wave came back with the previous government [coalition with the nationalist League of Polish Families], anti-Semitism and reign, as it turned out, of some hidden fascists, or Nazis, who landed in the government. Well, we’re a situation we’re in. (...) Oh, and at h time the time when it looked as though it is very easy, I've heard that the people of color are attacked on the street. I have not heard for a very long time, say one and a half, two years back, of any attacks on the punks in the street, or attacks on Poles in the street for no reason by the fascists, but I heard of the attacks on immigrants. (Interview 37) Similarly ambivalent picture of Wroclaw, although in a slightly more disguised form, is presented by a different interlocutor, left-wing feminist activist (Interview 38), expressing the opinion: "I think we're a liberal city, open, although it depends.

In sum, in the problem of “defining situation” of immigrants and minorities living, “alternative” groups activists in Wroclaw, we can find three keys issues. First, persons from different ethnic, language cultural and social-moral groups in Poland met and still meet with a stigmatizing attitude that is rooted in negative stereotypes about the groups to which they belong (or as supposed members of other stigmatized groups) and with discrimination. These experiences are 20

strengthened by their language and customary barriers, their unfavorable law status and hard socioeconomic situation, as well as by feelings of alienation and insecurity caused by cultural differences perceived as burdensome and related with conviction of negative environmental attitudes. Second, all these problems appear in experiences of immigrants and members of ethnic, national and religious minorities in Wrocław. Among other issues, an important factor of conducive climate to alienation of foreigners and other minorities are difficulties in contacts with officials responsible for foreigners’ affairs, specially the often criticized bureaucracy of the Lower Silesian Governor’s Office (Urząd Wojewódzki). Despite opinions that this city, in comparision with some other places in Poland, is a relatively friendly space in which inter-cultural understanding (“growing tolerance” perspective) is possible, Wrocław still is a place where racism, xenophobia and other forms of bias and discrimination (“continuous intolerance” perspective) are still present. Third, the experiences from Wrocław (and generally from Poland) induce part of interviewers to thinking about further migration to another country. Such tendency to leave Poland is mostly caused by the experience of racial hatred motivated violence. That experience is a subject of the next part of this text.

2.2. Hate Violence experience As it was defined in Preface, for the racial hatred motivated violence we consider any acts (attacks) of non-physical character (insults, xenophobic remarks, offensive gestures, etc.) and physical character, which are motivated by peculiar ideologies distinguishing specific groups on the basis of fictitious or simplified image of some group (stereotype) and that motivation usually is known to person or group being subject of that violence. We analyze below examples of forms of racial hatred motivated violence that is experienced persons interviewed by us, we discuss typical places in Wroclaw where that violence was directed toward the interviewed persons, and we try define who are perpetrators of such acts, finally we present a hypothetical summary of groups/social categories which are specially vulnerable to racial hatred motivated violence.

Furthermore that last aspect concerns the issue of a differentiation of experiences of persons from different ethno-cultural groups and is directly related to the problem of “defining the situation” by participants of this study, in chapter 2.1.

2.2.1. Forms of violence Several questions in the survey concerned hate violence experiences. Half of 36 respondents who talked about this issue, admitted that during the previous two years (2008-2010) they experienced personally or had witnessed "behavior motivated by hostility towards foreigners."

These were rather men than women: the answer "yes" was given by nearly two thirds of men (14 people) and just over one quarter of women (4 persons). Another question related to different forms of hate violence faced by the respondents or their friends at any time during their stay in Poland.

Respondents could select as many categories as they wanted from the following forms of violence identified as motivated by hostility towards foreigners: verbal abuse - 24 people, shouting abusive statements motivated by hatred (for example, "Poland for Poles", "white power", etc.) - 19 people, unkind ridicule - 17 people, threats - 10 people, beatings - 8 persons, pokes - 7 persons, jerking - 7 persons, destruction of property - 5 people spitting - 4 persons, assault with use of a dangerous instrument - 2 people. In the following subsection we discuss separately examples of non-physical and physical forms of violence cited by interlocutors during in-depth interviews.

2.2.1.1. Verbal provocations and other forms of non-physical violence The most common forms of attack, an almost daily experience for part of the interlocutors, include insults ant other unpleasant comments. Sometimes they contain explicitly expressed reluctance, but can also take the form of allusion, but so intelligible to recognize their xenophobic or racist context and motive. As showed in part 2.1.1., some people sense the reluctance of the 21

surroundings even when faced with only hostile glances or such statements that although no express explicitly reluctance to particular groups, reveal a negative attitude of the environment. Attacks or other verbal and non-verbal behavior which can be classified as a category of hate violence are a form of human environment action in response to realize one or more characteristics of persons who are their object. It is particularly, but not limited to such characteristics which do not depend on the persons subjected to racist or xenophobic ambient pressure and meeting, within that context, with attacks - it is something with which they were born (appearance), which accompanies them, for example, from childhood (identity, tradition, religion), or something connected with an objective difference, and the dynamics of the secondary socialization in a new country (e.g. language barrier)4, a “normal” one especially for immigrants. The most typical characteristics "activating" thinking and action in terms of anxiety or hatred are: • actual or alleged origin (belonging to ethnic group, nationality, religion, etc.), but a person experiencing violence do not need to be truly a member of the group, and can only be so perceived; • appearance (especially skin color, facial features, appearance of eyes, hair, etc., sometimes a dress that would betray a "foreign" origin); • linguistic otherness particularly in that the person does not speak fluent Polish, speak with an accent or uses a language other than Polish in public space; • actual or alleged otherness of manners and/or beliefs (behavior, habits, way of being, opinions, etc.), but the practices considered distinct need not be actually of that specific group/culture into which the environment assigns a person - they may only be perceived as such; the probability of using by the surroundings a characteristic belonging to that category seams to increase with the presence - in the eyes of the reluctant environment - of other visible characteristics of the "evidence" of the actual or alleged otherness of a person subjected to stigma.

Examples of racist verbal violence, often containing not only the content that is offensive or degrading, but vulgar (and hence reinforcing element of aggression), are provided in particular by experiences of Wrocław residents with African origin. A student from Congo (Interview 11) said that quite often he is termed as "nigger", "monkey", "bamboo", "asphalt". In turn, a student from Ghana (interview 12) admitted that almost every day he feels wearing a critical view of the surroundings (Poles), and sometimes accompanied by insults: "monkey, fuck off to Africa!”, “you black bitch!”, “you bamboo!” It happened to him to be provoked to brawl with words: “hey, bamboo, what are you doing here? Fuck off to Africa where your place or we will send you there."

A Polish woman of Tanzanian origin also speaks that often she meets with provocations on the 4 Such approach is close to a proposed by the Goffmana concept of "stigma" as "severely harassing attribute”, and in particular, the third of its varieties, which are the "group-imprint of race, religion, nationality and transmitted from generation to generation and imposing an uniform blemish on all members of the family”. It is important however Author’s reservation that “we should be aware that, in that point, a language of the relationship is useful, not of attributes. An attribute which stigmatizes one holder, may confirm commonness of other one, so, in itself, is neither honorable, nor disparaging.” (E. Goffman, Piętno. Rozważania o zranionej tożsamości, transl. A. Dzierżyńska, J. Tokarska-Bakir, Gdańskie Wydawnictwo Psychologiczne, Gdańsk 2005, s. 33-34). Such approach avoids the "treatment" of a stigma as something once and for all and imminent, and draws attention to at least two issues. First, a given feature can activate different types of ambient reaction depending on its specificity (e.g. degree of familiarity of contacts, cultural openness and competence of persons in the surroundings, socio-occupational or class position of “stigmatized” persons. etc.). Thus that could explain ambivalence of many of the interlocutors in relation to the experience accumulated during their stays in Poland, in Wroclaw, since although in some situations, one or more of their characteristics may constitute for the surroundings an excuse to negative discrimination and hate violence, in others, however, can be a source of pride, power and provide positive discriminant in the surroundings interested in cultural diversity, etc. Secondly, and in view of this elaboration, it is especially important, a characteristic which is a stigma “today”, may not be it “tomorrow”. This assumption seems to be the key for both the possibility for any critical analysis of issues such as social exclusion, ethnic conflict or chauvinism, and for any practical actions, antiracist ones, and others oriented to the prevention of discrimination and violence.

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street. Asked how do the Poles treat her, she gave a long list of expressions: As an intruder, a degenerate, an exotic zoo animal, a worse kind of man, an imbecile, threatening the life or health, receiving their place of work, a pagan, a Muslim, a competitor in the race for rats, a tanned girl who eats a lot of carrots, a woman not of the world, not knowing about the existence of the Internet with a skirt of bananas, a person of loose morals that likes sex and most likely will have a lot of children, a person of huge pendulous breasts down to her belly and of protruding buttocks, who plays basketball and run a lot, who does not pay taxes, a person who speak poorly or at all in Polish, a tourist, and I live here permanently.

(Interview 29) She stated that people pay attention to her different appearance, especially to her hair and skin color: Reportedly [my hair] looks like sheep's wool and certainly I never wash it, and must be there lots of vermin, which is nonsense. I laugh at this. Skin color.

Frequently form the childhood. Almost every day I hear insults of all kinds, waste of quote. (Interview 29) The reluctance or aggression of the surroundings may appear also on the background of linguistic difference. Two cases were reported by a Wrocław resident woman with Mexican origin, who stressed that she is badly treated because of her accent in Polish or when she speaks Spanish: One time we, with my husband and our son are going to Carrefour by tram. My husband was seating by me, and we were talking in Polish, and everything was all right. And I don’t know why but I started to talk to our child in Spanish. He started to brawl a bit or something. And one lady simply look at me, she was back to us, and got up and changed the place. (...) Another time, as well in Carrefour. We were making shopping. I have a child so we approached to the priority check-out, and there was, I think, four persons before us. We were waiting. But a cashier knew we had a child, so she said that we had a priority because of the child. So I took my cart and one older lady, who were before us, she stopped my cart and blocked my way. I am talking to her: "excuse me, but what are you doing?" And she says to me she is the invalid and she is to be first. I said that’s not a problem for me, and she could go first. Mrs. cashier was upset this situation because they saw that this woman was very rude. And she asked her for her disability ID card.

And she replied that she did not have to, because she had the right for it and nobody would check her. I asked her to have peace of mind: "Let you go first."

But she said she would not do it, and that the cashier had to handle all those persons who had been before us. And then I told her it is a shame for the country to meet such persons. And she said, "If you don't like it, fuck off to your country."

(Interview 30).

Examples of “symbolic" aggression, motivated by negative national stereotype, are provided by expressions of interviewees from Ukraine. Humiliating of that kind can appear even on the part of persons who, in certain way, are familiar, e.g. further family’s members or acquaintances, who, in other situations, can show sympathy however, in times of tension reveal xenophobic antipathies: Precisely, I wasn’t called “prostitute”, but “Bandera’s” and “UB’s”, “Ukrainian”, “nasty French”. I knew that the Ukrainians are “such”. A year ago it was an older one, living in Poznań, she was from my husband's family, 23

there was a family dispute. She was not right. Suddenly the lady, who always said what I'm beauty bright brilliant, turned in a great fury and said, “I knew that Ukrainians are such ", etc. (Interview 28) I was living with a nationalist. He hated the Turks. He hated that, that, that. (...).

He said I’m “Rus”. He learned Russian language, but I don't know why, because he hated the Russians. He said: "You don’t have any rights in that flat. You came, and such are Polish realities, you’ll change here nothing, you came here and you have ti serve us. (...) I think he liked me, but he was unable to accept that I'm a Pole. He liked me but I was for him a stranger, because I was from another country. (Interview 25) Last of the interviewees used the wording “moral violence” which seems to reflects clearly experiences of persons meeting with provocations or verbal aggression motivated by prejudices.

The interviewee admitted that she’d not experienced any physical violence, but described the incident, which happened in one organization, where she volunteered. She identified that situation as "moral violence", which had a negative impact on her emotional condition: I remember that when I was here a volunteer I worked more than it was necessary.

I wrote a proposal for the EU. It was my initiative. I could not write anything.

But the president of the organization was somehow not in the mood and said he would not sign it because I never wrote anything good. And he told me that I did nothing, only sat on this project. And I tell him I’m here a volunteer and I do here even more then some of the staff, although I do not need to do so. And I have written this proposal and if you don't like it, I can give it to another organization if you don’t need it.. And he said: "I see! so you want to work here for another organization!” But I tell that since you don’t need this proposal, I will realize it under another. He told me something that I wept very long. (...)

Simply something that I had to sit in Ukraine and to carry out my projects there, and here I have to obey that rhythm and that order which is here and to not pop-up with my initiatives. (Interview 25) As “moral violence" we can also classify stereotyping including xenophobic and sexist elements like in the case of images of Ukrainian women as prostitutes - the last quoted interviewee mentioned it. Acts of intolerance concerning someone’s religion or beliefs also fall into that category. They were pointed out by another above-quoted interviewee who mentioned that there were “some situations” when teachers pointed out her daughter that she does not attend religious classes and is not baptized (Interview 28).

In the context of verbal abuse, the Internet is worth mentioning, as an area where the question of hate speech is often present. That is a manner of speech driven by ideology, such as racism leading to stigmatization and attacking the individual / group based on its specific factors or implicit features. In the reports of NGOs, as well as in social studies dealing with this subject, the term hate speech is mainly used as an attack against the population - mostly minority - perceived as 'foreign' ethnic dimension, national, religious, and sometimes awarded because of the sex (female), sexual orientation (those of non-heterosexual orientations), the prevalence of disability or certain socially inherited structural features (eg. lower class, working-class origins, etc.). In other words, as stated by the authors of wide-known study on hate speech, it is a community in which the membership is more a matter of assignment than of choice. The case, however, seems more complex. Well, verbal violence, which constitutes hate speech, may be made against a person / group not due to its characteristics, but because of the opinion expressed (eg, political) or a clearly defined position and belonging to the "ideological options." Then the revealed belief or line of reasoning becomes more important than gender, sexual orientation or nationality of the attacked author. However, we do not 24

mean the sharp polemics or ideological clashes, but the linguistic practice of abuse and creating an atmosphere of fear around the group / community actually or allegedly represented by the attacks.

In light of our observations, experiences of this kind are associated with the virtual intruders from the wider community against "alternative", the "alternative "means first and foremost the side of expressing aspirations and demands of emancipation of minority groups, marginalized and discriminated social categories. In this sense, sometimes hate speech as a form of attack, was faced not only by immigrants or members of minorities, but also by activists and activists of organizations and movements, anti-racist, anti-fascist, people promoting tolerance, multiculturalism and etc.

Similarly, hate speech - as an expression of misogyny and sexism - is directed not only at women as women, but also feminist activists (and, perhaps, some pro feminist men). According to this logic, the object of hatred can be not only gays, lesbians, and other people with sexual orientations different from hetero normative pattern (basically homophobia), but also people (including heterosexuals) who have publicly expressed demands of equal rights for sexual minorities from the heterosexual majority. In the language of the extreme right, all these groups-categories of marginalized / disadvantaged individuals or movements working to improve their situation, as well as participants related to ideological movements due to the "common denominator" such as emancipation, anti-war movements, alter globalist, socialist, employee and trade union, environmental, etc. - regardless of their diversity and different inspirations. Different policies are often subjected to a kind of homogenization of the stigma, making a collective enemy of them sometimes known as "ultra left", "leftists", "left", etc. Thus, in such a broad category anarchists and liberals are shown side by side as enemies of the right (also social democrats and communists, socialists and liberal Christians, etc).

This kind of hate speech can be heard on the demonstrations and counterdemonstrations of groups organized by the extreme right. It’s illustrated by one of the interviewees as threatning statement that can create a peculiar atmosphere of verbal terror such as "and instead leaves on the trees, the Communists will be hanged ", “hit once with a sickle, once with a hammer the red rabble". One of the respondents told us about the situation in which she personally faced violent comments in the internet as the author of the article on the march for the rights of sexual minorities published in one of the sites left. The comments were made by by people associated with the extreme right: Hate crimes, have luckily not reached me directly. It touched me only through insults towards my person on one of the sites run by the Polish National Rebirth. There was an extensive comment and reply to the article I wrote on the march of equality, which took place during the Festival of Equal Rights in 2010. I wrote an article which not only glorified the march, but I wanted to focus on why it is needed; that non-heterosexual orientation is not an issue of who you're sleeping with and what excites you, but a very specific consequence (...) [dealing with] the situation of social security , for example, the inheritance rights when it comes to derivatives of various benefits, opportunities for joint accountability with a partner or a partner, etc. What I meant was (...) to explain why the movement of emancipation, critical mass, must deal with the struggle for the rights of the minority. Well, this article has met a response from the NOP on one of their blog sites that began to counterattack in the form of an article in which they state that I had a left lobotomy, which means that I'm generally brainless, perverted, anti-Polish, because, I sympathize with decreasing Polish population and weakening it in the international arena.

In this sense, I think that this is violence: they totally disgraced me, used untrue inflected arguments and mentioned my name all the time in abusive contexts. I think this is also a violation of a sense of personal wealth. (Interview 38)

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2.2.1.2. Physical violence As physical violence we classify not only actual attacks resulting in injury or threat to the life, but also attempting to make such acts, in particular in situations where an attacker wishes to make the threat of violence, presents objects which can be used for it (e.g. knife) or provokes ostensibly to physical confrontation. One of the forms of violence, which is defined as a specific form of “moral violence”, having also a physical dimension, is spitting-on 5. A Wrocław resident from Cameroon was explaining why having been spat-on is a greater insult for him than having been struck: Usually when someone is calling me with bad words, I don’t react. But when someone spit on me, it’s as he deprive me of my honor, dignity. I prefer that someone would strike me, not spit on me. I come from a country where the Germans were killing whole tribes, Spitting-on has, maybe. other meaning for me.

(Interview 8).

A situation when racist verbal insults were accompanied by spitting-on is described by one student from Senegal: One day I was coming back from work and I met some guys on my way. And they started talking to me that they were Nazis. I think they were drunk. They were insulting me with stupid words like “monkey, get out from my country” and other.

And one of them spat on me. (Interview 7) Two cases of attempted physical attack, during which aggressors were not only verbally insulting a person of a different skin color, but also threatening him with a knife, were mentioned by a student from Rwanda.

During my first year in Poland, I was coming back from Rynek [the main square in Wrocław] around 2 A.M. I was with my girlfriend. I was taking her to take a bus. I saw two guys sitting on the bench. When I was passing them, they started to scream: “fuck, hey black, go back to Africa”. And one of them had a knife. Good thing happened, fortunately: two other guys came, they saw the situation and they just solved the issue. Me, I was ready to protect myself and ready to run but these guys took them away. They knew each other. There were many cases, some of them I remember. (Interview 6) On some other day, I was coming back from the University of Technology around 11 in the morning. I went to a shop and one guy started insulting me. I asked him: “Do you have a problem?” And he said: “Yes, I have a problem”. So I asked: “What is your problem?” He answered: “I don’t like your skin color”. I said: “You are stupid. It’s your problem”. I went shopping. When I got out of the shop, he was outside with his girlfriend; he was a very young boy. He asked me: “I have a problem with you”. And he showed me his knife. The girl was trying to stop him.

In that moment I saw my neighbors, it was close to my dormitory, and I called them, and they took me away. This guy was screaming after us some stupid insults: “fuck off from Poland”. But he didn’t go after us. That was my crisis situation. (Interview 6) A student from Tanzania described beating which he experienced at night before the one of 5

In the surveyed group, four persons, two of which were immigrants from Congo, one from China, and one from Bulgaria, pointed the form of violence of spitting-on.

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Wrocław night-clubs. One of the key aspects of this history is a reflection on the custom dimension of racism. It is a nourished by many racists belief that something wrong is the close contacts between members of different ethnic groups. A sexist-patriarchal argument boiling down to thought that "white women should not deal with black men”, is a frequent element of ideology of racist motivation of some white men to aggression directed against men “of foreign origin” maintaining according to the perpetrators – "too close" relationship with the "local women". Under the influence of having been beaten by racists, the below-quoted interviewee reconsidered his earlier opinion that the avoidance of meetings with Polish women would secure him against violence. He decided to do what he wants, because regardless of his attitude "there will always be someone who will hate me": I can tell you about one situation. That was my lowest moment in Poland. From that day, I changed my way of thinking. When I came to Poland I heard stories that Polish guys don’t like blacks because they date Polish girls. I decided not to date Polish girls. For me it is like that: I have got family that loves me, I don’t need that someone beat me because of a girl, and you never know when beating you may end up. I come from a different ground, if we really fight we need to fight till the end, and one of us can end up in jail. We have different culture: you can fight with me today, tomorrow I can come back if I can’t fight with you, I will with your brother – just to pay back. So I decided not to date Polish girls – I will have cool life back home, mama that loves me, so I wanna come back home safe and in one piece. So I went to a club with my friends from Belarus, we were partying, and around 2 at night, the girls wanted to go home. At the club some people started fighting, black people too. I didn’t know them. People think that if you are black, you know every black person. I didn’t care, because it was their fight, I didn’t know who was wrong, so I didn’t want to be in the middle. Then I was going out of the club. I got out first, girls needed to take their coats. I was outside waiting, somebody came after me and punched me from the back in the head. I collapsed. I wear a baseball cap, so my cap touched the ground first, then me. I couldn’t injure my head that much, but there was plenty of blood on my face and on the pavement. I couldn’t wake up for some ten minutes. When I awoke, the ambulance was there, the police was there, I tried to stand up and I went to see a doctor, do my x-ray. The doctor said that my head was OK, I went back home and had really strong headache for a week. Till know I have scar. If I haven’t wear a cap, maybe I could die there. So from that day I understood that hate is not from this that u date somebody, it doesn’t matter. I decided that I will do what I want to do, because it doesn’t matter what I do, there will always be someone who will hate me. (Interview 2) Persons who experience racist or xenophobic physical violence are not only the men. Such situations happen also to women. One of the interviewee (interview 29) mentioned acts of violence which has been subjected to: spitting-on her face on the street, poking, yanking, pushing, kick in the abdomen in school. In turn, an activist of Wroclaw Roma told about a group attack, during which the perpetrators beat a man and a woman: Sometime in 2009 maybe two or three attacks, because the made these machinecasinos in Brochów [a district in Wrocław] where we live (…) and the Roma were sitting there and playing. And they came and attacked with baseball bats.

Fortunately, everything was barred, because later the Police said that someone sat them to drive this competitor, a Pole, away from there, so just one would stay.

And the first resigned out of fear, and just one stayed. And the Roma came there also, but there were no longer brawls. There was the police, there was monitoring.

They were in balaclavas, came in four cars. Some ten of them were. With baseball 27

bats they started to hit everything. They closed the door and beat just one lady and one bloke, a Rom, a he spend in hospital maybe more than 7 days. (Interview 21) In the previous section we quoted a comprehensive narrative of a respondent, which have identified as a participant in "alternative" socio-cultural activities. The caller spoke about the local history of the conflict caused by sub-cultural violence on the side of neo-Nazi and ultra-nationalist groups and organizations. It should be noted, however, that this conflict exceeded significantly the inter-environmental tensions and it meant a many-years-lasting atmosphere of terror and intimidation among a substantial part of the Wroclaw youth which, in some way, distinguish themselves by their appearance recognized as deviated from the final model of Polishness (punk or hippie clothes and hair style, the dreadlocks, various ornaments, including necklaces, patches, badges or other pacifist or anarchist emblems, non-Christian religious symbols, and even certain types of shoes and bags, etc.). It is worth quoting the early-90s examples of physical violence carried out by extreme right-wing groups and caused by their hate for otherness at the level of life style or appearance: Speaking of these most serious accidents, many people ended up in hospital. One such serious one took place in Popowice [district of Wroclaw], where they beat up a girl. She walked with a mohawk. They beat her, broke her cheek bone and something else, she finished in the hospital, and because someone’s, named "Herman", mother was a prosecutor, they came to the hospital and even intimidated her. She was from, she flew away to Szczecin, and everything had been finished without any end.. From such serious cases ... "Kwadrat", which got three times with a knife, was beaten, attacked by a group of several dozen skinheads, fascists, could be that boneheads, because they were not necessarily just skinheads. Because since some moment one could not talk only about skinheads, but boneheads. Maybe they were fans, and maybe also some of their supporters. He, alone, was attacked by dozens of people, and beaten with baseball bats,, and then someone came back and three or four times stabbed him with a knife, when he was laying unconscious. He survived. They pierced his lung, arm and something else. That same day, it was the same action, some girl, I'm sure it was also open fracture of the cheekbone (...) the guys fled. It was the same day, here in Wroclaw. For sure my then girlfriend, I can not say which teat it was, but it was after my finishing school, she was attacked at the station, escaped to the post office, they grabbed her backpack and a belt, and against a pillar encased in such à la marble, swinging her and beating her head against the edge, crashing her head in I don’t know how many places, slitting. (Interview 37) The cited examples of violence motivated by hatred are just some of the cases, which were mentioned by interviewees. Certainly they did not also tell about all such experiences during the interviews. It happens that person exposed to the violence motivated by hatred do not wish to report their experiences to others, often avoiding to report to the Police or other institutions. It is possible, however, to read “between the lines" that it cannot be excluded that such cases occur. As an example, we can use expressions two interviewees from Bulgaria, heard during talks carried out within the frames of participatory observation on the Dworzec Świebodzki marketplace in Wrocław.

A man, who since twenty years lives with his family in a small town on the Lower Silesia and occupies himself with trade, asked how he lives in Poland, admitted that better than in the country from which he arrived. He stated, however, that "it could be various". A woman staying in Poland since seven years, living with her family out of Wrocław, spoke similarly. Asked how the Poles treat her, she shook her head and said that “it could be various", sometimes good, sometimes bad. In the context of the situation of migrants from Bulgaria the tendency to diminishing the importance of 28

unpleasant or dangerous experience, it seems striking in comparison with the statements of three men who were in the sample of respondents - sellers from the market (notes at the end of the survey). One of them, a 25-year-old man was stabbed in the stomach. He claimed that the motive of the perpetrators may have been their reluctant due to the knowledge of the fact that he is Bulgarian.

The event took place after the respondent refused to pay a ransom of 30 PLN. The man also said that in the workplace (the bazaar), insults and threats happen. The second respondent (25-year-old) confirmed the course of this incident, also talked about insults faced in the bazaar, for example, from the side of the customers approaching the stand calling them “Romanian”, or “Gypsy”. The third interlocutor also spoke about the above described attack on his colleague. Moreover, he said that after drinking beer in a public place he was taken to the police station where a policeman scorched his hand with a cigarette (he showed his scars to a pollster).

What can raise a vigilance in someone exploring the problem of violence motivated by hatred is that statement, “it could be various”, which seams to appear frequently in voices of immigrants and persons belonging to other minority ethnic, national or religious groups. Sometimes such statements are preceded by the conjunctive “but”, after previously expressing an opinion that, in Poland, “the life is good”. That generalization of euphemism draws, however, attention on two questions: 1) a fact that unpleasant situations happen, and existence in Poland is not free of threats; 2) a fact that the interviewees could afraid (or do not want because of other reason) to speak openly about their negative experiences. A problem of avoiding the subject of racism and xenophobia were observed by us also during one conversation with an immigrant from China (Interview 18). That interviewee was very careful during giving the interview. You could have impression that declaring on the Poles and on his own experiences in a new country, does not wants to talk about matters which were unpleasant and disagreeable. Knowing that the persons conducting the interview were the Poles, the respondent was very careful in providing feedback about the Poles and Poland 6.

6 The tendency to "euphemisation" in the description of the experience of racism, to diminish an importance of violence or to deny it, was showed also by interviewee in research carried out by a team of German-Polish in 2008 see B. Grell et al., Hate Crime Monitoring and Victim Assistance in Poland and Germany, Never more, Opferperspektive, Berlin 2009, p. 94-95. Possibly, the using of euphemisms can be seen as a broader problem of tabooization of hate violence referring both to the population from which to derive the offender and to the groups exposed to this violence. For an example of analysis of euphemisms in a “linguistic communion” of a parent community in the context of the anti-Semitism in Poland, see A. Podbielska, "Różnie to bywa z sąsiadami »Czarne eufemizmy« in My z Jedwabnego Anna Bikont, Societas/Communitas, no 2 (8), 2009. The author discusses "black euphemisms" as a means of cultivating "the collusion of silence" on the side of the parent community. Perhaps in the case of immigrants we can speak about a kind of adopting the strategy of “euphemisation”, but surely there are also completely different reasons, which may include: fear of further stigmatization or revealing (especially in the case of an uncertain legal status in a new country), fear of offenders’ revenge, reluctance to reconstruct traumatic experiences in someone’s or the need to reduce a cognitive dissonance which consists in the fact of "better living" in a new country with experiences of bias, discrimination, anxiety or aggression from the surroundings.

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2.2.2. Places and occurrences Where and in what circumstances may someone be exposed to violence motivated by hatred? The first coming-to-mind answer to this question suggests that there is “no rules" regrding that issue. Verbal or physical violence can occur wherever there are perpetrators sufficiently determined to give the word reluctance to persons recognized by them as a "foreign" or "undesirable". In part 1. we showed that the situation of degrading and discrimination took place both in the context of short contact on the street or in the shop and in the informal social relationships (sometimes from family members or flat-friends) among colleagues in the workplace, as well as in contacts with representatives of public institutions (railways, health care, education, offices, police, etc.). One of the questions posed in the survey concerned the sites, in which, in the past two years (2009-2010), the surveyed met personally with behavior motivated by hostility to foreigners or witnessed such behavior. Allowed to choose more than one answer, the respondents indicated the following places where they met with various forms of hate violence (non-physical and physical): "on the street" - 9 persons; in a mean of public transport (tram, bus) - 7 people; in a bar, restaurant or club - 7 persons; in the workplace - 6 people; at school or college - 4 persons. In addition, one person admitted that such a case occurred at the police station, where the perpetrator of violence (hand cigarette scorch) was a police officer. Some differences in the experience of respondents in the context of sites of the incidents were indicating. Then, the “street” was more often pointed by respondents from non-European countries (7 persons) than by those from Europe (2 persons). This may be associated with a greater physical difference of the first group to the Polish environment (e.g., skin color, facial features), which may be associated with higher exposure to the experience of racist and xenophobic violence. It is also worth to mention that the reluctance in the workplace was experienced only by respondents from European countries. This may be due to the fact that the Europeans made up the majority of working people in the surveyed sample.

The statements of the respondents both in the surveyed group and in the group of people who gave in-depth interviews, however, point to the existence of Wroclaw specific “greater caution zones" - places or areas in which, particularly in the evening hours and the night, people, who are aware that they could meet the threat, would not appear. Below (Table 4) we present a summary of twelve selected areas of Wroclaw. The names of these districts or sites have been included in the survey form, and the task was to identify by the respondents if they believe they are safe. In the table we present these sites ordered from these places perceived as the most dangerous (so-called "Bermuda Triangle" or the street area of Kosciuszko, Pulaski and Traugutta) to those seen as the most secure (so-called "Grunwald"or settlement Grunwaldzki) 7. Ordering criterion is the average grade on the four-level scale from "absolutely safe" ("1") "absolutely dangerous" (value "4"). We also present the most common indications for a given location (modal value) and some important observations on the indications for the various areas of the city.

7 It is worth noting the significant difference in respondents' gender in relation to two locations: the Rynek and the Main Railway Station. Among respondents who identified Rynek ("definitely" or "rather") as hazardous were only men (7 persons), and negative ratings for the Main Railway Station came from 14 men and only form 3 women.

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Table 4. Perception of safety in selected places in Wrocław.

Number of people knowing the place a

Averageb

Modal valuec

Bermuda Triangle (Oławskie district; streets Kościuszki, Traugutta, Pułaskiego)

14

1.03.2021

“definitely dangerous ”

No responses “definitely safe”

Niepold Precinct

22

2,64

“rather dangerous ”

No responses “definitely safe/dangerous”

Psie Pole

17

2,59

“rather safe”

A slightly higher number of responses “safe” than “dangerous” (9/8)

Railway Station

34

2,56

“rather safe”

The same number of responses “dangerous” and “safe”(17/17)

Great Island (Sępolno, Biskupin, Zalesie, Zacisze)

13

2,38

“rather safe”

No responses “definitely safe/dangerous”

Księże Male

10

2,30

“rather safe”

No responses “definitely safe”

Krzyki, Gaj

18

2,22

“rather safe”

No responses “definitely safe/dangerous”

Nadodrze

16

2,19

„raczej bezpieczne”

No responses “definitely safe/dangerous”

Śródmieście

31

2,13

“rather safe”

No responses “definitely safe”

Official or colloquial name of the district

Notes

Market Square

34

2,09

“rather safe”

Out of 7 respondents who rated the place as dangerous, 5 described it as “definitely dangerous”

So i okolice

24

2,04

“rather safe”

–

Grunwald (Grunwaldzki Square and vicinites)

33

1,85

“rather safe”

No responses “definitely dangerous”

a

The number of respondents on which the average value was based.

1 – definitely safe, 2 – rather safe, 3 – rather dangerous, 4 – definitely dangerous. The higher the value of the average, the more frequently perception of the place as dangerous. c The most frequent response among respondents who know a given place. b

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As can be seen in the Table above, foreign residents in Wrocław feel especially insecure in the area of nightclubs, the Niepold Precinct. It is confirmed by the respondents who participated in in-depth interviews. Sometimes they also mentioned clubs in the area of the Market Square. These are the most significant “areas of greater caution” in Wrocław – where people, aware that they may meet with threat, prefer not to appear, especially at night. Those places include areas of night-clubs.

A student from Congo (Interview 11) admitted that tries not to go to clubs at night and generally very rarely leave the dormitory at night. Others interviewees from African countries gave ambivalent responds noting that the issue of their safety in Wroclaw depends on what kind of people they spend their daily time with, and on a degree of their vigilance. A student from Senegal (interview 7), asked whether he regards Wrocław as a safe for foreigners, used the words "it depends". And although he “generally” regards the city, where he studies, as a “safe place”, he admitted: "Of course there are places that you can’t go at night as a Black person like me". A Wrocław resident from Cameroon statet in turn: There are places in Wrocław, where I feel safe, and places, where I don’t feel so. (...) It depends on the surroundings in which you stay. Here, where we are now, in the dormitory, nothing like that’s happen. But in other places you may meet hell on earth. On the streets, in night-clubs, on buses, in shops. (Interview 8) A student from Rwanda told about one racist provocation and a determined verbal confrontation, finally finished with escape of Black participants of a night-club party: Once I went to a club with my friends, we had some drinks and we were dancing.

And some Polish guys they start to call us: “gangsta paradise”, “blacks”, and other. We were drunk a bit, and we said to them: “fuck off”. They called for more guys, they were like fifteen, we had to run from the club. (Interview 6) Another place, where immigrants or members of other minority groups may meet with such racist xenophobic attacks, is the public transportation. Repeatedly, among places, listed by the interviewee as possible for hate violence, appeared a bus or a tram. The following two situations illustrate a situation of tension caused by violence of racists during going by tram, when there were insults, spitting-on, or attempts to spit-on Black passengers.

Once I was on a tram with my friend, a Black girl, a few young guys were standing around us. On the next stop they wanted to get out, they were close to the door and they wanted to spit on us. One guy heard that they were talking about doing it and in the moment that one of them was about spitting, the guy grabbed him and said to him: “Don’t do it”. They went off the tram and the guy told us that he heard that they were planning to spit on us. He felt really bad. My friend was so sad and angry that she wanted to finish with school and come back to Nigeria. I don’t want to say that Africa is so peaceful, it depends on the country, but in Tanzania it would not happen that someone spat on you because you are White. (Interview 2) I was with my friend, in a tram and then comes one guy in rush to us and he said something that we didn’t understand and my friend just shook his head, then another came and spat on him. I was so so surprised and shocked, no one even said a one word to him, no one cared. Human being spat on another human being (...) It was my first month in Poland, I knew that there were skinheads in Europe, but I was so surprised and shocked, so we didn’t say nothing to them. Now I understood this word very well: “go back to Africa” and whatever. It was normal looking guys, about 23 years old. I remember this moment very well, ‘cause that was my first incident. (Interview 3) 32

Also, one respondent related to the "alternative" environment (punk scene) admitted that sometime it came to fight on a bus. He and his colleague were attacked by three persons, "because we had earrings, and rode on a tram" (Interview 39). A place, which sometimes could be a space of threat, is also the Wrocław Main Station. One of persons visiting Wrocław (an American gay of Jewish origin) described a robbery done by a group of skinheads when he had arrived at the railway station: At the train station, I had the pleasure to meet three skinheads who jumped me and stole everything of mine: bags, passport, suitcase, keys, glasses, everything.

I’m healthy and safe. None of my bones were broken, and I have all my teeth.

Things could have been a lot worse, and I’m just lucky that they weren't! (e-mail correspondence)

2.2.3. Perpetrators

Trying to find an answer for the question, who are perpetrators of hate violence, we should admit that our research allow only to signalize that issue. The first reason of the limitation of analysis relates to the very objects of the research, which are experiences of persons exposed to racists or xenophobic violence, not socio-psychological determinants of the perpetrators’ behavior.

The second reason is linked with a limitation of the very empiric material - the interviewees often did not specify perpetrators of hate violence and degrading behavior, usually giving just their general description and reporting a situation.

On the basis of given answers we can, however, reconstruct some characteristics of persons performing the acts of hate violence. There are two categories in particular: • young men8, including football supporters, often drunk „mostly men, 16-30 years old" (Interview 11) „always men. Sometimes drunk people, street boys, but most of the time young men my age”.

(Interview 6) “drunk people or football fans” (Interview 4) •

men revealing extreme right views, nationalist, neo-Nazis ones, openly expressing racism or national chauvinism, including skinheads; these groups have been mentioned above in the context of experiences of alternative and sub-cultural social activities; the responses below come from African students and a woman from Ukraine: I met some guys on my way. And they started talking to me, they were saying they were Nazis. (...) And one of them spat on me. (Interview 7) Once a guy spat on me. It was two years ago. Me and my polish friends went to a place where rock music was played. I had never been there before. One guy, really huge saw me and spat on me. He removed his T-shirt and I saw the swastika on it.

8 It is confirmed by the respondents. Most of them reported that perpetrators were male (25; only 2 mentioned only women; 2 mentioned both men and women). According to the majority of respondents, the perpetrators were young.

Six respondents reported perpetrators older than 30, three mentioned perpetrators older than 40, and one mentioned a 60+ year old.

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I was really scared and I called the police. But before the police came, a security guy saw the situation and removed him from the place. (Interview 6) Re.: It was still the worst in 90s. I think people of Wroclaw can remember this fireplaces on Rynek [the main square of Wrocław]. I lived near the main square at that time and I had some arguments with skinheads myself. And it happened, for example, that you were sitting before the National Museum, reading a book, and that was no problem for anybody, and a good-looking sir comes to you and asks: “Excuse me, what time is it? You try to answer, but don’t finish your sentence 'cause already receive a punch (...)

Q: Is was because he’d sensed your accent?

Re.: Well, such people are sensible to such things, nowadays there is no them any more, at least I hope so. I guess it was just his way of having fun or entertain himself, and something like this happened to me few times. It was painful, troublesome. Once I bumped into a skinhead myself, he just elbowed his way to the queue to a public phone at Rynek – at those days people used to call using mostly public phones. (Interview 28) Some of the interviewees indicated experiences that deviate from descriptions above. In case of Wrocławianer originating from Mexico (Interview 30) people showing her reluctance or aggression were: "a man 50 maybe 60 years old, with mustache and beard, and he was really rude" , and ""an older woman, maybe 60 years old". A respondent from Cameroon said in turn that it happened to him to be offended, in a public place, by a child whom he wanted to help: In most of cases, perpetrators are men, but it happened to me to be attacked by women also. Once at Rynek, I saw a little girl, she seemed to be lost, so I came to her and tried to help, but what I heard from her was: “go away, bamboo". I was surprised. (Interview 8)

2.2.4. Categories of persons exposed and particularly vulnerable to hate violence

On the basis of the foregoing considerations, we can extract the categories of persons who are particularly vulnerable to hate violence and the categories of those, whose life in Poland, for certain reasons is more easy and more secure. The available material does not, however, allow to specify a relative variation of frequency of aggressions towards particular categories of persons, or to carry out statistical analysis of significance of differences. We therefore treat presented typology as a hypothesis based on collected material, which needs to be verified in a quantitative research on a bigger sample of interviewees. In Table 5. relationship between the membership of a given category and a probable degree of risk of hate violence is illustrated. Categories were distinguished according to key, in our opinion, dimensions of status differentiation and other ethnic-cultural characteristics: 1) difference of appearance (skin color, features, eye appearance, hair, etc., may also relate to clothing revealing the origin connected to otherness or cultural difference; may also relate to belonging to a religious minority; 2) linguistic difference (the degree of knowledge of the Polish language, an accent while speaking in Polish, as well as using a language different than English in public places. 3) relatively common “civilization” stereotype in Polish social awareness 34

as a division between “the East” and “the West” 9, 4) legal status (holding/not-holding the citizenship of the Republic of Poland or other EU country; and 5) status related to a possibility/obstacles for free activities or solving the problems in a context of belonging to a specified group or a minority category (“dividing” line runs between those ones who belong to a group recognized by the Polish law, e.g. by Act on National and Ethnic Minorities, and on the regional language from 200510, and those ones who are out of official minorities). Dichotomous division within the category, "the threat of violence motivated hatred" ("relatively small" / "relatively large") is indicative only. It can be treated as a conventional approximation of actual or potential experiences of the interviewees and persons from the same or similar categories separated on the basis of status differentiation and other ethno-cultural characteristic. In practice, individual experiences may differ from this scheme 11. It seems reasonable also to verify that statement in the future research using a broader scale down the intensity of the threats.

9

Adoption of a division according to "the stereotype of civilization," is justified the results of a survey the Public Opinion Research Centre (CBOS) conducted in January 2010. The author of the recent studies, writes that among the nations, “towards which the surveyed declare rather reluctance than sympathy or both of those feelings, and even though declarations of sympathy outweigh – just slightly”, they rate "our eastern neighbors and the nations of the Balkans (with the exception of the Greeks and Croats), inhabitants of the Caucasus and the Far East (except Japanese), as well as Arabs, Jews and Germans. (...) Above all two stereotypes influence the attitude of :the wealthy, civilized "West" and the poor, generally culturally backward "East." (...) "The West" for the Poles is a positive reference group with which they identify and to which they want to belong. From the "East" - as a negative reference groups - would prefer to cut off, distance, thus not wanting to be associated." The author stresses that the tendency such a polarization of stereotypes can be observed in the surveys conducted by CBOS since 2005. An additional "mechanism, observed in recent years, shaping the likes and dislikes of Poles is belonging to the European Union - EU nations belong to the" more popular "than others (this also applies to nations perceived as related in the sense of historical experience, Czechs and Hungarians, for example) except Germans and Latvians.

In the case of the Germans, “low quotes" may be explained by the bias resulting from the images of historical events stored in the collective memory. The author indicates the difficulty to develop explanations regarding the Latvians because of the small number of "explicit opinions on them." Another exception is Bulgarians, situated in the factor analysis also among the nations "less popular", but gaining twice more declarations of sympathy than reluctance (the result was caused by a high percentage of "neutral" responds). Among nations "the most disliked", in the cited survey, they rate the following groups: Gypsies, Arabs (generally categorized as one national group), Romanians and Turks. CBOS’s survey does not include sub-Saharan African nations. See CBOS, BS/12/2010, Stosunek Polaków do innych narodów, oprac. Katarzyna Wądołowska, Warszawa, January 2010.

10 Article 2 of Act on National or Ethnic Minorities and Regional Language defines a national or ethnic minority as a group of Polish citizens who meet the following conditions: 1) is numerically smaller than the rest of the population of the Polish Republic; 2) significantly differs from the other citizens in the language , culture or tradition, 3) seeks to preserve its language, culture or tradition, 4) is aware of its own historical, national community, [or ethnicity - in the case of ethnic minorities], and is focused on its expression and protection, 5) their ancestors inhabited the present territory of Polish Republic for at least 100 years. "The sixth criterion defines the difference between the two categories: the national minority "is identified with a nation organized in its own country", while in the case of the ethnic minorities there is no need for this kind of identification. The law recognizes nine national minorities (Belarusian, Czech, Lithuanian, German, Armenian, Russian, Slovak, Ukrainian and Jewish), and 4 ethnic minorities (Karaim, Lemko, Roma and Tatar).

11 In addition to the group-relating factors increasing - as it seems – a possibility of exposure to hate violence, (skin color, clothing betraying cultural or religious diversity, poor knowledge of Polish, etc.), the experiences described in this elaboration depend, to some extent, on a given case, circumstances and individual situation (e.g. one of the interviewees pointed out that the large stature allows him to feel safer: „I believe that if you are small, because I am big (188 cm), it’s worse. The bigger you are, the less often those situations happen to you. My friends are smaller than me and they have problems more often. To me it happened, but comparing to them it’s rare”. [Interview 6]). In this sense, people who have not experienced violence cannot be treated as dominating cases and their relatively secure situation as conclusive for all immigrants and members of other minority groups.

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Table 5. Differentiation regarding status and other ethnic-cultural characteristic of the interviewed persons in the “particularly vulnerable to hate violence” category.

Dimensions of differentiating of status and other ethnic-cultural characteristics

Threat of hate violence Relatively small

Relatively large

Minorities „invisible” (White)

Minorities „visible” (mostly skin color)

Good knowledge of Polish (lack of accent)

Poor knowledge of Polish strong accent, speaking in other language

„Stereotype of civilization”

„West”

„Wschód”

Individual legal status

Citizens of the EU (including Poles)

Immigrants out of the EU

Minority status

Ethnical and national minorities recognized by Polish Law

Persons out of officially recognized minorities

Visibility: difference of appearance

Visibility: language, accent

The interviewees realized the existence of the relationship between the differentiation of status/characteristics and a degree of exposure to hate violence, shown in the table presented above.

The first conclusion from the interviews and observations concerns the relative reduction in the risk of violence towards those involved in "alternative" cultural-artistic scene or just with a distinctive look that could be considered different from dominant patterns. Although over the previous two years there have been incidents, such as spitting, verbal abuse and hate threats towards the people in this category, they do not seem to have been universal. What is more, there is an increasing popularity of alternative appearance in young generation of Poles: clothing, hair styles (such as dreadlocks, mohawks, etc.), wearing earrings in the visible parts of the body (body piercing), tattoos, etc. It seems that due to influence of mass culture, appearances that only several years ago could be considered controversial are not perceived abnormal anymore. In some environments they have become a fashion, differentiator and even an advantage. Moreover, as one of the respondents said, in his circles he can count on friends who know what to do and how to help in difficult situations. Knowledge about their rights, self-confidence and lack of language barrier make people from these groups able to cope and fight for a place in society. They can also count on mutual aid.

The exception are sexual minorities and/or those actively participating in activities for this group, 36

and to some extent, other participants in broadly defined left-libertarian social and political activities. Second observation, expressed by the interviewees themselves, concerns the belief that violence, which in previous years was directed at - as it was said above – the "alternative circles", today is targeted at foreigners, especially people with distinctive appearance (skin color). One of respondents describes the situation of the group exposed to hate violence: If previously the focus was on punk-rockers, at this moment it seems to concern colored people, certainly immigrants. I mean aggression. It especially concerns black people, with darker shade of skin, and also gay and left-wing activists.

(Interview 37) Another respondent, associated with the “alternative circles” and a citizen of another country, also identified the color of skin as a factor increasing the risk of racist violence: It seems to me that some people are badly treated because of their skin color. Me, I do not look different, and I do not have any problems with right-wingers, because I look very Slavic. It seems to me that people who look different have much greater problems. And I do not mean idiots from the nationalist organizations, but the “common folk”. When there is a black person walking down the street, you know that many people will stare at them. (…) People stare at me because I have tattoos and generally I look different: but it is not like: “Here comes the Belorussian”. (Interview 22).

A respondent from Ukraine (Interview 28), who has got contacts with Polish nationalists (skinheads), and who is aware of racism present in skinheads' environment, and is also critical to it, said that she - being a Slavic - does not feel threatened.

Hatred is spread evenly, and now it just focuses more on the Black world, on everything that is dark. That is why, as a Slavic, I do not feel threatened.

(Interview 28) An interviewee from Denmark (Interview 33) states that she has not experienced discrimination in Poland because of her ethnicity. As she said, she looked like a Pole, and therefore she had no problems on the street or on the bus. A Mexican (Interview 30), who experienced discrimination at the railway station (see 2.1.1.1.) because - as she claimed – her appearance (she thought that she could be regarded as Rom). She admit, however, that generally she does not experience reluctance because of her appearance: "I am very lucky that I have such a fair complexion." Another interviewee from Latin America (Colombia), when asked if Wroclaw is a safe place for foreigners said that because of his appearance ("blue eyes", "dark-blond hair") he is less vulnerable to attacks than immigrants from Africa or Asia, but it happened to him sometimes that he crossed cautiously the street when he seeing a group of skinheads: But it depends on where you are coming from. I’m Colombian but I don’t look much different than Polish people. I have blue eyes and dark blond hair, so people in the street can take me as a Polish person. I think that people from Africa or Asia can have some problems here and I know this from stories told by foreigners.

I have been living in Bogota for all my life and it is a really dangerous city so Wroclaw is rather safe for me. I don’t see dangerous situations in the streets. I feel safe in Wroclaw, but when few times it happend to me to spotted groups of skinheads walking towards me I would rather go to another side of the street, because I was afraid. (Interview 10) Some people have pointed out that they met with reluctance of surroundings when someone captured their "non-Polish" accent. An example would be a respondent from Ukraine: 37

A bus driver has shouted at us. We talked in English. We sat at the end of the bus and it was really funny, got lost, going to Koszarowa street., and knew that somewhere there has to be turn and we’re going nobody knew where and it was night and I was the only person who spoke Polish. I went to ask the driver: "Excuse me, where are we going? We got lost. What is that bus stop? "The bus driver turns to me and says:"Where are you from? From Russia? From Ukraine?

From Belarus? What is this behavior? What is it at all? "He had noticed my accent. (Interview 16) In case of cited before respondent originating from Mexico, who does not consider her appearance as particularly distinctive, it is a difference of language - speaking Spanish in public, or hearing her accent when she speaks Polish - may be a criterion for triggering an aggression of a hostile-toforeigner environment.

Fortunately, I do not have such a dark complexion. Generally when I get on a tram or a bus they do not pay attention on me. Well, the European complexion.

Simply. But as I begin to speak, sometimes ... for example when I'm talking on my mobile in Spanish all people look straight at me. (...) Or when I go to a playground with my child. I had a situation that when I came to a playground and my son was playing with other children, their mothers had no problem with it as long as they could hear me saying something to him in Polish but with a forgein accent and one mother quickly took their children. Sometimes I prefer not to speak at all when I'm at a playground with my son. (Interview 30) Another dimension of differencing the experiences is connected with the existence of the polarized “East/West” stereotypes. A respondent from Ukraine said about humiliations linked with stereotyping of immigrants from the former Soviet Union as “the people from the East”: My mother had such a situation, but it’s hard to tell it. That’s slogans like “it’s come here and demands something”. Showing that to the person who must handle the relation is worse. “Don’t ask us for anything.” (Interview 28) The respondent told also a “quite recent” story of her friend, a student coming from western Ukraine. This person has experienced negative stereotyping on the part of a certified translator. She wanted to use her services in connection with obligatory translating of documents needed in Poland: I have recommended her that lady interpreter, whit whom I have been cooperating for years. And she seemed to be very friendly, she translates from Ukrainian and Russian, she is a sworn translator. My friend went to her with papers and got such a proposal: "You wash all the windows in my home, and I will translate it for you." And that’s not the first time when someone reports me that when Polish people see an Ukrainian or Russian, they immediately consider them as cleaners.

It is also promoted by media. For example you can see it on the Internet. Even small children know that women speaking with Eastern accent are not doing anything else besides cleaning. (Interview 28) In turn, an interviewee from Canada draws attention to the privilege of a positive stereotype of "Western man" At the same time he expressed his embarrassment because of "too nice", as he called it, attitude of people to him just because he comes from a wealthy country: It is obvious that I’m a stranger. But often, people think I'm from Czech Republic or Slovakia, because people think it is impossible I'm from Canada and speak Polish. I'm actually half-Asian, because my father is Chinese, and here on the street, people have the same eyes as I do, maybe because of the Tartar blood, 38

maybe they think I am one of them... if I was a Negro or Asian it would be a bigger problem. (...) But when people see that I'm from Canada, they think, "Oh! You're from a rich country". People are to friendly to me and I often do not like to say “I'm from Canada”. They always ask the same question: "Where are you from? Where are you from?" Well, I have enough of such questions; sometimes I lie and say I'm from Czech Republic. (...) When I show my Canadian passport to the police I'm still in much much better situation than an Ukrainian even tough I am here illegally. (Interview 31) Another example of people being treated favorably because of an origin associated, in the collective imagination of Poles, with a positive stereotype of a foreigner from the country not-creating controversy, was given by an interviewee from Hungary (Interview 17). This man believes that Poles treat him very well because he is a foreigner. He stated simply that he wish to speak purely in Polish to be able to see how they would treat him, thinking that he is a Pole. He believes that he has the same rights as Poles. He told about one situation when he was in contact with the municipal guards. He was with his friend from Ukraine. Initially, the guards thought that they were Poles then they thought they were from Ukraine, so their attitude toward them has changed, but when they finally learned that the interviewee is from Hungary, they changed their attitude toward them into more positive. At the end the mandate was not issued.

It is also worth to pay attention to diversity of situations of different minority groups in the context of difference of status as a minority. One example could be the Roma. A citizen of Wrocław originating from Bulgaria told about problems faced by Bulgarian Roma living in Lower Silesia.

Although the burning issues in this group include lack of education of children, as well as exposure to discrimination and racist attacks, local NGOs are not necessarily concerned with the Roma people coming from outside Poland: Since PROM has been just next door, and they do social work with Romas and Polish, they work together and do a variety of projects and educational activities, we told them few times that there is a lot of Bulgarian Gypsies. But they always answer: "We cannot manage with our Romas" (Interview 26) Perhaps the fact that the Bulgarian (but also the Romanian) Roma are not formally (in the light of the Act on Minorities) part of the Roma ethnic minority, as persons not-being citizens of the Republic of Poland, makes them not feeling safe enough in situations when they meet with reluctance of the environment. According to an official of the Honorary Consulate of the Republic of Bulgaria in Wroclaw (Interview 36), the Bulgarian Roma do not report acts of violence, they only come for help or advice in matters of the documents, but she committed that victims of hate violence motivated are women exported to Poland from Bulgaria (among them teenage Roma ).

This respondent argued that even if living conditions in Poland are difficult, for many people it still means a relatively better living standard and less exposure to racism than in their country of origin: The Bulgarian Roma (...) they come here when they feel there is no other way for them, but they never come and say that someone harasses them. (...) If such a thing occurred, for example if they got beaten because they are Roma, it is likely we would have a signal. (...) The Bulgarian Roma are coming here to settle down.

There are areas they usually stay in: Trzebnica, Oleśnica, Strzegom (towns around Wrocław). It is a fact that they live in terrible conditions. But they feel better than in Bulgaria, because the attitudes to the Roma in Bulgaria are very negative. (...) I would say: they are used to living in bed conditions there and they believe they can have better life here because people do not treat them as badly as there. And it is probably because they do work, they do have some money they can survive with, and some kind of stability there, they simply feel better here. I 39

mean maybe they are able to adapt themselves to conditions they find in a new place, because, as I sad, they live in such conditions in their own country. But they do not complain. We never encountered anything like this, that someone slanders them, etc. No. They come here in other cases, some documents and so on (Interview 36) One of the respondents quoted before pointed out a general difficulty of various groups without any state support, and therefore a visible difference of “initial conditions”, development opportunities and increasing their visibility within the socio-cultural scene of Wrocław: For all ethnic groups is very hard to appear on the scene of this expanding city.

Well, on the other hand there are also different initial conditions for example Germans get a great support, or Jews. Maybe just our country hasn't still grown up enough to support its minorities living abroad. We support our embassy by playing for them for free. (Interview 26)

2.2.5. Response strategy

By "response strategy" to hate violence, we mean taking actions by people directly threatened with violence or anticipating it, to reduce/remove a threat or a full or partial reduction of its risk. We mean here the actions constituting a response (reaction) with an intentional character ("Strategy"). It should be noted, however, that the "intention" does not necessarily mean early planning or thinking of the action, but may be related to the particular circumstances and in this sense occur "spontaneously", usually as a part or an effect on an earlier more general definition of the situation of a person exposed to the discussed type of violence.

Below are a few types of the response strategies reconstructed on the basis of statements of the interviewees. They can be divided into three categories: 1) reactions involving the avoidance of confrontation in emergency, 2) confrontational reactions, 3) strategies intended to prevent hazardous situations, 4) response strategies involving the search of help. In this section we analyze the first three categories, while the fourth one will discussed in the next section dedicated to experiencing and searching the help. In addition to the types of strategies to respond to violence, we discuss also examples of rationalization (justification or excuse) undertaken for the strategy and associated methods to explain their situation by persons who have experienced hate violence.

Among the response strategies involving the avoidance of confrontation with people presenting verbal violence (or using other forms of symbolic intimidation), and threatening physical violence or using it, quite often it is to ignore the harassment, insults or threats. A student from Nigeria said that "he tries not to hear” abusive and vulgar remarks directed toward him on the street: Some drunk people or football fans passing me on the street and shouting to me not nice things like “monkey, go to Africa” or “fuck off from here”. But I ignore that. It doesn’t disturb me. I walk and just block my ears; I’m trying not to hear them. (Interview 4) Another interviewee, a student from Tanzania ignored physical aggression (he was pushed) on the side of a Polish student in a University building. According to this account, the perpetrator had already been used a verbal provocations and attempted to humiliate the interviewee. The respondent 40

also mentioned the fact that before he had decided to ignore such situations. In the past, he had been going into a fight, but then he did not see the point of confrontation: I had one situation: I was working on a computer at the Univeristy and other computers were occupied, but I noticed that people were only checking emails.

And then a big guy, Polish, approached me and said that I had to finish ‘cause he wanted to use this computer. I just asked him if he was serious and we exchanged some not nice words. He thought that he had some priority because he’s Polish. I met him a few times in a corridor and he pushed me but I ignored it. I could change this situation, I could fight. But what for? I did it before in the past, but not anymore. (Interview 2) A Pole of Tanzanian origin also holds the strategy of ignoring aggression of the environment, although she admits that it is rather a kind of external mask, as she takes such situations very painfully, unable to understand the sources and nature of racist hostility against her: I’m totally giving them a miss, not reacting at all, but I admit that sometimes I just pretend to be tough when everything inside me is falling apart because I do not understand that hatred. (Interview 29) When asked about his reaction to the insult, a student from Rwanda said that he has long been ignoring them. He rationalized that approach by the fact that he had a more important goal to achieve, his completion of studies in Poland, and taunts of "stupid people" cannot dissuade him from what is the most essential to him: I don’t care. I am trying not to listen to them. For long time now, I have not been reacting. Nobody can stop me from my aim: I am here for education. I’m too strong to be nervous or stressed about stupid insults like “monkey” or “Poland is for the Poles”. I don’t let those stupid people let me down. (Interview 6) Although "almost daily" meeting with verbal aggression on the street, that interviewee explained the situation by the fact that "everywhere you can meet good people and stupid, bad people."

Another respondent cited earlier (Interview 2) stated that "he prefers to ignore than to have problems." He explained racist behavior of young people by their ignorance: Young people copy some stupid things from others not even thinking about it. If you ask them why they are doing it or why they don’t like Blacks, they won’t know or will give you an answer such as “because you are from Africa”. They don’t know what to say. It makes no sense. (Interview 2) An interlocutor from Japan (Interview 1), who has not met with physical violence, although she admitted that "once in a while met stupid people, " explained that "everywhere it is the same."

While "sometimes" children made fun of her, she rationalized this fact with an argument, that they were just kids and they did never hurt her. "Another interviewee, commenting on the incident, during which he was humiliated by a racist term by a baby girl, whom he wanted to help in the street, said: On the other hand, it makes no sense, to be offended for such things, because it is ridiculous. Simply ridiculous, because Poland is just one country, and there are others. If someone considers himself to be better, because he lives in Poland, it is only in his head. In another country it disappears, because in another country a Pole may be treated worse. I spent eight years here and I do not have the strength to pay attention. I cannot be offended all my life, because my mental health would suffer. I feel that I have had enough and I'm not going, sorry for the grotesque, to 41

mix myself with pooh. (Interview 8) Another way of avoiding confrontation with racist or xenophobic violence is pretending not to understand the Polish language. Such a strategy was, for example, taken by a respondent from another African country, a student from Ghana (Interview 12), who usually does not respond to vulgar insults towards him, pretending not to know what do persons, expressing aggression, say to him. He claimed that he avoided confrontation, because any reaction on his part could be interpreted as a provocation, and he is afraid to be beaten.

Lack of confrontation can also rely on the abandonment of other actions such as seeking help or make a complaint. An interlocutor from Mexico, who met with the vulgar xenophobic reaction on the side of some 60-year-old woman in a supermarket (see 2.1.2.1), has decided not to report the incident having been earlier learned of the experienced difficulties in making a complaint to the institution (PKP, cf. 2.1.1.)

I could report it to the manager but I did not have time to do it. At the station, I probably spent two hours there, and I lost 2 hours. And already I did not want.

(Interview 30) Perhaps, her decision of not to confront was caused by the fact that she did not feel lonely then, because "everyone in the queue laughed" at the aggressive woman, which gave her some kind of satisfaction or a feeling of moral support in an unpleasant situation.

Sometimes the only way to avoid confrontation with an aggressive environment is to escape from the place where there is a threat. This can occur in a situation of verbal harassment on the part of an aggressive group, the shift seems to be the best and most rational way to avoid the issue: "I just walked fast towards my home. " (Interview 7). It is usually also the only solution when a group of assailants, visibly outnumbering or outweighing, attempts to beat. The same interviewee (student from Senegal), quoted the following episode: Me and my two other black friends, we were coming back from a friend’s house to our dormitory. (…) We met a group of twelve guys. One of my friends said to me: “Be ready, man, because these guys will make troubles with us. But I didn’t believe him. As soon as we passed them, one of them threw an empty beer can at us, but the can fell in front of us. One of my friends kicked this can back to them.

Two of the Polish people approached us and said that we touched his can. We were calm and we said: “OK, OK, no problem”. And we saw that others are coming and shouting to us: “Niggers, you have a problem now!” We started running away. They were running after us but we were faster. (Interview 7)

To confrontational reaction we can rate all those activities that are designed to actively confront an attacker or a person expressing aggression.One form of confrontation may be the symbolic confrontation. In its verbal version it consists in taking a discussion, expressing outrage or a sort of "contraction" calculated to silence aggressive people or make them to move away from a place of incident. Taking up the discussion, although not always possible especially in situations of increased aggression, may consist of advancing arguments to convict unfavorably oriented individuals to change their opinion or to embarrass them. In its non-verbal version, the confrontation, which is not related to the physical force, may for instance consist of presentation to the attacker /attackers lack of fear and even ridicule aggressive environment. This was the case of a Wroclaw student from Tanzania (the previously cited statement of that interviewee concerned avoiding open confrontation example, physical), who during a quarrel on a tram decided to respond in the same way: 42

Once I was on a tram and some youngsters looked at me and started screaming “uuuu” (the monkey sound), so I the same thing to them (monkey voice). They looked at me a bit shocked and the story ended. (Interview 2) The use of the symbolic confrontation strategy depends, of course, on the opportunities created by a given situation and assessment of a degree of environmental aggression. In the circumstances relatively little severe, for example in contact with children, as in a case of an interlocutor of Ukraine, the verbal confrontation can be both a form of "working around " the problem of stigmatization, for example, when the fun of the accent is turned into a joke: Q.: Did someone laugh at your accent?

Re.: Yes., children were laughing, but me, on the other hand, I tried to turn it to be funny. Children said something like: "Auntie, Auntie, our laundry has drid" And so I said: "What has it done? And I thought that it has already dried up."And I just think that maybe one day I said that drid. (...) Here it comes that children like me, but some educators, who are jealous of me because, as for the Polish reality I am a woman who is successful here, they were trying to do a problem of it that children were laughing at me. But really, we are fooling about. (Interview 25) On the using the strategy of turning a tension into a joke one participant of socio-cultural activities of the “alternative” environment” also spoke. In his case the reactions relate to a situation in which someone expresses severe attention because of the appearance: Q: Does our society become open for being different?

Re.: Not necessarily. I already look like, how I look. Sometimes it happens that someone says something stupid, and I turn it into a joke, and the situation is directly different. (Interview 37) An extreme form of response to the actions of actual or potential perpetrators of hate violence is the physical confrontation. Mostly the interviewees from African countries told about individual fights caused by provocations of racists attackers, for example in night-clubs or around them. To a large extent it depends on the particular situation whether that fight will help ease the tension and avert the danger, or - on the contrary - lead to an escalation of aggression and increase the risk. In this category we can also include the attitude that is illustrated by the statement of the quoted earlier interlocutor, who met with hate speech on the Internet. This woman, having a sense of danger due to the fact that her name is known to activists and sympathizers of the extreme right, mentioned that she had decided to reach for a safety measure, which is incapacitating gas, and carries it all the time since the described incident: I must say that for some time I go with gas. It's after that commentary on the right-wing portal. A lot of people I know, they also do like that. I think it will help me just a little, but I feel a little safer. I’m little afraid. I carry the gas more for psychological comfort than a real sense of security. (Interview 38) A special form of the organized physical confrontation i.e. to create groups or networks of self-defense. This strategy is usually taken: a) under conditions of intensified threats from groups of offenders (usually associated with neo-Nazi or ultra-nationalist subcultures, or groups of similar profiles) using violence experienced as a long, burdensome and destructive enough physically, mentally and morally, that make unable daily functioning in the community, b) when institutions for protection and prevention (especially the police and the municipal police, private security agencies, etc.) and for law enforcement (the police and the municipal police, the criminal justice) do not carry out these functions or perform them very little, not giving people who are exposed to 43

hate violence the feeling of safety, which leads to distrust of the legal or official forms of protection and the lack of a sense of justice. Then the strategy of collective resist appears as a "sheet-anchor", allowing to recover not only the relative sense of security, but also dignity.On organizing in the 90s, initially mainly in the punk and hardcore subculture environments, self-defense groups in different districts of Wroclaw, one interviewee told: All i ended in a little gang way, the territories were strictly divided. Up to this street, an area was, let’s say, antifascist, and the next fascist. (…) To enter such or such region (…) made a risk of encountering with such or such a group. It depended on each area …. And then, suddenly, there were just a few punk zones, and almost the whole city was in the grip of, so to say, generally speaking boneheads, fascists, or how to identify all of them. Because they too were divided into their ... in some regions were "Poles , in other areas, "Nazists”. Completely different crews. (…) For sure, at some point, there was no attack without a respond. A level of violence was horrible.

It was so stupid, that I was walking down the street, seeing a skinhead or suspecting someone, an I attacked him, seeing him the first time in my life, doesn’t matter whether I was alone, or there was three of us…Finally, when I knew that I had a chance to attacking, or if it seemed to me, for example, on my own territory, so to speak, I attacked even three, being alone, three guys bigger than me. Such craziness started after they tried to kill “Kwadrat”. (Interview 37) The interlocutor told about an importance the creating of an anti-Nazis movement called Anti-Nazi Front (ANF) had for decreasing the danger of extreme right-wing violence in Wrocław: ANF they were, in my opinion, the real leftists. Few were punk, they were anarchists, Greens, environmentalists and animal rights activists. (...) ANF began to organize, I do not know in which year exactly, mass demonstrations, which were focused heavily on confrontation and there were numerous demonstrations. (...) They started to get a beating, everyone in general. For, at the beginning, no one responded, but then more and more people participated. These were not isolated actions; everybody saw the anger after they tried to kill the Kwadrat.

Simply everyone attacked them, and not just punks, simply militias à la Antifa 14 emerged and began to attack them (…)They began to lose ground, they saw that they were not unpunished, and as if their rules were finished (...) Maybe the end of 90s, they disappear. Sure, they were not extinct, but they start to be camouflaged, they looked like, I do not know, football fans, and even not, just fans of the club which is here [in Wroclaw].

While some interviewees admitted that - at least from the “alternative” environment’s perspective – neo-Nazis and ultra-Nationalist violence, in recent years, is not such a common problem like in the 90s, the organized physical confrontation still takes a place. This occurs mainly in the context of demonstrations of the emancipation movements (e.g. feminist demonstrations, marches for equality, etc.) which are disturbed z by the extreme right, and also in response to aggression directed at peaceful counter demonstrators expressing opposition to public demonstrations of a racist and chauvinistic nature. One respondent told about it.

Such actions occur mainly in the demonstrations, both on their part, and from our side. Sure, some actions on the street were accidental. (…) The situations were various, you know how it is. (...) Now, my friends, for example, knew them from their face and attacked them. (Interview 22)

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It seems that the organized confrontation, aiming at self-defense, a strategy that in public perception, raises controversy in the public perception. Those who used or use this method of prevention of hate violence, are aware of it. Therefore that strategy requires a special kind of rationalization going back - which is understandable - both to the argument of personal "innate behavior”, and to the broader ethical reasons, which is the desire to protect the vulnerable from potential harm. One of the interviewees justified this kind of strategy in such a way: Do I use violence? Does the hatred motivate me? No, it’s probably more a tactic which works. The tactic or self-defense. At some point, this hatred, of course, also came, but I know ... that, at the beginning it was certainly motivated by something else. Fear, a combination of fear with being pressed to the wall. The best example is that cat which pushed to the corner is so dangerous, and it was, it seems, the same in my case. (…) And when I noticed that it worked well, I started to use that violence. I was using it until some point, and now I don’t use it. Sometimes I know I need to dominate someone ... well, then I come alive. Rare but rare, but sometimes I use it, because I know that I need. But I do it for myself, for whom ... maybe not even for myself ... I am not afraid of that. More I do it for ... it seems to me, that someone would not be hurt. Well, just. (Interview 37) With taking a confrontational strategy, the dilemma may involve. It was expressed by an interlocutor quoted below, referring to the fact that, after the previous experience and because of the sensitivity for the threat she applied preceding verbal confrontations, which she herself considered as too "aggressive." The respondent admitted that her reactions could sometimes be harmful for people with positive intentions: At first I was scared to react, because as you got in the face, you know, you do not want to get in the face twice. Then I went through this phase of the great aggression, even people who wished me well, getting right away from me "goodbye. " It's also such a hopeless little. (Interview 28) This statement shows that the confrontation with the environment, though sometimes it is a reasoned strategy or a way of response, which appears as the most rational, may create ambiguity. A person undertaking such a strategy may question oneself, whether such an action is justified and whether it creates in "both sides' an unnecessary sense of distrust. This aspect of the experience certainly is associated with a more general "definition of situation" of an individual (as a member / participant in a specific social category or group), in which kinds of strategies are included in response to actual or anticipated hate violence. But it seems that, in some measure a kind of strategy and its rationalization (or a critical reflection on it, as in the example above) are subjected to individual experience, not necessarily possible to reduce them clearly to a "broader" social factors.

In this sense, the strategies and their rationalizations have to be seen as a kind of "interplay" of macro-social factors (position in the structures, including the "hierarchy" of statuses like socioeconomic, legal, ethnic ones) cultural ones (available internalized patterns of thought and action, interpretations of moral standards, etc.), micro-social ones (dynamics of individual’s inner circle), situational ones (dynamics of the situation in which undertaking to respond to the threat takes place) and personal ones (experience of a past and current living situation, abilities, and psycho-emotional condition, physical condition, etc.).

Two types of the response strategies, discussed above - those aimed at avoiding or at making confrontation - are varieties of actions taken in response to the emerging threat in a particular situation. Another variety of strategies consists in responding to the problem of hate violence by preventing the emerging of threat. It involves such a definition of a situation of a person belonging to a group / category exposed to hate violence, which has an important element of awareness of existing in the local environment mentioned earlier “greater caution zones " and a belief that any 45

problems can be prevented while avoiding sensitive areas and not allowing interactions that might lead to tensions, conflicts and or might pose a direct threat to the individual. Thus, this means narrowing by the people from surveyed by us categories / groups their own contacts with the environment to specific "security zones" and "groups of trust". An example would be the strategy of one interviewee who tries not to go out at night, and spends his free time with trusted Polish colleagues: I never had a situation that I had to fight, probably because I don’t go to a party at night often. I usually go to school and then come back to my place. I have many Polish friends and I spend my free time with them. (Interview 4) Another interviewee (Interview 12), who admitted that, especially at night he does not feel safe in Wroclaw, and always goes to participate in events in a group of seven or eight people. Then he feels more confident because he knows that if a problem emerges he can count on his friends. Yet another respondent, who had situations in which he was beaten and suffered lack of support from the police and the multiple "stigma" as a foreigner, emphasized that, although he wanted to continue to live in Poland (due to kids and friends) was more cautious and restricted his beaing in public places. A safety space is for him an apartment and work site: Q.: How do you feel still living in Wrocław after what happened to you?

Re.: I’m really, really careful. I keep living in Poland, I have many friends, I have my kids here. I want to stay here. I’m still hearing stupid things in the street, but I’m really busy with my work as a producer and I spend most of my time in the studio, not in public spaces like before. But, yes, I feel more safe at my home and studio. (Interview 5) In this section we presented some aspects of experiencing of hate violence by persons belonging to migrant and other minority groups and living in Wroclaw. In addition to discussing examples of non-physical violence, verbal / nonverbal and physical violence, we showed a moral dimension of this kind of experience - the hate violence is not just bodily harm and / or psychoemotional one, but also the experience of creating the feeling of being deprived of their dignity, subjected to humiliation - not only in someone’s own assessing, but also in the eyes of the social environment. We presented examples of places and circumstances in Wroclaw, in which, acts of racist and xenophobic hate violence happen or may happen. We stressed in particular the existence in the consciousness of interviewed persons the specific “greater caution zone”, i.e. critical points, “where better not to walk" at certain times (evenings, at night) for persons, who might fall into the category / categories exposed to the hate violence. We also presented some characteristics of the perpetrators of this violence, who, according to the interviewees’ reports are mostly young men, including those with extreme right-wing, chauvinistic views. Finally, we questioned - in the form of a hypothetical statement - the diversity of experiences in the context of threats of hate violence. We have presented the main "determinants of stigma" that is, those elements of the status or ethnocultural traits that may increase the exposure to ideologically-motivated violence or, in certain situation, be, "protection" against violence. We have shown also three types of the response strategies of people experiencing racist or xenophobic violence in emergencies: the reactions involving the avoidance of confrontation, confrontational responses and ways to prevent the occurrence of a hazardous situation (with particular emphasis on the importance of "space security" and "group of trust"). The fourth type of reaction is to seek help - this is dealt in another part of the study.

2.3. Seeking and experiencing help Seeking for help can be consider as one of the strategies to respond to hate violence. This 46

issue seems to be crucial to gain a fuller picture of the experiences of people from groups/categories which are exposed to this kind of violence. This issue is also important in the context of the question whether there are favorable conditions in Wroclaw for the friendly integration of immigrants and people from other minority groups. It will depend on how much these people can count on the support of environment and how effectively public institutions, established to ensure the protection and implementation of principles of justice, shall fulfill its functions, whether they will have the sense of safety and what their quality of life assessment in the community will be like.

Below we give examples of the individual and institutional help, in the latter case; we are focusing primarily on the actions of the Police. 12 The issue of seeking for help by people experiencing hate violence cannot be separated from the problem of lack of support from the environment, occurring as indifference or reluctance of witnesses to testify with judicial authorities. Part of the analysis below is also a discussion of cases in which Police officers not only failed to comply with their duties to ensure the protection of immigrants in emergency situations, but acted in a way that can be described as secondary stigmatization of people experiencing racism or xenophobia. This on the other hand is associated with expressing a mistrust for the Police by members of groups/categories endangered with hate violence and constructing by interviewed persons such a ‘definition of situation’, in which an important element is lack of sense of justice, the inability to exercise their rights and resulting from it distance to Poland as a country of little friendliness for foreigners. This part of the chapter ends with a discussion about the importance of community autonomous self-help in the context of the groups of immigrant/minorities, where it plays a particularly important role to create an informal network distributing knowledge of threats and mutual help in emergency situations.

2.3.1. Individual help In the statements of some of the respondents a topic of help they receive from Polish friends and acquaintances emerges. Usually, this applies to aid in formal matters, related to filling out the documents, to stay and to support during visits in the offices and other institutions. In emergency situations of hate triggered violence, Poles (colleagues, friends, etc.) if they are present at the scene, they can help neutralize the tension or give a real protection. As an example we can take situations described by some people, when for example the dorm neighbors showed up in time (albeit accidentally) at the place where the offender abused a foreigner or threatened him with beating. The support of friends is also a part of previously announced strategy to prevent violence. For part of interviewees the fact that they have a social group of trust they spend their free time with and can without much fear go out at night to a club or for a walk around the city, is an important factor in ensuring their security.

Assistance may also come from random people, met on the street, bus or tram, club, shop, etc. It may be a form of verbal confrontation (demonstration of indignation, ridicule, or other form of discrediting the person manifesting racist aggression) with the perpetrators of violence or threats, or those expressing insults. Support can also occur as notifying the Police about an event or - as in the episode described below - the deterrence of offenders (in this case, someone unleashed the dog to help the attacked persons): I was with my friend at the party in a club, we finished partying and we were five guys. (...) We were heading home. One guy was passing us and said to one friend 12 Here it is worth quoting data from the questionnaire. Among the respondents who have experienced non-physical or physical hate violence (personally or just knowing that some friend experienced it), only five persons admitted that they reported the incident to the police or to the prosecutor, and 27 did not report it at all. The reasons they mentioned included (there were more than one answer possible): conviction that the incident was not worth reporting to the police (11 people), trying to stay away from trouble (4 people), mistrust towards the police (3 people).

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with head phones: “Hey, monkey, go back to Africa!” My friend didn’t hear him, so he stopped, took off his headphones and smiled to him because he didn’t know what the other man had said to him. (...) This Polish guy started asking my black friend: “Do you want to fight?” And he started pushing him strongly. Some other Polish guys came and they started swearing on us and pushing us. Someone who was accidentally around walking a dog, released the dog to help us. It was really good that someone called Police, probably because we were in the city center.

(Interview 3) Although there are references to various kinds of gestures of good will presented in case of emergency by the environment in the interviewees statements, immigrants and people from other minority groups also experience lack of reaction and indifference from witnesses of hate violence13. That attitude can be interpreted by some as a quiet acceptance to racism and xenophobia; others express their opinion about the trivialization of the problem in Polish society. A student from Ghana, who witnessed another dark-skinned friend being attacked on a bus, commented on the lack of reaction from other passengers to the event: You see, it is like I told you before: people spit on people and everybody is frozen, nobody did nothing, nobody said a single word. The same in this situation. Where I come from, if something happens to you and people are around you, they will support you, people will do whatever to help you. But here people pretend that they don’t see anything. So people who were doing this to me, they knew that no one would react, no one would call Police. It is like that. (Interview 3) Another problem is the reluctance of witnesses to xenophobic incidents to testify the truth about these events. Significant in this aspect is the case of an Ukrainian (Interview 32) employed as a janitor in one of Wroclaw's schools.

Unfriendly witnesses - the case of worker from Ukraine In January 20011 Mrs. N (Ukrainian woman with Russian origin) was beaten by another employee of the school (one of school in Wrocław, on its wall, near a door, is written with a big letters: “Skinheads Zone”). Assault was accompanied by verbal abuse clearly referring to her Ukrainian origins. The interviewee admitted that this man has abused her before, motivated by xenophobia and anti-Ukrainian bias. The woman was severely beaten with a chair when she refused to let him inside the school for fear of his aggressive behavior. The beating was confirmed by forensic-examination. The case was directed to the court, but there is still no verdict. Respondent and her husband (also Ukrainian) claim that they cannot count on the support of the school principal, nor the witnesses. The latter, for fear of losing their jobs, do not want to testify against the accused. The principal refuses to cooperate, for fear of losing the good reputation of her school. This prevents the court case from finalizing. By listening to the testimony of witnesses we can conclude that the testimonies given in court and the first testimonies of individual witnesses made shortly after the incident do not coincide with each other.

The first witness, who worked as a security guard at the school, has a second degree of disability. When he testified to the Police immediately after the event he admitted that the man beat the woman brutally, throwing the chair at her, shouting and insulted her. In the courtroom during the hearing, at which the offender was also present, the witness cried and avoided specific and clear answers, because, as he claimed, he feared the vengeance of the accused. His testimony did not match with the testimony submitted to the Police. At the hearing, he said that the perpetrator lightly slapped the woman's hand when she refused to open the gate. When the judge read the testimony given by a witness at the Police station and asked him, which of those two testimonies was true, the witness replied that both of them were. Psychologist present at the hearing said that man cannot be questioned any longer in the category of witness.

The second witness, a former high school student, is the son of a friend of the accused. He claimed that woman was 13 We also asked the respondents of the questionnaire about the reaction of witnesses. Twenty people indicated no reaction of witnesses, and six respondents reported that witnesses were staring. Only three people responded that witnesses tried to help them.

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the first to strike the accused. He also claimed that he had not seen the entire event. This witness clearly testified to the benefit of the accused. Abuser himself, after described incident was fired from his job, but after a while was rehired for the same job. From January 2011 the accused is moved to another school. In this moment he and his son are sending a complain and requesting to convene disciplinary commission. Nomada Association monitors a case in a court.

2.3.2. Institutional help An institutional help, may come from various organized entities with which the persons exposed to hate triggered violence are in contact with. Although in the carried out interviews a topic help from religious organizations did not appear explicitly, it is likely that, particularly for religious minorities, religious community (or its leaders) may take measures to support and act on behalf of and in the interests of victims of the racist or xenophobic perpetrators. Non-governmental organizations may play a similar role, in particular associations gathering immigrants or members of ethnic, national or religious groups, as well as associations acting on behalf of those groups 14.

Finally, institutions can provide support to local authorities - the interviewee operating in the Romany Association (Interview 21) talked about collaboration with the plenipotentiary Governor of Lower Silesia for National and Ethnic Minorities.

In the context of the discussed problem, institutions specialized in providing protection, prosecution of perpetrators of violence and law enforcement play a particular role. It is important to mention the organized protection of public places (clubs, merchants, etc.), which is the responsibility of the employees who work there, usually employed by private security agencies.

Interviewees’ statements regarding the support from the security guards give an ambivalent picture.

On one hand, some of described situations show that security staff responds properly to emergency situations, as in the previously cited case of the student from Rwanda (Interview 6), who was spitted-on in the club by an aggressive man, who also threatened him with a symbol of swastika.

The respondent mentioned that he has informed the Police about the incident, but in the meantime, a security guard who had seen the incident, removed the neo-Nazi from the club. On the other hand, some interviewees shows examples, where the attitude of security staff leaves much to be desired.

In the case of a student from Senegal, bothered along with other African colleagues by violent assailants outside a club in Wroclaw's Market Square, the bodyguards turned out to be merely passive witnesses to the incident and did not help: Once someone attacked me. It was around Christmas two years ago. A friend of mine came to visit me, so with another friend we went to a club in Rynek. After clubbing we were in a group of ten people (all of us black) going home. We met some guys (about ten of them). We passed them by and they started saying to as: “Ej, czarnuchy, wypierdalać stąd!” [Yo, niggas, get the fuck out of here] And my friend started swearing at them, too. The next moment they started fighting and suddenly we got attacked by the rest of those Polish guys and all of us got involved into the fight. Some of the bodyguards from the club came outside but they didn’t do anything and went back to the club. ( Interview 7) However, the security staff often turns out to be the perpetrators of racist violence themselves.

Another interviewee, living in Wroclaw, with origins in Suriname, told us about being beaten by guards at the club, where he worked. Despite serious wounds and the high cost of medical assistance, he received no support from the manager of the club. On the contrary - soon after the incident he was fired: One day, I was standing up stairs (...) observing people coming in, and I noticed that a black guy was trying to get inside but security guys looked at each other as 14 about activities of Nomada Association see chapter 3

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if they wanted to fuck him up. One of them started screaming at this guy and the black guy said that he didn’t speak Polish. I went to the security and I said: “Relax, man, this guy doesn’t speak Polish, leave him alone”. And I walked this guy inside. Security guys got so mad at me. (...) At the end of that night when I was ready to leave, one of them started shouting at me (he was twice bigger than me). I said to him: “Ej, man, why are you screaming at me? I don’t even understand you?” And suddenly one guy took me from behind, two others took my security on the ground, and started to beat him. I don’t know how but I came loose. And they put me outside to the back yard and threw me on the ground. I found a stone and I threw it at one of them. I was so angry. Then my security came free and he took me and we went away. Then I don’t remember what happened. I woke up home in front of my door and I don’t know what was going on. Because I was knocked out. My son and my girlfriend were inside. And my girlfriend asked me: “What’s happened? You have blood on your mouth!” Suddenly I threw up blood. I had my gullet cut. (…) An ambulance came. I went to the hospital. (…)

Next day, I called the boss of the club asking: “what’s going on?” He said: “I don’t know what’s going on. I must check the camera”. I called him again and I repeated: “What’s going on?” Because I had a bill from a doctor and I needed to pay 600 PLN for medicine. And he answered: “Do you want me to pay for that?

Why should I pay for that?” So I explained: “I work for your club. What’s going on? Your security attacked me! So who is responsible?” Then he said: “So you have to go to the security” (…) And that’s it. Two days later he sent me an e-mail informing me that I was fired. After 3 years. ( Interview 5) The institution which was mostly mentioned by interviewees was the Police. On the basis of the collected speeches, the image of the Police officers, who deal with people who are exposed to hate violence, seems to be ambivalent at best, although, in interviewees opinions, that interpretation could be perceived as too supportive for the Police. Although there are some examples of positive actions, dominating are the voices expressing negative opinions and reluctance, caution and above all mistrust of the Police. In this context, there is one isolated statement of an interviewee from Ukraine, who insisted that she had a ‘good experience with the Police’ as a foreigner: As a foreigner I had a good contact with the Police. For example, once I was caught by a ticket inspector who took my ID and exerted verbal pressure on me saying things like "you, Russ" etc. Fortunately, the tram stopped, and there was a Police car and he took me there, the inspector has been told to go away and I was escorted back home. I don’t know why it happened. I had no bed experience with the Police. I admit that I do not like the Police, I do not want to have anything to do with them, but none of my issues with the Police concerned my citizenship and they never gave me the feeling that I’m a stranger. No, I cant complain about the Police. (Interview 28) Some people mentioned that although the Police intervened in difficult situations, they do not take further action to protect or take the problem seriously. The following example of a student from Syria shows the Police officers as discouraging a person who was attacked on the basis of xenophobic reasons, to testify: Returning from a party in December 2010 at about five o'clock in the morning, I saw two young boys walking from the opposite direction. I crossed the street.

When they were passing by me one of them said: ‘Fuck all Arabs’. I didn’t respond to this provocation, I kept on walking. They shouted at me: ‘Your religion is a rag! Rag religion’ Then I felt hurt; I turned around, went to them and asked, 50

‘What did you say?’ ‘He repeated and pushed me. We started to fight. Few moments later the Police pulled up, separated us and began to ask questions. The boys presented their version, which claimed that I attacked them and wanted to rob them. The Police wanted to give all of us 100 PLN fine. I strongly refused, explaining the whole incident. The Policemen tried to talk me out from filing a notice on the offense. It was suggested to me that a case in court will cost me a lot of money and that I cannot afford it. One of the officers suggested that I should go home and he assured me that he will detain the perpetrators. I returned home safely. (Interview 34) Another example is a complete passivity of the Police in a physical endangerment. A student from Ghana, said: I will tell you another story. This will be about institution, which should cover us and they don’t: the police. It was four months ago and my friend wanted to go to a party with me. He was close to Galeria Dominikanska [shopping center] waiting at the bus stop and I was supposed to meet him there so that we would take a taxi.

It was raining and I was with two black girls, so we were hiding from the rain. He phoned me and said that he was waiting. So we went to the bus stop. My friend was there and close to him there were three guys smoking cigarettes and blowing straight into my friend’s face. They were really close. And my friend asked one of them: “What is the problem?” And the guy started saying: “go back to your country, you dirty monkey” and other stupid things. My friend said: “Ej, relax, man”. Then the Polish guy said: “Ej, what can you do?” And he pushed him a few times. So my friend handed me his cell phone and said to the guy: “If you want to fight, let’s fight”. So they started fighting, but then the guy ran away and after a couple of minutes we saw about fifteen guys coming towards us. All of them came and were standing really sure of their power around this guy who was fighting with my friend. Now it was is two guys against fifteen guys who had hooks and whatever. They were saying: “get back to Africa”. And my friend looked around and saw that a police car was coming. We were happy to see it, we tried to stop the car. Can you imagine that the car stopped for a second, the police officers looked at us and drove away? We saw a taxi and we started to run towards the taxi because it was so massive: fifteen guys with hooks and chains!

We were really scared. The cab stopped, we got inside and they started throwing bottles on us. The taxi driver had to run away.

Q.: Didn’t the taxi driver want to call police? How did he react?

Re.: No, he didn’t say a word to us. Police saw us. They must have seen that we were in trouble, but they drove away. Why should I call them? (Interview 3) This statement also shows common attitude among the interviewees of distrust of the Police.

This attitude towards the Police was expressed by one Polish interviewee with African origins, who said that if she asked the Police for help they would either laugh at her or told her to go back ‘where she belongs’. She spoke of unpleasant contact with the Police she had living in Opole (a city South of Poland): A few years ago I sat with my brother on the bench. A Police car drove up, a Policeman with his index finger, without a word, called us, walking in his direction, we had no choice, we had to cross one meter of scarce green belt. The Policeman asked me if I was a cow, and I assure you that this was not the worst thing he said to me that afternoon. (Interview 29) 51

How the Police trivializes situations where racist provocation which occurres ends with beating, has been told by a student from Tanzania. He expressed his distrust of the Police comparing they attitude to ‘the mafia’. He also mentioned that he was familiar with cases of racism victims, which, although reported to the Police, were not investigated: Q.: What happened when the police arrived?

Re.: The police came and they caught somebody, but the girls said it was not that guy ‘cause they saw him.

Q.: And you don’t want the police to look for this guy and investigate?

Re.: No. I don’t know, maybe it’s a bad thing in my path, but I don’t trust the police, not only in Poland. Even back home I don’t trust the police. I believe that when it comes to the police, you need to be lucky sometimes, or you need to know somebody, or have money. If you don’t have money, the police issue is complicated. My uncle once came to Poland, he went to a club and had a fight.

When the police came, he told the police that the guy who fought with him was still there. A police officer asked him why he was fighting. My uncle explained that this Polish guy had told another black friend that he didn’t like black people and started swearing at him. And that was why my uncle started a fight with him.

The policeman said: “There is no problem when someone starts a fight with you because you are black”. And the issue finished at this point. For me as a foreigner, I don’t want to fight with the police. The police are still like a mafia so I don’t want to be in a mess. I know some people that went to the police to start some cases about racism and these cases ended up with nothing. (Interview 2) Negative feedback on the activities of Police officers was also expressed by the Roma community representative from Wroclaw. He talked about the unjustified harassment of Roma by Police officers, as well as they little involvement in the prosecution of perpetrators of hate violence: We as Roma... there should be no cooperation between us and the Police, but we live in this country, the law obliges us, as every citizen, we need to adapt to the rules and laws. And we are treated differently. In our area - at Brochowo (a district were a lot of Roma live) there were situations that guys were just standing on the street and suddenly their IDs were checked, once, second time, third. It was such intervention (...) we went to trivialization Mrs. Chief of Police and we asked why they were doing it. And she said that it is an intervention, because they were staying in one place and behaving too loud. I say, ‘This is a daytime, how are they suppose to behave in the backyard?’ (...) We are not getting along too well with the Police, they treat us as cattle. When someone is attacked, we call the Police.

Police is asking: ‘Do you know his name?’ And we say: ‘He was in a balaclava, so how can we know what his name was?’ (...) If these were Gypsies they would be locked up the next day. But as these were the Poles, nothing happened. This guy was beaten, his mother was beaten, but [the Police asks]: ‘Did you see their faces?’ He says: ‘They were in the balaclavas, so what could I see?’ (Interview 21) Inadequately to the situation faced by immigrants and members of other minorities Police’s activities sometimes lead to a secondary stigmatization by the Police themselves of persons being at risk of hate violence. By secondary stigmatization we mean subjecting people to the procedures and treatment, which may reinforce the feeling of humiliation, injustice and of being stigmatized, although the institution dealing with such a case should protect a person injured and ensure their ability to seek justice in accordance with the law.

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Sometimes in such situations the Police treat the injured persons as if they were the perpetrators of the incidents. About such an episodes, a student from Ghana, who along with his colleague was attacked by racists, and provoked into a fight spoke: Re.: A police car came and the guys who was trying to get us involved into a fight started running away. We only wanted to protect ourselves and not fight, so we didn’t run. Two of the guys that attacked us were caught by police, the rest ran away. A policeman asked us: “Do you want to report that?” We said: “Yes. Why not?” So we had to go to a police station to describe the whole situation. So they took us there and said: “OK, guys, now no phone calls”. And they gave us paper to sign.

Q.: With English translation?

Re.: No translation. And we were like: “Ej, we don’t understand” and the police was like: “It’s nothing, just sign”. A friend of mine understood a bit of Polish and he saw in this paper a word “alien”. They referred to us as “aliens”, not as “foreigners”. And they took us home to check our ID’s and we returned to the police station where they took our photos. So now the reporting looks as if they were arresting us: they took off our shoelaces and they put us in a back yard.

Q.: But why ? Did you ask them why they kept you if you just wanted to report about what happened?

Re.: They lied to us. They said that we just needed to write a statement, it will last a few seconds and then they would release us. This is what they told us. The reason why we were going there was that my friend’s jacket was stolen, and he said that he wanted his jacket back from those people. And now the police said that a translator was not there. So we needed to wait until morning. It was before 5 A.M. This situation happened when my dad was in Wroclaw, so I was afraid that he would be mad at me because he didn’t want me to go to a party, since he knew it could be dangerous. We saw those two Polish guys that we fought with for a moment and they were really rude to the police .We didn’t know what happened to them. But we were still there, divided into two groups in separate rooms. When the morning came, it was so cold in there, we were frozen. I felt as if the police was treating me as someone who I stole something or committed some crime, who deserved to be in that place. Finally we wrote this statement and the police said they would inform us about this situation. They never called us back. Someone who is supposed to protect you is letting you down. My friends had many situations of this kind. My cases are maybe small, but I heard terrible stories from my black friends living in Poland. (Interview 3) About being humiliated by the Police and unjust, in his opinion, punishment by the court, spoke the interviewee, whose case related to being beaten by the security guards in the club, where he worked, we discussed above. The incident presented below occurred sometime before, and the interviewee associated the fact of not having received help from the Police after the attack of security guards with convicted in this case: It was in 2007. I was working in a club and my brother worked in another club.

As he worked as a DJ, he called me because he needed a microphone. So I told him that since I had a one-hour break, I would bring him, the microphone. I walked with my friend and two girls. We were walking near Helios when I saw some hooligans with flags who, of course, were screaming something. Girls started talking to these guys. We were walking towards traffic lights and we 53

waited there for the girls. We were observing what was going on. Those guys were talking to them, but the girls didn’t want to talk anymore, so we were waiting for them in case something bad happens. We didn’t know these girls very well. The girls were approaching us then one of those guys started running towards us and screaming something to my friend. My friend speaks Polish and he got angry because the guy was saying about us some stupid things: what we want here and something about black people. Then another guy came from behind and punched me. We started fighting with six guys. One of them grabbed me from behind and I fell on my back. The second one held my feet and another kicked me in my belly. I tried to get loose legs, my friend tried to help me as well, but the guy that was holding my feet, beat me. In one moment they ran away. So I went to this other club, I gave back the microphone and I had to returned to the place where I worked. So I was walking, I realized that my leg was bleeding, but at that moment I didn’t feel much pain. In front of the club, I saw the police, they came to me and I said to them that some guys attacked me and that I was bleeding. So the police took me. The guys that attacked me, called the police, because they know how it works. The police took me to a hospital. Six police officers drove me to the hospital. I was there for two hours and the doctor asked me if I was bitten by a dog. From the hospital I went to the police station and these guys were at the police station as well. It looks as if they were fighting with the police because they were screaming and swearing – really aggressive. And I was convicted of attacking them! I had a court case and I lost! These guys said that I tried to steal their phone. In that moment I had my phone in my pocket. Ridiculous. I was in the court with my friend and on the other side there were six big guys, huge guys, sitting there like angels. Finally, I had my word. I said to the judge: “I’m black, I’m walking in the middle of the night, I see guys with flag of Śląsk Wrocław [local football team], and I’m approaching these guys to start a fight with them because I want their phone. Do you really believe that?” But it didn’t help. Still, I was sentenced. And I had to cover the cost of the trial. And I asked myself: “What is going on with this country? Hooligans with a flag beat me so hard that I still have a scar, but I get sentenced for attacking them!” And I think that because I was sentenced in this case, later the police didn’t want to help me with the case with security from the club where I worked [see the example above]. (Interview 5) Trivialization of racism problem by the Police, discouraging to testify, finally, sluggishness and postponing the investigation of reported cases or complete omission of action, these are the topics that appear in many statements. The interviewee from Senegal, who, along with two dark-skinned friends managed to escape from the attackers, told the Police about the attack, but the provided by the officers came down to accompanying students to the dorm: I called the police and I told them that we were foreigners and some Polish people were making trouble with us. They came and went with us to akademik [dormitory]. They didn’t ask us how this guys looked like. Nothing. They just walked us to akademik [dormitory], they wanted to do their job as easy as possible. (Interview 7) These statements raise questions about the reasons for the inadequacy of the Police action in the described situations. Are we dealing with cases particularly difficult from the Police point of view, or maybe these are ‘normal’ situations and Polish Police acts the same as in cases not involving foreigners. And maybe the lack of the Police’s help is not accidental and is related with the fact that some employees of this institution are not free from bias 54

and hostility towards immigrants and members of other minorities?

‘The Police order to wait’ – a case of an immigrant from China An interviewee from China (Interview 18) also couldn’t count on a proper Police support. The recurring in his statements theme is the lack of any response and support from the Police. The man told about a situation where his friends - including immigrants from China - experienced racist insults at the bar. His colleague went to the Police to report the attack of one of the men. The Police wrote down his testimony and said that he had to wait.

The Police, according to the interviewee, was unable to help his friend, and ignored the problem. Another time the interviewee lost his money. He reported this fact to the Police, and they told him to wait. Also, when someone stole his car, smashed the window - the Police told him to wait.

Their own negative experiences or stories they’ve heard about the unpleasant experiences and helplessness of people facing hate violence, caused by sluggishness or stigmatizing by a policemen, led the foreigners living in Wroclaw to adopt a precautionary approach or even to avoid any contact with the Police. An interviewee born in Mexico, living in Wrocław, has been abused by another woman at a bus stop and later on a bus. When asked whether she reported the incident to the Police, she answered: The problem is that when you are a foreigner, you sometimes wonder: what you can do and what you can’t do. They will be questioning and asking you, etc.

(Interview 30) Some people explicitly express the belief that the Police always takes the side of the Poles, which often simply means taking perpetrators side by the officials. People living in Wroclaw, belonging to immigrant groups believe that foreigners have no chance to obtain justice in cases of racist insult or assault. Giving reasons for not calling the Police after provoked racist fight on a Market Square in Wroclaw, a student from Senegal said: Rynek was almost empty so it was no people to react. We finished the fight and we went back home. We didn’t want to call the police because we didn’t believe that the police would believe us that it was Polish people who started the fight. Police always is on the side if Poles. (Interview 7) This interviewee, asked if he would call the Police in a situation, where someone would attack him and it would be a serious threat, he replied: I will try to run away first. If I couldn’t escape and if I knew that I couldn’t protect myself, then maybe [I will call]. It depends on where I would be. For example in a club – I wouldn't. Because I have heard from my friends that when they called the police and sad that someone had attacked them in a club, the police would come and tell them that it would be better for them to change club if they felt in danger. (Interview 7) The belief in the partiality of the Polish Police was also expressed by a student from Rwanda: Q.: Have you ever had contacts with Polish police?

Re.: No, I haven’t. But knowing about my friends’ experience, I don’t trust the police. I have an impression that if I have a serious problem in the street, I will not want to call the police. I think that even if I explain my case, and a Polish person does so, the police will always take the side of a Polish person. (Interview 6) Accumulation of experiences such as those described above and the awareness that friends or 55

acquaintances had similar experiences, leads to strengthening the belief that these incidents are not isolated episodes, but add up to a relatively consistent picture and assessment of life in Wroclaw. No sense of justice and concealment mechanisms, helplessness, or suppressing of downplaying the problem of hate violence by local institutions and the wider social environment, are integral elements of the ‘definition of the situation’, those of living in Wroclaw, who belong to groups and categories that are particularly vulnerable to hate violence. The following cases of Africans living in Wroclaw can sum up previous reflections on the topic of seeking and experiencing help.

Helplessness in the face of injustice - Wroclaw students from Africa A student from Congo (Interview 11) was spitted-on on a bus by a man in his twenties. He didn’t respond because he did not want to see the situation ending with fight, none of the witnesses reacted. He didn’t report that to the Police, because he didn’t trust them, taught by experience of his colleagues, who reported a hate crime to the Police, but their cases were never resolved to their benefit - they have now a filing of injustice, and wasted time.

A student from Ghana (Interview 12) was spitted-on at the club by about a 25-year-old man. It resulted in a fight between them. Security guards at the club were friends with attacker, so they led the interviewee and his friends out of the club, advising them that this would be best. When a friend of respondent protested, he was struck by one of the bodyguards. This happened at Daytona club at Rynek square. A few minutes later they met the Police, told them about the event. Police said they should go and have fun in another club if they had problems in this one. The Police didn’t offer any help. The interviewee then felt helpless. Many of his friends from Africa encountered a similar treatment by the Police. Respondent stated that he doesn’t trust the Polish Police. Although he knows his rights, he would never execute them, he doesn’t believe neither in aid of the Police, nor the Polish justice in court. He is convinced that he would never win with a Pole in court.

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‘I’ve had enough - the case of man from Cameroon living in Wroclaw June, 2006, At. 13:00, A man (Interview 8) was crossing the Swidnicka street near the moat. He stopped before a pedestrian crossing waiting for the green light. Two men began screaming at him: ‘Oh! Bamboo! Monkey! Go back to Africa’. Such behavior was not surprising for the man; it was quite frequent, particularly in that period. One of the assailants approached him and spitted on his face. The respondent asked him: ‘Why are you spitting on me? You need to apologize’. Men were insulting him: ‘Bamboo and talking in Polish’. He was vulgar and aggressive. The respondent patiently repeated that he demands an apology. One of the men tried to hit him, but he was overpowered by him. At the same time the other man took his bag, in which he carried all the documents needed for the extension of his stay. The attacker ran to the moat and threw the envelope with the documents into the water.

They started to fight. A girl passing by, observing the whole situation, called the Police. When the two men noticed the Police they tried to flee, but were detained by the Police officers. The attackers told Police that the respondent was under the influence of drugs and wanted to rob them. Police took the victim to the test. While waiting for it, he was closed in the same room as the perpetrators. Only he was examined, the attackers were not. He submitted a written testimony of the entire event.

A month later the Police called the man, asking if he wanted to file a notice of the crime committed. ‘ I didn’t want that, because sometimes these situations happened to my friends. For example Samuel was attacked in a shop in the Korona shopping center by a man who knocked out his three teeth. He sued him, but it ended up with nothing. I myself had this situation a month before this event. I went to KFC, and a man hit me for no reason. I managed to hold him, and then I called the Police. The Police arrived two hours later. All this time I was holding him. They told me that I have to give a testimony and it will take me a whole evening, because it was a fight. I’m telling the Police: ‘What fight? I wanted to go inside, and he hit me, there are the cameras, check. I wanted to defend myself; he was the one who attacked’. The Police walked away and left the matter to be settled between us. The question arises: What can you do in such a situation? If you can run away, run away. If you cannot, you have to defend yourself to save your own life, because you never know how the situation will end up. I did not believe that making a filing a notification about a crime would make a difference. I decided not to do it’ .

Under Polish law, a racist attack, both physical and verbal, is prosecuted ex officio. Therefore, two years later (2008) in Wroclaw court a process in which the allegations regarded racist assaults began. Jacek C. and Arkadiusz M. where the one to sit in the dock.

On 3 December 2008, Karolina Łagowska in the article titled ‘Prosecution: Cameroonian beaten up because he was black she wrote: ‘The Public Prosecution wrote in the indictment: " as a result of hits, being pushed and prodded the victim suffered from spine, shoulder injuries and overall bruising " On Tuesday, in the court Arkadiusz M. and Jacek C. argued that they are innocent (...)that they have friends among people from all over the world, with different skin color "and that the victim began to fight. Their version wasn’t supported by the witness, a Wroclaw journalist. He testified that "he had heard racial slurs shouted at the Cameroonian and saw how the two men beat him. (...) In the fight it was clear that white males were the aggressors, and the dark-skinned man was trying to defend himself." 15 The man talks about the trial as follows: ‘The first advocate of those guys was on trial once and he started to cry. At the second hearing came a female advocate. After she finished asking me questions, the boy who attacked me, asked me: 'Did you wanted to hurt me when you hit me?’ I then realized that what was happening there was some masquerade. The dude, who met me on the street, insulted me and spitted on me. Usually when someone insults me, I don’t react, but when someone spits on me, I feel as if somebody take my honor, my dignity from me. I prefer to have someone hit me than spit on me.

I didn’t want to participate in this case anymore, for me it was a comedy. This case was postponed all the time, for another two weeks and another, and it already started to interfere with my work where I travel a lot. Many people told me that this is how judiciary works in Poland. I decided that I already have had enough. I asked the court: ‘Can I stop coming here? For me, this case was so obvious, there was recording from a camera, there was a witness. People spit on you, and then they ask me if I need someone to react on. Three years later! I wanted to forget about this incident, it was a nightmare for me. No one from my family believed what happened. I wanted to forget about it. Human reaction hurt me. And also the fact that no one responded. People looked at this situation as a movie. This is terrible. Only the girl called the Police. It hurts me a lot, because since I moved to Poland, I always tried to integrate. Probably thanks to my family that lives around the world. From the beginning all I wanted in this whole situation was for them to apologize to me. I've told them many times. They apologized to me in the court, just because they could get a sentence and go to jail. At first I thought: these people need to send them to prison. But

15 http://wroclaw.gazeta.pl/wroclaw/1,35768,6017731,Prokuratura__Bili_Kamerunczyka__bo_byl_czarny.html#ixzz0u 9Hfahs1

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then I thought: what will it change? They’ll come out of prison even worse’.

The man resigned from the case. There was no further press news on this topic.

2.3.3. Autonomous self-help environment What the interviews show - the most important context of help for people at risk of hate violence are immigrants and other minority groups, and also by the networks of self-defense organized by the participants of socio-cultural actions associated with the alternative artistic scene, anarchist and anti-fascist movements, and other libertarian and left-wing initiatives. The category "Help" can be interpreted broadly here. On one hand it means various forms of support on specific issues, such as a legal residence status, social or inter-environmental integration. It also covers issues related to violence on xenophobic or racist grounds. Assistance can come from those who had been together in informal, personal contacts, as well as from institutions and organizations of immigrants and minorities. On the other hand, through contacts with other immigrants and members of minority groups, persons exposed to hate violence create information distributing network (about the risks, realities of the country of residence and the local community, possible difficulties, how to resolve them, etc.), which may also have a form of mutual assistance network. Such a network provides, in many cases, the basic social ‘safe space’ or ‘group of trust’, bringing together a group of people who understand what a threat in the form of racism or other forms of chauvinism is, often experiencing it personally, having also sometimes experience in contacting institutions.

An integrative function and role in the creation of information distributing network and expertise of minorities/immigrants can be fulfilled by official institutions. Among those who were interviewed there were representatives of Wroclaw honorary consulates of two countries: Ukraine and Bulgaria. The employee of the Bulgarian consulate who was quoted earlier (Interview 36), mentioned the support provided in cases of the permits for immigrants from Bulgaria, mainly Roma. She admitted that the members of this group do not report crimes connected with racism.

However, another interviewee from Bulgaria, living in Wroclaw, expressed doubt as to whether this institution has sufficient capacity to be able to operate in a wider range: The [Bulgarian] Consulate is honorary, but it is a promotional body. As if it exists, sometimes it does something to promote, to appear on the scene, but this is not its duty, and there are also no people there doing something with it, because there are just an interpreter and a manager of that consulate, but nobody else.

The consul, in turn, is a businessman who deals with his business, or a developer, so he has other things on his head. (Interview 26) The Director of the Honorary Consulate of Ukraine (Interview 35) has certain knowledge in matters of immigrants from that country. For example, the court case brought against the Police in connection with the severe beating by officers of the citizen of Ukraine. (He was beaten together with a Pole, which he consumed alcohol with in a public place. When the Police approached them, the Pole responded aggressively and pushed a Policeman. A fight began, during which the Ukrainian wanted to separate fighting men, but the Police used batons against the two detainees.

Consulate Director expressed the view that there is very little chance that a citizen of Ukraine can win this case.)

But in the case of immigrants from the Ukraine - as in other foreign environments - the key role is played by the informal information distributing and mutual aid network. The Honorary Consulate’s official said that people residing in Poland provide a legal help to the threatened immigrants and employers exploited by the "black economy". Another interviewee (Interview 23), being in contact with the Consulate, recalled that the primary place of contact for the Ukrainians is the Orthodox Church. It is quite often that people talk about their problems and exchange the information close to church.

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The statements of other respondents also point to the importance of informal contacts within the "group of trust." A student from Congo (Interview 11), who believes that the city of Wroclaw is not safe for foreigners (estimated that 80 percent of his foreign friends were attacked or insulted), admitted that he feels safe only in the Medical Academy, where he studied, and in his dorm. Also, students from Turkey (Interviews 13 and 14), who - unlike many other speakers - in Poland, feel well, most of the time they spend with foreigners, friends from college and the dorm in which they live. The company of other foreigners, especially those from the same country, can reduce feelings of alienation in their new surroundings. Another student from an African country drew attention to this: I was so lucky, that two guys came with me from Ghana. So we go school and then at home we talk. This doesn’t make me so sad. (Interview 3) An important aspect of participation in the information-aid environmental network is being in contact with those who stayed in Poland and Wroclaw for a longer period of time, who know the Polish language better,16 often with a relatively stable social and/or legal situation. Within such a network, in addition to exchanging information and experience, it is also important to share stories related to immigrants-minorities environment, and also "implementation" in the realities of the local community. The following two statements, however, present a completely different perspective on the security of dark-skinned people in Wroclaw (the first interviewee said the situation improved in recent years, while the other speaker expressed concern about the stories he heard), show how the "mechanism" of introducing the newcomers into the local realities by those who have already spent e time here: I think there has been a big improvement since the time I came here or compared with the past. When I came I spoke with a African people who came here years before me and they said that it had been really dangerous for Africans and immigrants who are black or had darker skin. For example, ten years ago it would be dangerous to walk in the street alone if you were black, even during the daytime. The guys had always hung out together in a group of three, four persons and they hadn’t been walking during the night. Now it’s different. I can go alone at night as well. I don’t feel that it is as dangerous as before. (Interview 6) I’ve been here only few months, but I remember that when I arrived to Wrocław and I wanted to go out in the evening, my friends would tell me that it was dangerous for a black girl to walk alone in the evening. They told me that I should have gone for a walk with someone else. More than ten people told me that Wrocław was not that safe for us, people who came from Africa. Until now I didn’t have any bad experience here in Wrocław, but I trust my friends and I don’t go out alone at night. (Interview 9) We can also have another point of view at the contacts, creating the environmental network of knowledge distributing and mutual aid, in which information, experiences, stories are exchanged, and, where possible and appropriate, assistance in solving problems is provided. Such environments have knowledge which is not available to other members of the local community. Stories from the past few years, which tell about foreigners, are sometimes subjects of interest to journalists and through the media they reach a wider audience, but usually these are descriptions of the controversial events. They rarely have a form of more coherent alternative stories of the local community of Wroclaw, told by the voice of immigrants/minorities and depicted through their eyes.

These stories circulate in the environments from which the interviewed persons come from. This 16 Sometimes learning Polish takes place in the group of migrants or in their everyday community. Among the respondents in the group with the questionnaire, six people admitted that they learnt Polish at the bazaar where they work, including learning from their Bulgarian friends who also lived in Poland.

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also applies to people involved in the “alternative” socio-cultural movements, which have not only their own local story of the "development of the scene", but also the story of the conflicts and interenvironmental victories involving the retraction or reducing the risk of violence after a period of far-right intimidation on the part of sub-cultural or quasi-political and neo-Nazi ultra-nationalist militia. As it seems in a perspective of the issue of preventing racial hate violence and helping those who are exposed to it, an informal environmental information-aid network with knowledge about past experiences of the group and/or its representatives, is a key element in the process of creating individual and collective subjectivity, which is necessary after all to create an atmosphere of safety and better integration of the local community in Wroclaw. It seems that the more conscious and effective the environmental self-help will be and the more efficiently it will be included in the process of creating a network of local over-ethnic cooperation in their environment among various individuals and collective (networking), the more favorable conditions will benefit the entire local community to promote emancipatory model of acceptance and democratic dialogue . Thanks to that it will be possible to work together to solve the most pressing problems that are often seeds of conflicts and intolerance deepening.

In this part of the study we have distinguished seeking for help as a specific strategy to respond to the experience of hate violence by the participants in the group/category of the most vulnerable in the community of Wrocław. We have showed examples of experiences in getting individual and institutional help. We also brought closer the problem of indifference of the local environment to racism, xenophobia and other forms of intolerance. We devoted a special place to the Police institution, presenting examples of particularly inappropriate responses to the needs of people affected by hate attacks, and often, as it seems, being in contradiction with, the rules of law, justice, tolerance and humanity. We also emphasized the importance of distribution networks of knowledge/information existing in immigrants-minorities environments and the forms of self-help.

We marked the importance of these networks in creating in a community of Wroclaw conditions of greater security for people currently exposed to hate violence. This part should summarize the discussion by saying that these networks exist primarily as a result of spontaneous down-top integration processes. If they are form, then it is not thanks to official institutions, the Police or justice authorities, but most of all aside to them. They are formed in response to poor effectiveness of institutions in supporting and the ‘anti-help’ and often socially disruptive nature of their practical actions.

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Annex Table 1a. Characteristic of interviewers a – immigrants and ethnic/national minorities Nr of interview

Sex

Age

Citizenship/nationality /ethnic group

How long in Poland

1.

F

32

Japan

6 years

2.

M

29

Tanzania

6 years

3.

M

23

Ghana

3 years

4.

M

23

Nigeria

almost 3 years

5.

M

41

Holland / Surinam

7 years

6.

M

29

Rwanda

more than 6 years

7.

M

29

Senegal

5 years

8.

M

30

Cameroon

8 years

9.

K

25

Nigeria

almost 4 years

Legal status in Poland temporary residence (work permit) temporary residence (student) temporary residence (student) temporary residence (student) Polish citizen temporary residence (student) temporary residence (student) temporary residence (work permit) temporary residence (student) temporary residence (work permit ) temporary residence (student) temporary residence (student) temporary residence (student)

10.

M

28

Colombia

more than 3 years

11.

M

24

Congo

4 years

12.

M

26

Ghana

4 years

13.

M

23

Turkey

1,5 year

14.

M

23

Turkey

1,5 year

temporary residence (student)

15.

M

29

China

6 years

-

16.

F

Ukraine

More than 1 year

temporary residence

17.

M

Hungary

almost 1 year

Polish citizen

18.

M

China

6 years

-

19.

F/M

Bulgaria

More than 5 years

EU citizens

Belarus

4 years

temporary residence (student)

around 25 around 25 around 30 around 50 around 25

20.

F

21.

M

-

Poland / Roma

Born in Poland

Polish citizen

22.

M

around 25

Belarus / Poland

4 years

temporary residence (student)

23.

M

around 75

Poland / Lemko

Born in Poland

Polish citizen

24.

F

28

Ukraine

-

temporary residence

25.

F

27

Ukraine

3 years

work permit

26.

M

around 50

Bulgaria

35 years

-

27.

F

25

Ukraine

3 years

temporary residence (PhD student)

28.

F

30

Ukraine/Poland

15 years

Polish citizen

29.

F

19

Poland/ polish-Tanzania

Born in Poland

Polish citizen

30.

F

around 30

Mexico

5 years with pauses

temporary residence (work permit)

31.

M

37

Canada

many visits in Poland

illegal

32.

F/M

around 50

Ukraine

around 20 years

permanent residence (work permit)

Other information - single mother, english teacher -interview in english -interview in english - music branch worker -interview in english - interview in english - music branch worker interview in english- interview in english - interview in english - international company worker - interview in polish interview in english- teacher of foreign language interview in english- interview in polish -interview in english - interview in english - interview in english - running a business - interview in english - NGO volunteer - interview in polish - NGO volunteer - interview in english - running a business - interview in polish - flee market workers - interview in polish - hotel worker - interview in polish - activist of Roma association - interview in polish - interview in polish - retired employee, activist of Ukrainian society in Wroclaw - interview in polish - journalist - interview in polish - pedagogue - interview in polish - activist of bulgarian association - interview in polish - university worker - interview in polish - running a business - interview in polish - study in Wroclaw - interview in polish - teacher of foreign language - polish husband - interview in polish - unemployed - interview in english and polish - interview with marriage - working at school - interview in polish

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33.

F

34.

M a

around 30 25

Denmark Syria

4 years

EU Citizen

- interview in english

6,5 year

temporary residence (student)

-interview in polish

during the interview

Table 1b. Characteristic of interviewers - institutions and alternative groups activists

REPRESENTATIVES OF INSTITUTIONS Intervie w number

Sex

Name of the institution

35.

F

Honorary Consulate of Ukraine

36.

F

Honorary Consulate of Bulgaria

ALTERNATIVE GROUPS ACTIVISTS Intervie w number

Sex

Age

Other information

37.

M

38

anarchist vocalist of famous Wroclawian punk band , antifascist activist

38.

F

27

left wing activist, publicist and journalist, feminist, Phd of political science

39.

M

25

punk scene activist

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Questionnaire

Dear Sir, Madam Please fill this questionnaire in order to help our Organisation with examining and diagnosing the situation of the foreigners in Wroclaw. Your opinion and comments are of the great value to us.

They will determine the course of our actions in the future, and this is why we would appreciate your full cooperation and commitment when answering the questions.

Please underline a chosen answer. If there is not enough space for the answer (open questions), please use the other side of the paper sheet (give the number of the question).

This questionnaire is anonymous, and therefore all the information and personal details given are confidential and will be only used for our studies.

1. 1. How long have you been in Poland: a) up to 1 year b) 1-2 years c) 2-5 years d) more than 5 lat 2. Why did you come to Poland? a) I felt threatened in my native country b) better perspectives of well paid job c) desire to improve the standard of living d) opportunity of studying e) visiting a relative (relatives) in Poland f) coming to stay with my Polish partner g) volunteer work h) other reason (what?) .......................................................................................................................................... .................. ..

3. Where (How) have you learn Polish? a) courses at the University b) courses at the work place c) learning from my friends, partner, relatives d) course of Polish language (in what city?........................................................................................) e) other (what?) ............................................................................................................................................................

4. How do you rate your Polish language knowledge? a) I have no communication problems b) I often have some communication problems c) I have communication problems in every day situations ( shopping, using public services) 63

5. Would you like to learn Polish language? a) yes 2. b) no (go to question 7.)

6. How would you like to study Polish? a) paid courses b) free courses c) individual lessons d) languages exchange d) Internet courses/ e-learning e) self studying f) Other way (what?) ‌......................................................................................................................................................... .

7. There are different factors consisting of standard/comfort of living. How would you value the following factors of your life in Wroclaw? definitely high Rather high Rather Definitely low low 1. sense of safety

ÂĄ

2. economic standard 3. personal freedom (in the meaning of being yourself, freedom of individuality) 4. educational opportunities 5. cultural opportunities 6. freedom of religion and religion practice 8. How much would you agree with the opinion that Wroclaw is an open city for other cultures, foreigners ? a) I definitely agree b) rather agree c) rather disagree d) definitely disagree 9. What are you missing from the relations with other inhabitants of Wroclaw? (you can mark several answers) a) personal distance b) acceptance and openness for other cultures and customs c) opportunities of making friendships and getting to know people d) willingness of helping in everyday situations e) knowledge of foreign languages among Polish people f) willingness of understanding different customs g) I find people in Wroclaw rather cold in contact with other people h) I find people in Wroclaw too extrovert (too direct) in contact with other people g) I am not missing anything h) I am missing something else (what?) ‌......................................................................................................................................................... .

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10. Do you find Wroclaw safe for foreigners? a) yes b) no 11. I am going to read some names of neighborhoods and places in Wroclaw. Which of these neighbourhoods do you find safety and how would you rate their safety?

3. (ank.:do not read “I don´t know the place) Definitely safe

Rather Rather safe unsafe

Definitely unsafe I don´t know this place

Market Square 2. Pasaż Niepolda 3. Nadodrze 4. Grunwald 5. Krzyki, Gaj 6. Wlk. Wyspa (Sępolno, Biskupin, Zalesie, Zacisze) 7. „Trójkąt Bermudzki” (the part of Przedmieścia Oławskiego, Kościuszki, Traugutta, Puławskiego street) 8. Psie Pole 9. Train station 10. Księże Małe 11. Śródmieście 12. Wyspa Słodowa and surroundings 12. What do you do at the moment? ( more than one answer is possible) a) I work (go to question 12.) b) I study c) I am raising children (go to question 13.) d) I am looking for a job (go to question 13.) e) I am unemployed (go to question 13.) f) I am doing something else. What? …......................................................................................................................................................... .

13. Do you like your studies? a) yes b) no (go to question15.)

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14.Do you like your work? a) yes b) no c) doesn´t apply 15. Do you have perspectives of professional development in Wroclaw? a) yes, I do and I am developing professionally b) yes, I do but I don´t develop professionally. c) no, I don´t have any opportunity to develop my career d) I am not interested in developing my career.

16. Have you ever been in: 17. Are you satisfied with you job?. (ank.: only these indicated by the respondent) 18. Have you had a chance to communicate in English (or your native language) with the institutional employees (public services, bank, hospital, emergency, family doctor) (ank.: only the places indicated with the respondent) 19. How would you rate the institutions in Wroclaw regarding the general preparation for meeting the foreigners? (ank.: only the answers indicated by the respondent. Put the number in the table) a) the institution is very well prepared b) the institution is rather well prepared c) the institution is badly prepared d) the institution is not prepared.

16T N 17T N 18T N 19 a, b,c 1. Lower Silesian Governor's Office Department of Foreigners(Urząd Wojewódzki do Spraw Cudzoziemców) 2. Municipal Office of Social Assistance(Biuro Pomocy Społecznej) 3. Court of Justice (Sąd) 4. Employment Office (Urząd Pracy) 5. Tenancy Office (Biuro Meldunkowe) 6. Deanery / Dean´s office (Dziekanat) 20. Have you witnessed violent or verbal incidents against foreigners in the last couple of years? a) yes b) no( go to question 22.)

21. Where did it happen? a) in the street b) at school/at the University c) in my workplace d) in the bar/restaurant e) public office f) in the means of transport g) other place (what?)..........................................................................................................................

22. Have you or any of your friends/relatives been subjected to violent or verbal incidents against foreigners described below?(more than one answer possible) 66

a) verbal abuse b) verbal abuse/bullying – shouting out any hatred slogans for example “white power”, Poland for Polish ect..) c) ridicule d) menace/ threats e) criminal damage (at place of residence or work, vehicle, graffiti) e) spitting f) physical bullying - jogging g) physical bullying - jerking h) assault and battery i) physical assault with any kind of weapon or dangerous object j) other kind of aggression/bullying (what?) ………………………………………………………………………………………………………. .

23. Can you describe the perpetrator (the aggressive person)?

-age.......................................................................................................................................

-sex.….....................................................................................................................................

- nationality............................................................................................................................. number of people..............................................................................................................................

-I know/I don´t know them personally........................................................................................

24. What did the witnesses testify? a) there were no witnesses b) witnesses did not react b) the witnesses supported me c) the witnesses joined the perpetrators e) the witnesses just watched the event f) the witnesses called for the police g) the witnesses reaction was different?

25. Did you report the incident to Police/ the Prosecutor´s Office? Or did the person involved in the incident do it? a) yes (go27.) b) no 26. Why didn´t you report the incident (to police or prosecutor´s office)? a) I think the incident was not worth reporting b) I didn´t want to have any further problems c) I did not have time d) I do not trust police 27. Do you have children? a) yes b) no (go to question 29.)

28. Were your children ever victims of verbal or physical bullying (abuse) in the school? (ridiculed of their nationality, native language, customs, believes, traditional celebrations of religion or any other? ) a) yes b) no

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29. Have you ever heard of the term “ hate crime victim”? a) YES b) NO 30. How do you understand the term “hate crime”? ……………………………………………………………………………………………………… ……………………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………

31. Would you like to share anything we have not asked in this questionnaire? ............................................................................................................................................................. ............................................................................................................................................................. ............................................................................................................................................................. ............................................................................................................................................................. ............................................................................................................................................................. ............................................................................................................................................................. .........................................................................

PERSONAL DETAILS 1. date of birth: 2. Sex (don´t read) a) female b) male 3. Marital status: a) single b) married c) widower/widow d) divorced e) concubinage (informal but stable relationship) 4. How many people in the family 5. Do you have any children under 18? a) yes, how many? …...... b) no 6. profession/ educational ..................................................................................................................................................

7. employment status full time job part time /temporary job unemployed unemployed without a valid contract 8. What is you job?…………………………………………

9. Nationality/ ethnic group: ..................................................................................................................................................

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