Theme 1: Inclusive communities
This theme is about safe, welcoming and more inclusive communities, enhancing the equality and diversity of our city.
Building on our experience of Covid, public health is a key feature of this work. We know that black and ethnic minority communities, women, disabled people and older people became disproportionately more vulnerable due to existing health conditions, roles in work, caring responsibilities and risks of redundancy or furlough.
The safety of our public realm is a key component of this strand of work and in particular ensuring that race and gender-based violence within our communities and public spaces is addressed.
The actions therefore address the risks and disadvantages that groups of people face because of their age, gender, race or through poverty, from hate crime, violence or discrimination.
Within this, the consultation identified an additional priority outcome for the first year of the framework: museum stakeholders, visitors and staff perceive greater fairness, representation and justice in their communities and local authority area.
The Council is delivering a wide range of actions to address poverty and community safety. The specific groups of people that these actions are intended to benefit are women, children and young people, people from a BAME background, adults who are vulnerable and people experiencing poverty and disadvantage. This is not exclusive however, as it is recognised that people from across the population, out with these specific groups also can face discrimination, verbal abuse and violence.
Actions taken under this theme progress the general duty of fostering good relations.
Mainstream actions
Tackling the key cross cutting themes of poverty and deprivation is central to the Edinburgh Partnership’s work and essential to building safer and more inclusive communities in Edinburgh. Reducing poverty and entrenched inequality requires sustained collaborative effort, including gaining the confidence of disaffected and marginalised groups, and the scale of the challenge is likely to have intensified as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Edinburgh’s Community Justice Outcomes Improvement Plan (2019-22) sets out a programme of work to improve outcomes for services users in the justice system. For example, a Restorative Justice Service has been developed and where appropriate, adults on statutory supervision who have been convicted of a hate crime and the victim of the offence, may be offered the opportunity to participate in the process. An ongoing programme of Anti-Discriminatory Awareness Practice Training (ADAPT) supports this work.
Community Justice services is also working to embed the recently developed Respekt Service which mirrors the Caledonian System to address domestic abuse. It provides a first language voluntary and court mandated service to Polish men and a voluntary service to the Polish women partners when they are victims/survivors of the abuse.
In 2020, the Equally Safe Edinburgh Committee (ESEC) rolled out a three-year improvement plan to prioritise the delivery of integrated, high quality responses to violence against women, children and young people. The Equally Safe Plan has actions to build and improve the infrastructure to ensure women and girls thrive, including promoting gender equality, supporting women’s safety and rights and educational input to schools.
The Council’s Criminal Justice Social Work Services direct actions include:
- providing domestic abuse services for women, children and male perpetrators
- providing gender specific services for example the Willow Service – for women who experience gender-based violence
- providing training across the City of Edinburgh Council and Third Sector partners in relation to gender-based violence including domestic abuse and complex trauma;
- attending multi-agency risk assessment conferences, focusing on women and children at risk from domestic abuse.
The Council also has information for people at risk of gender based violence on their website, including men who experience abuse in their relationships.
A new Domestic Abuse Housing Policy, published in 2020, ensures a sensitive and equitable approach to finding suitable housing solutions for victims of domestic abuse. Implementing a collaborative, early intervention response to domestic abuse, victims are supported to access a range of housing options, advice, information and support.
Edinburgh’s Community Safety Strategy (2020-23) contains priority workstreams to both reduce the likelihood of children and young people engaging in harmful or offending behaviour, and to improve digital safety to safeguard those most at risk from online harm, particularly children, young people, and vulnerable adults. Additionally, a Community Improvement Partnership is working to support minority groups disproportionately impacted by homelessness and engaged in street begging; this includes delivering outreach programmes to advise on a range of practical supports available relating to housing, welfare and benefits.
Future work
To complement the ongoing work described above, a short life working group will be established to explore how key equalities themes are being progressed within existing strategies so that any gaps in the Council’s work to mainstream equalities can be identified and addressed.
Actions to support the priority outcome
The priority outcome for the first year of this framework is that museum stakeholders, visitors and staff perceive greater fairness, representation and justice in their communities and local authority area.
The independent Edinburgh Slavery and Colonialism Legacy Review Group will review features in the public realm such as our statues, public buildings and street names which commemorate those with close links to slavery and empire. It will then propose a series of recommendations to redress this legacy.
As well as dedicating resource and support for the Review Group, the Council’s Museums and Galleries Service has made a commitment to an anti-racism pledge.
It commits to:
- celebrate the creative contribution that people from a BAME background and people with protected characteristics make;
- review practice so that colonial language, values and narratives are challenged in interpretation, research and documentation throughout exhibitions, venues, collections, programming and digital media;
- develop a core of anti-racist practice and language and deliver training including unconscious bias and white privilege for front of house staff and curatorial staff;
- build and extend connections with communities, expanding the diversity of exhibitions and programming and highlighting further BAME histories;
- review representation across the workforce and develop a staff Inclusion Working Group to develop equalities policy;
- provide opportunities for people from a BAME background, migrant and refugee communities to gain work experience through internships, shadowing and volunteering placements as well as through partnership projects to increase their abilities to secure employment opportunities.
Performance
Performance measures are under development and will include
- research into museum staff, stakeholder and visitor perceptions to establish robust baseline data
- other measures to be developed following the conclusion of the Edinburgh Slavery and Colonialism Legacy Review
- outcomes of targeted restorative/community justice supports.