A video highlighting support for victims of cyber abuse, along with new multilingual resources, are now available to support targets of cyber abuse in diverse communities.
The eSafety resources arise from a collaboration between eSafety and the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC).
In February, the AHRC recorded more complaints under the Racial Discrimination Act than at any time over the previous twelve months. While the rate of racism complaints since then has been within the usual range, thirty per cent of all racial discrimination complaints made to the AHRC since the start of February have been related to COVID-19.
“Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, there have been persistent reports of racist abuse and discrimination against people of Chinese and other Asian backgrounds,” said Race Discrimination Commissioner Chin Tan. “We welcome this collaboration with eSafety because it means people will know there is support available if these harmful attacks happen online.”
eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said: “At eSafety, we stand ready to provide support and advice to victims of cyber abuse, which is behaviour that uses technology to threaten, intimidate, harass or humiliate someone with the intention to hurt them. In the era of COVID-19, during which some individuals may find themselves the targets of this type of behaviour on the basis of their race, we want to make sure our resources are accessible to all.”
eSafety’s advice to victims of cyber abuse is now available in Arabic, Persian, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Tagalog, Hindi, Vietnamese, Spanish, Tamil, Punjabi, Thai and Korean and can be found here.
Constant vigilance is required to condemn and address racism, whether online or off. Australia prides itself on being a safe and welcoming country that addresses issues of racism and takes each racist incident seriously.
A new short video explaining cyber abuse and the remedies available is available here.
For more information or to arrange an interview, please contact:
AHRC
Mark Franklin
0437 133 671 or Mark.Franklin@humanrights.gov.au