Telling the story of everyone s rights, every day

Telling the story of everyone s rights, every day November 2013 1

ABOUT EQUALLY OURS Equally Ours is a new initiative to raise awareness of the benefits of human rights for everyone in everyday life. Equally Ours is a partnership between the Equality and Diversity Forum, Age UK, the British Institute of Human Rights, Children s Rights Alliance for England, Disability Rights UK, Mind, René Cassin and Runnymede Trust. Equally Ours aims to help everyone to understand how human rights benefit all of us here in the UK, every day, in very practical ways; that they are an important part of our shared heritage, helping to make equality, inclusion and social justice real for everyone. Equally Ours brings charities and voluntary organisations together to share their stories of how human rights matter to the people they support people from all backgrounds and all walks of life. We would like to thank the Thomas Paine Initiative for funding Equally Ours. The Thomas Paine Initiative is a collaborative funding initiative that aims to help promote greater respect for the importance of human rights by ensuring a better understanding of the true scope of the obligations and liberties deriving from domestic and international human rights law. 2

WHO IS THIS BRIEFING FOR? This briefing is designed for charities and voluntary organisations that work to secure dignity, respect, justice and equality for people. We hope it will be particularly useful to campaigning and communications teams who are interested in telling and sharing stories that bring to life these values. It will help you: Understand how people think and feel about human rights, and the opportunities this gives your organisation to connect with their values. Understand why sharing positive human rights stories is important for organisations working to advance equality and social justice. Understand what influences people s thoughts and feelings about human rights. Think about how your organisation can share a positive human rights story. Human rights have played an important role in protecting older people, for example in ensuring they get dignified and humane treatment in hospitals and care homes. Caroline Abrahams, Charity Director, Age UK 3

WHY TALK ABOUT HUMAN RIGHTS? There are many reasons why it s important for charities and voluntary organisations to talk about human rights. Many charities and voluntary organisations work to secure the basic human rights principles of dignity, respect, equality, fairness and autonomy for the people they work with. Just a few examples include: Health charities are often concerned about the lack of dignity provided in hospitals, care homes and at home. Children s charities advocate for children to be treated with respect and for their voices to be heard in decision-making. Disabled people s organisations campaign for autonomy and empowerment to be at the heart of policy and practice affecting disabled people. Mental health campaigners work to secure access to just and fair treatment and services for people with mental health problems. Charities working with refugees and asylum seekers campaign for humane policies that protect the fundamental rights of the people they work with. Advice organisations campaign for better laws, policies and support to help all of the people who come through their doors. Whoever we are, we all need our human rights laws to keep us safe. Those of us who want to see children fully protected should be spreading the word that human rights are right for children. Paola Uccellari, Director Children s Rights Alliance for England 4

The UK s human rights safety net is an important source of legal protection for the people many charities work with, support and campaign on behalf of. For example: Patients who experienced inhuman and degrading treatment at Mid Staffordshire hospital challenged their treatment using the Human Rights Act. Human rights have been used by disabled people to protect our right to family life for instance, challenging decisions that separate disabled couples into different care homes when they have lived together for years. Gay people in Northern Ireland used the European Convention of Human Rights to challenge discriminatory legislation. Human rights values and principles are the enemies of prejudice and discrimination they are vital to achieving equality and social justice. However, human rights are poorly understood by most people in the UK today. This has several consequences that affect the people many charities work with: It makes it difficult for people to assert their own rights, particularly when they are in a vulnerable situation. It is more difficult to build a broader culture of respect for everyone s rights and for the principles of equality, dignity, fairness, autonomy and respect. Public debate about human rights, equality and social justice issues is based on misperceptions and therefore doesn t focus on the harm that still happens to many people. 5

Talking about the issues that affect the people you work with through a human rights lens, helps to amplify and build consensus about a wider set of values and principles. It puts the idea of individual empowerment and autonomy at the heart of your message. It emphasises the principles of equality, dignity and respect, and undermines prejudice, discrimination and injustice. It helps people to see the relevance of human rights for their everyday lives, building their understanding and confidence in asserting and respecting them. Sometimes charities and voluntary organisations don t talk about human rights because they think that this will be off-putting to the people they re communicating with, or they don t feel confident about talking about human rights in an everyday way. In reality, there is broad public support, right across the population, for the values and principles of human rights and we know that people become even more positive when they see the relevance of human rights to their everyday lives. We hope that this briefing will help us all to feel more confident about sharing the positive story of human rights in Britain today. 6

HOW DO PEOPLE THINK AND FEEL ABOUT HUMAN RIGHTS? In 2012, the Equality and Diversity Forum commissioned research into current public attitudes towards human rights in Great Britain today. As part of this research, we sampled 2,280 adults in England, Scotland and Wales to find out how people feel and think about human rights 1. We found that there are four broad clusters of attitudes towards human rights in Great Britain 2 : SUPPORTIVE 22% CONFLICTED 41% UNINTERESTED 11% OPPOSED 26% 1 Because Northern Ireland has a slightly different system of human rights protections, it was not included in this research 2 Source: YouGov sample of 2,280 GB adults, 25 th 29 th May 2012 7

CLUSTER 1: SUPPORTIVE Around one in four people (22%) hold strongly positive, supportive views about human rights. They agree strongly that all rights are fundamental and should apply to everyone, that rights help create a fair society and protect people when they re vulnerable. This group feels that rights are central to their own lives, believe their rights are protected and has a better understanding of how human rights laws work in practice than the other groups. People in this cluster reject ideas that the human rights system is being abused or that human rights laws don t do what they re supposed to do. People in this group have higher levels of education, are younger on average and are more likely to work in the public and charity sectors than the other groups (and the population as a whole). People in this group are far more likely than the other groups to get their news from the radio and online, are less likely to read a paper and are bigger users of social media than the other groups. 8

CLUSTER 2: CONFLICTED Around four in ten people (41%) hold a mixture of positive and negative views about human rights. People in this group lean towards feeling positively about human rights. They agree that rights create a fair society, help to protect people when they re vulnerable and see most rights as fundamental. However, they also agree with statements suggesting that human rights laws are not doing what they re supposed to do and that the human rights system is being abused. People in this group feel their rights are protected and tend to see them as relevant to their day to day life, but less so than the positive supporters. Their understanding of how human rights laws work in practice is also less accurate than the positive supporters. People in this group feel more positive about human rights when they hear messages that connect human rights to everyday life, talk about fair processes and increase their procedural understanding of how human rights laws work. People in this cluster are broadly representative of the population of Great Britain as a whole, including their newspaper readership, use of social media, socio-economic background, ethnicity and sexuality. 9

CLUSTER 3: UNINTERESTED Around one in ten people (11%) do not have strong views either way on the value of human rights. This group is largely ambivalent to both positive and negative arguments about human rights and is more likely than other groups to see human rights as unimportant in general. This group tends not to see rights as relevant to their lives, is unsure if their rights are protected and has considerably lower understanding of human rights laws than the other groups. This group feels more positive about human rights when they hear messages that connect human rights to everyday life and that emphasise the tradition and heritage behind human rights. People in this group are much younger than the population as a whole, and tend to come from a lower social grade. They are less likely to have a degree and more likely to have never worked than other groups. They are less likely to use social media than other groups. CLUSTER 4: OPPOSED Around one in four people (26%) hold negative views about human rights and human rights laws. They hold negative views of human rights in general, do not believe that rights should apply to everyone, or that they create a fair society or help to protect people who are in vulnerable situations. People in this group agree strongly with negative statements about human rights laws and do not see human rights as relevant to their own lives. 10

WHAT INFLUENCES HOW PEOPLE THINK AND FEEL ABOUT HUMAN RIGHTS? Our research tested and identified the impact of different types of messages on people s attitudes towards human rights 3. We found that particular ways of talking about human rights increased how positively people felt about them. Emphasising the relevance of human rights in everyday life increases how positively every group feels about human rights. Talking about the tradition and heritage of human rights increases how positively the uninterested and opposed groups feel about human rights. Showing the link between human rights and fairness increases how positively the conflicted group feel about human rights. Improving understanding of human rights procedures increases how positively the conflicted group feel about the Human Rights Act in particular. 3 Source: YouGov sample of 2,280 GB adults, 25 th 29 th May 2012 11

WHAT ROLE DOES THE MEDIA PLAY? As part of our research into public attitudes to human rights, the Equality and Diversity Forum also commissioned an analysis of media coverage of human rights. This looked at over 1,000 newspaper articles, websites and other relevant documents, primarily from 2011 and early 2012. This study found 4 : Few articles in the leading national newspapers examined the basic principles of human rights or argued for the importance of protecting human rights in law. Human rights were rarely associated with advances in equality, tolerance and fairness. There was substantial opposition in the media to applying the fundamental principles of human rights to everyone; instead, minority groups were regularly presented as undeserving of human rights protections. The dominant media narrative linked human rights with undeserving groups and used them as a proxy for anti-european views. Human rights were portrayed as undermining rather than enhancing traditional freedoms and legal protections, rather than empowering and enhancing citizenship. Our research also confirmed that the media influences people s attitudes to human rights, but that it is out of step with the broad nature of public opinion on the issues. We believe there is both a need, and an opportunity, to share the positive story of how human rights benefit everyone in everyday life. In particular, opportunities exist to show the relevance of human rights to people s day to day lives, and to reconnect human rights with values like equality and fairness. 4 Source: Talking about human rights: media, public and political discourses and public understandings, Glasgow University Media Group, July 2012 12

TELLING THE STORY OF EVERYONE S RIGHTS, EVERY DAY Equally Ours is here to help charities and voluntary organisations share their stories of how human rights affect the people they support. By doing this, we hope to raise awareness of the benefits of human rights protections, and to help make sure they apply effectively to everybody. Equally Ours will produce communications briefings, help organisations to amplify their individual human rights stories through digital and social media, coordinate joint media and social media initiatives and provide training for charities and voluntary organisations in talking about human rights. A core narrative underpins our work. It sums up the story of human rights in Great Britain today, from the point of view of organisations working to secure equality, dignity and respect for the people they support: Most of us in Britain today are proud of our hard-won human rights and support having laws to protect them. We rely on them as a safety net as we go about our everyday lives, free from harm. They help make our shared values a reality values like equality, dignity, justice and freedom. But too many people do still experience harm. We need to do more to make rights real for everyone, every day. That s what matters. Your organisation can help us tell this story, raising awareness of the benefits of human rights for everyone in everyday life, including the people you support and work with. You can do this by linking the issues that affect the people you support, with the principles and values of human rights, and by celebrating the achievements that human rights principles have led to for the people you work with. 13

HELP TO SHARE AND TELL YOUR STORIES Equally Ours produces various resources to help charities and voluntary organisations share their stories of how human rights affect the people they work with. Equally Ours will produce briefings from further research into how people think and feel about human rights when it comes to particular social justice and equality issues. We will also be producing media briefings on topics that affect people s human rights in everyday life. We are working with Common Cause, through the Public Interest Research Centre, to develop a guide to using values when talking about human rights, equality and social justice issues. This guide is due to be published in Spring 2014. We are working with Counterpoint, who are carrying out an analysis of the frames being used in the current public discussion of human rights. A framing toolkit for campaigners and advocates is also due to be published in early 2014. We will be holding training in talking about human rights for charities and voluntary organisations throughout 2014. We will be producing case studies of human rights in action and would love to work with your organisation to share your stories. To sign up for our free resources and to get involved, visit us online, drop us an email and follow us on social media. W: www.equally-ours.org.uk E: info@equally-ours.uk @EquallyOurs www.facebook.com/equallyours 14