I’m Rocio Cifuentes. I’m director of the Ethnic Youth Support Team in Swansea and we’ve developed a project called “the Think Project”, which aims to educate young people and increase their resilience to racism and far-right extremism.
As everybody will be aware of, racism and xenophobia have been increasing significantly in the UK over the last decade, probably since 9/11 in America, and 7/7 in London. When the so-called ‘war on terror’ was instigated, it kind of became a war on Islam. That means that the very diverse communities that we have been living in, in the UK, communities including many Muslims, were increasingly targeted for their race and religion.
In Swansea, we have a small, but growing ethnic population, which includes a lot of Muslims and refugees and asylum-seekers. So, as a charity whose aim is to support ethnic minorities and young people, we felt that there’s a real need to do something practical about the increasing racism and xenophobia and Islamophobia that the young people we support are being subjected to. We looked around and realised that nobody else was really talking to young people in schools, or really challenging in any kind of practical sense the negative media narratives which are really kind of all around us.
