PECAO Workshop – Roma in Romania, discrimination and online hate speech

Ciprian Nodiș is one of the 5 Romanian peer educators from Nevo Parudimos Association, within the PECAO project – Peer Education to Counter Antigypsyist Online Hate Speech, which fights to identify and combat online antigypsism. Ciprian addressed the topic “Roma in Romania, discrimination and online hate speech” in a workshop with young people with whom he works to achieve PECAO objectives.

This workshop took place on 31.03.2021 in Bistrita, within the Christian Center for Social Reintegration “Onisim” (foundation that deals with the social reintegration of people who have just left detention, or homeless people).

The event brought together 7 young people aged between 23 and 30, coming from different social categories and different ethnicities.

The meeting aimed to raise awareness of the negative impact of hate speech instigating anti-gypsy discourse among young people, focusing on their exchange of attitude through experiential learning.

During the workshop, the Roma community in Romania and the history of the Roma ethnicity were discussed.

There was also discussion about Roma discrimination and online hate speech, but also about the objectives and activities of the PECAO project. During the workshop, Ciprian focused on modern methods and techniques through which racism is propagated online and the scale of the phenomenon of hate speech in the virtual environment.

“I tried with this method to challenge the young people to come up with ideas on how this phenomenon could be combated in the online environment and they concluded that a monitoring method is needed. In this way we were able to introduce the PECAO project and the importance of this intention ”.