A red-haired family claims to have been driven from their Newcastle home because of abuse. Why is the harassment of redheads dismissed as just harmless fun?
By Finlo Rohrer
BBC News Magazine
Here’s a joke. “What’s the difference between a terrorist and a redhead?”
Here’s the punchline. “You can negotiate with a terrorist.”
Is this offensive? If it was made in your workplace, within hearing of a redheaded colleague, would you make a fuss? Probably not.
But mock someone’s ethnicity, religion or sexuality and you will attract the beady eye of management. Make a sexist joke and prepare to be dismissed as an antediluvian relic. Verbal abuse
Carrot-top, copper-top, ginger-nut, ginger minger, bluey (among Australians), Duracell, Ronald McDonald, Simply Red, Queen Elizabeth. And so on for hours and hours of the typical redhead’s life. No wonder some gloss over their hair colour as “auburn” and “strawberry blonde” and even “titian”.
Photographer Charlotte Rushton has been chronicling the UK’s redheads for a book, Ginger Snaps. Of the 300 she snapped, only two have been spared bullying because of their hair. She herself has suffered verbal abuse from complete strangers.
“I was on the Tube, pregnant, and I was really humiliated by this drunk yob. He was shouting ‘do the cuffs and the collars match?’ He got right up into my face. You don’t do that to other people.”
She believes the phenomenon is long-standing and uniquely British in its most virulent form.
“In other countries redheads will get teased at school but it stops when they become adults. If you are a woman you are fiery and alluring, beautiful.”
In adult life, women get stereotyped and red-haired men take much of the worst abuse. Treatment of red-haired children in school ranges from mild taunts to grim persecution.
Michele Eliot, the American director of British children’s charity Kidscape, regularly has significant numbers of red-haired children in courses on coping with bullying.
“There is nothing like this in the US where having red hair is not a precursor to having someone abuse you. Red hair is considered glamorous.”
Bullies at school and in later life may sense that ill-treatment of the red-haired will not be treated as seriously by the authorities as persecution of other groups.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/6725653.stm