Genocide Awareness Resources

Genocide

Where can you interrupt the process?

Genocide is a process of committing systematic persecution and violence with the intent to eliminate a targeted group, often including mass murder. Genocide doesn’t happen all at once. It’s a process that builds over time that can be interrupted at various points.

Preventing genocide requires confronting the conditions that make it possible. This means standing against ideas, policies, and actions that divide people into separate groups. It begins with individuals challenging stereotypes and helping create inclusive communities. It also requires communities to speak out against discriminatory laws and policies that deny people their human and civil rights. By doing this together, we can build communities that are stronger and more resistant to hatred, violence, and genocide.

Architecture of Atrocity

Language and Attitudes: This process of division begins with language and attitudes.This looks like the normalization of stereotypes about people’s real or perceived identities, such as their race, religion, nationality, or beliefs.

Avoidance: When these attitudes and beliefs become internalized and normalized, it can lead to actions of avoidancesuch as exclusion, treating people as inferior, or scapegoating.

Discrimination: Once these individual beliefs and actions become widely accepted or tolerated, policy leaders are empowered to enact discriminatory laws and systems. These policies target certain groups, legalizing discrimination and denying them human and civil rights.

Violence: As this discrimination becomes part of official systems, acts of hate and violence may increase.

Elimination/Genocide: This can create the conditions in which genocideor mass atrocities are possible.

Understanding this escalation helps us recognize the warning signs and take action to interrupt the process before it reaches the point of genocide.

Genocide is preventable.

Thecrime of genocide has been defined by Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.