Story eight - Dakota Blue Richards

Dakota Blue Richards
Our Space camp

‘There’s so much pressure to be what people call perfect. I don’t really understand it because if everyone looked the same it would be odd. It takes all of us to make the world.’

Dakota Blue Richards is the gifted actress who, as a 12-year-old, played Lyra Belacqua in the film adaptation of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass.But instead of the shimmering red-haired child star I was expecting, I find a slender, dark-haired teenager, knitting her thumbs together and haltingly telling me about how much she loathes discrimination.

This summer, she explains, she went to the Lake District, with 86 other teenagers aged 14 and 15, to take part in the first Equality and Human Rights Commission’s Our Space summer camp. It was designed to bring people from different backgrounds together, get them talking about themselves and identity and see how equality and human rights affects their lives. They practised leadership skills and confidence building, went kayaking, camping and orienteering, and at the end they left, hoping to take the message to their friends and communities, a small army of ambassadors to spread the message that fair and equal treatment should be expected and demanded by all.

The Commission will build on the Our Space project next year as part of its wider strategy on engagement with young people.

Dakota wanted to go to Our Space, she says, because it chimed with her upbringing. ‘I was brought up to believe that you shouldn’t judge people by the way they look or by their background and that if they choose to do something which is different, like a different religion or a different sexuality, as long as it’s not hurting anyone else it doesn’t matter.’

She talks slowly and very seriously; but sometimes a huge smile – or a giggle – escapes from her mouth. ‘My mum would always say to me, “no matter what happens you are lucky that you’ve had so much goodness in your life and you shouldn’t take things for granted, like a good education, a home, food, or clean water”,’ she says. ‘Sometimes I think people don’t really know what they’ve got.’

And she says something astonishing. When her hair was dyed flaming red to play Lyra Belacqua she was teased at school.

She is making a point about how people respond to difference. ‘People in school call other people names because of their hair colour, their skin colour or their nationality,’ she says. ‘The bullies,’ she adds, ‘used to call me names and I found it quite hard because they were trying to hurt somebody else based on the fact that they look slightly different. There’s so much pressure to be what people call perfect. I don’t really understand it because if everyone looked the same it would be odd. It takes all of us to make the world.’

There were two types of people at Our Space, she says: ‘the people who were quite interested in human rights and equality and the people who initially thought, “it’s a free holiday!’’ Our Space was a combination of physical and mental exercises’, she says, smiling, and she tells me a horror story involving a rope and a bin, and having to move the bin using a piece of rope. ‘It was to teach us leadership and how to work as a group,’ she says, ‘because it made us think about everybody in the group and to listen to everybody and to let everybody have a say.

‘The person might not be the leader in the group, or know anyone else in the group but they might have a good idea and it didn’t matter who they were.’ By the end of the week, she says, prejudices were dying like flies. (And the bins had been moved.)

An exercise that really touched her, she adds, was when the teenagers were given a list of discriminatory acts on cards, and had to grade them in order of seriousness, from teasing someone about having red hair to a physical racist attack. ‘People looked at the cards that they’d got and said, “Oh God, this could potentially be what I would do, teasing people for being ginger and wearing glasses.’’ It made them think.’

She believes that most teenage discrimination comes from thoughtlessness, rather than malice. But she is particularly disturbed by the current use of the word ‘gay’ meaning stupid by teenagers. ‘I just don’t see the point in using that word because a lot of people who use it don’t even mean it in that way. So why use it when it can be offensive to people?’ She has made all her friends stop using it, she says, and if they do use it she won’t respond to them. ‘People often don’t understand when they’re being discriminatory. They don’t understand that they can be being offensive to other people. And if you’re feeling a bit unsure, a bit insecure about something, the tiniest little remark it can really affect you. I think it’s unnecessary.’ The week, she says, ‘made me think we should try to teach other people to stop doing things that are offensive.

I try to influence my friends and if they do say something that is discriminatory I’ll explain it to them.’ Recently, she says, a friend said something thoughtless about the homeless, and she tried to make the friend imagine what they would do in the homeless person’s position. ‘It’s about trying to get them to look at things from somebody else’s perspective,’ she says.

Our Space, she adds, has inspired her. ‘It taught me that I should try and do something to challenge discrimination in my community.’ And she knits her thumbs again and tells me, ‘My Mum and I have a favourite quote. I’m not sure who said it, but it is, “Never think that a few committed individuals cannot change the world as that is all who ever have.’’’