what?

Awareness means establishing and cultivating considerate, responsible and solidary interaction with one another. Spaces are to be created that strengthen the self-determination of different communities – in a manner of partnership and solidarity. Through awareness work, we learn to respect everyone’s boundaries, how to counter discrimination and how to support people who (have to) experience discrimination.

why?

…Because we are aware that border violations and assaults unfortunately still happen everywhere. No affected person should feel powerless and left alone!

In spaces that are characterized by physicality, noise, darkness, confinement and – possibly -intoxication, personal boundaries are unfortunately exceeded more often. This crossing of boundaries usually affects people who are already discriminated against by existing social power relations. Messenger community is mostly cis-male dominated, almost all of us are able-bodied and championships, by definition, are sporting competitions, which further encourages dominant behaviour. All of this makes the community a place where different people, especially WTNBIA+ can quickly feel unwelcome. We of course do not want to criticize sexist discrimination only, we want to criticize ALL discrimination and we want to work on this process all together.

what we want.

The messenger community is a very special place to most of us. Some found a first or second family within the community, many are really well connected and share many friends in all kinds of places – We of course do not want to deny this. But still, the world we live in, unfortunately did not teach most of us solidarity and cooperation. In order for every person to feel welcome within the community, it is important to be aware of ones own boundaries as well as those of others. We want to (learn how to) break down the behavioural patterns associated with our own discriminatory behaviour. We want to work towards a new social state in which respecting one’s own and others‘ boundaries is a matter of course. As a community, we can set a good example and advocate for respectful, appreciative interaction with one another. Therefore we have built this website and formulated a guideline which intends to facilitate the access of championship organizations to the topic awareness.