A significant part of the citizens of the Republic of Moldova have rather strong prejudice. For example, 49% of the citizens would not accept to have a Roma person among their friends, while 35% would not accept a Muslim to be their neighbor. The level of acceptance for seven minority groups is extremely low, says the analysis “Real Social Distancing! – Acceptance and Marginalization in Moldova of 2020” that was launched by the Center “Partnership for Development (CPD) on the International Human Rights Day, IPN reports.

The analysis aimed to determine the level of acceptance of minority groups by the population of the Republic of Moldova. Social distancing is defined as the level at which the population would accept to have a series of relations (friendship, neighbors, coworkers, family members, etc.) with representatives of the minority groups. The lower is the level of acceptance of having a relationship, the higher is the level of social distancing.

The analysis showed that in the case of members of the LGBT community, persons who live with HIV, former detainees, Muslims, persons of African origin, the Roma and persons with intellectual disabilities, the level of social distancing varies between 2.6 and 5.6. According to experts, if the level of acceptance is higher than 2, the person would not accept to have the representative of a minority group as a neighbor.

Compared with 2018, the general level of social distancing hasn’t changed. Even if particular progress in the case of a number of minority groups was made, the level of social distancing for the most marginalized groups in society worsened significantly.

The analysis authors opined that the lack of progress is primarily generated by the political players. The efforts to monitor hate speech showed that this phenomenon expanded significantly the last few years. Also, many of the political players resort to hate speech as to a frequent tactic in political activity.

At the same time, the appearance of cleavages in society about the spoken languages, which was perpetuated by a number of political forces, turned out to be a myth. The data for 2018 and 2020 show a low level (in relative terms) of exclusion of persons who do not speak the official language: 12.3% would not accept to have such persons among their friends, while 10.5% would not accept these as neighbors.