Alternative subcultures and hate crime

Hate crime is more than a legal category. It is also a moral category that promotes tolerance and respect over prejudice. In so doing, the concept of hate crime makes a claim for social justice on behalf of those groups disadvantaged by racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism and so on. This article argues that one of the means via which the concept of hate crime does this is to generate certain forms of ‘emotional thinking’ among the general public, such as compassion for victims and contempt or disgust for perpetrators. The question of whether a given criminal event will be labelled and constructed as a hate crime is thus not simply a matter of whether it meets the minimal definitional requirements. It is also dependent upon the capacity of those who claim victim status to engender forms of emotional thinking that encourage others to see them as the undeserving victims of prejudice, that is, as ‘ideal’ victims. This argument is grounded in a recent empirical study of the Snowtown murders in South Australia. Despite the emergence of a strong ‘hatred as motive’ theme in the legal arena, the murders have never been publicly labelled as hate crime. The article argues that images of deep moral failure on the part of the victims (not just the perpetrators) precluded them from engendering forms of emotional thinking that are essential if the concept of hate crime is to function as a moral category.

This book brings together internationally acclaimed scholars with researchers, policy makers and practitioners from across the world to critically scrutinize the concept of hate crime as a global phenomenon. The book seeks to examine whether hate crime can, or should, be conceptualized within an international framework and if so how this might be achieved. The book has split into three parts: Part I of this book examines the global dynamics of hate. It is here that our contributors begin to analyse whether hate crime can be defined globally, whether universal principles can be applied to the phenomenon, how hatred is spread, and how it impacts upon our global society. Part II moves beyond the broader questions of globalization to jurisdictional examples of how globalization impacts upon our understanding of, as well as our responses to, hate crime. It is here that the book explores in greater detail what is happening around the world and how the international concepts of hate crime are being operationalized locally. The aim of this part of the book is to draw out the themes of globalization and internationalization that are relevant to hate crime, as evidenced by a number of jurisdictions from Europe (West and East), the US, Asia, and Africa. Part III completes the book by examining the different ways in which hate speech and hate crime are being combated globally. International law, internet regulation, and the use of restorative practices are evaluated as methods of addressing hate-based conflict. The analyses found here draw from existing frameworks as well as exploring normative standards for future international efforts.

We cannot talk about how much hate crime exists in the United States or what to do about it until we are clear about what a hate crime is. This chapter shows that the concept of hate crime is loaded with ambiguity because of the difficulty of determining (1) what is meant by prejudice; (2) which prejudices qualify for inclusion under the hate crime umbrella; (3) which crimes, when attributable to prejudice, become hate crimes; and (4) how strong the causal link must be between the perpetrator’s prejudice and the perpetrator’s criminal conduct.

The discourse of hate crime has come to Europe, supported not least by international human rights actors and security and policy organisations. In this article, I argue that there is a need for a philosophical response to challenging claims about the conceptualisation and classification of hate crime. First, according to several scholars, hate crime is extraordinarily difficult to conceptualise and there is a fatigue among practitioners caused by the lack of clarity and consensus in the field. I agree that there is a need, not for additional definitions, but for a more comprehensive conceptual framework, that may help us think more clearly about given definitions of hate crime; about their basic structure, cross‐cutting problems, and possible variations. Supplying such a conceptual perspective represents a timely task for applied philosophy. I engage with this by offering a four‐tiered concept of hate crime. Second, the involvement of human rights actors in the consolidation of hate crime law and policy in Europe has supported the classification of hate crime as a human rights violation. Ultimately, what is at stake is not only our understanding of hate crime, but also our maintenance of a precise and pointed discourse on human rights violations. I argue that we should hesitate or even abstain from classifying hate crime as a human rights violation, and that doing so is compatible with taking both hate crimes and human rights seriously.

The hate crime concept describes a set of actions that span the worlds of activism, policy, and scholarship and provides the basis for these actors to work together and open up the rule of law to communities that often exist outside its protection. However, there is huge diversity in current approaches across and within these worlds to recording, reporting, legislating against, and researching hate crime, which challenges the notion of a shared and global concept of hate crime. This article offers a framework that helps describe the processes and relationships that generate and refine national and international concepts of hate crime. In so doing, it starts to assess to what extent an internationally coherent approach to understanding and responding to targeted, bigoted violence has been achieved.

This chapter examines the extent of hate crimes in the age of crises. It acknowledges how the concept of hate crime is notoriously complex and contested. The continued rise of hate incidents paints a worrying picture of seemingly legitimized hostile and prejudiced attitudes rooted within wider structural inequalities. Even though ne and physical hostility is normalized, legitimized, and politically weaponized, there is a deafening silence from national governments when it comes to addressing the underlying causes of hate crime. The chapter considers the complex realities of perpetration and victimization in an effort to improve responses to hate crime in times of increasing fragility and uncertainty.

In England and Wales, Section 146 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 made disability hate crimes legal. This advocated for increased sentencing for perpetrators whose crimes were motivated by or demonstrated hate against a person with a handicap or a perceived disability. Currently, this additional sentencing provision is the only legal option for prosecuting disability hate crime perpetrators. This thesis explores the experience and aftermath of hate crimes committed against England’s cognitively challenged senior victim group. The cognitively challenged elderly victim group is far more likely to face bias and violence; they have a greater likelihood of re-victimisation and suffer significant suffering as a result of hate crimes. To date, the voices of cognitively deficient elderly victims and survivors have been mostly absent from scholarly research and hate crime policies. As a result, the purpose of this article is to look into present policy barriers and how the cognitively challenged senior victim group might best receive support, justice, and interventions following discriminatory hate crimes. There has been little examination and discussion of intersectionality in disability studies and hate crime research. Common ideas fail to adequately reflect the multifaceted, overlapping, and complex experiences of danger and victimisation. This paper builds on studies on hate crimes against the cognitively deficient elderly victim group. It noted the challenge of categorising individual encounters as one type of hate crime. Victims and their relatives recognised that they were targeted for a variety of reasons, including their inability to care for themselves and their age. The study contends that the present strand-based approach to hate crime conceals a multitude of cross-identity characteristics that, when combined, might raise the danger of victimisation while decreasing a victim’s chance of reporting their experiences. To address vulnerability, safety, and hate crime against disabled people in England and Wales’ criminal justice, health, social care, and refuge systems, barriers to including the cognitively impaired senior victim group in the policy process are presented, allowing for targeted suggestions and changes on relevant issues.

Empirical connections between local anti-Muslim hate crimes and international jihadi terror attacks are studied. Based upon rich administrative data from Greater Manchester Police, event studies of ten terror attacks reveal an immediate big spike up in Islamophobic hate crimes and incidents when an attack occurs. In subsequent days, hate crime is amplified by real-time media. It subsequently attenuates, but hate crime incidence cumulates to higher levels than prior to the series of attacks. The overall conclusion is that, even when they reside in places far away from where jihadi terror attacks take place, local Muslim populations face a media magnified likelihood of hate crime victimization following international terror attacks. This matters for community cohesion in places affected by discriminatory hate crime and, from both a policy and research perspective, means that the process of media magnification of hate crime needs to be better understood.

In this article we examine how the concept of hate crime has been transformed in judicial discourse from a broad ambiguous category, which generated substantial controversy and opposition, to a focused determinate legal construct, which has been largely accepted as a legitimate legal practice. We track changes in judicial rhetoric across 38 appellate court opinions that consider the constitutionality of hate crime cases (1984-1999), and we propose a theoretical framework for analyzing the “settling” of legal meaning. A qualitative interpretive analysis demonstrates that the meaning of hate crime that emerges across the series of cases is much richer and nuanced than the collection of words contained in the statutes, and that the domain of hate crime has expanded across the series of cases to include a broader range of behaviors and mental precursors. Quantitative analysis shows that, over time, judges have developed a more economical and formulaic rhetoric for responding to petitioners' constitutional challenges to hate crime statutes and have converged around sets of arguments for negotiating challenges. We discuss the implications of these findings for traditional jurisprudential analyses, sociolegal research on judicial decisionmaking, and research on the social construction of deviance.

Even though there have been several concerns expressed about the concept of hate crime, very little doubt has been accorded considerable legal, social and political purchase since the early 1990s. Hate crime has generated a lively debate over its own definitional limits and the findings of a study of allegations of racial and homophonic harassment recorded by the London Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) are provided.

This chapter highlights the originality, significance and need for this book by referring to the rising levels of hate and extremism both online and offline, the physical, emotional and community-level harms associated with hate crimes, and to the growing scepticism towards the concept of hate crime and ignorance of the harms associated with it.

Hate crimes (or bias crimes) are crimes motivated by an offenders’ personal bias against a particular social group. Modern hate crimes legislation developed out of civil rights protections based on race, religion, and national origin; however, the acts that constitute a hate crime have expanded over time, as have the groups protected by hate crimes legislation. Anti-LGBT hate crimes, in which victims are targeted based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. LGBT people are highly overrepresented as victims of hate crimes given the number of LGBT people in the population, and this is especially true of hate crimes against transgender women. Despite the frequency of these crimes, the legal framework for addressing them varies widely across the United States. Many states do not have specific legislation that addresses anti-LGBT hate crimes, while others have legislation that mandates data collection on those crimes but does not enhance civil or criminal penalties for them, and some offer enhanced civil and/or criminal penalties. Even in states that do have legislation to address these types of hate crimes, some states only address hate crimes based on sexual orientation but not those based on gender identity. The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act gives the federal government the authority to prosecute those crimes regardless of jurisdiction; however, this power has been used in a limited capacity. Hate crimes are distinct from other crimes that are not motivated by bias. For example, thrill seeking, retaliation, or the desire to harm or punish members of a particular social group often motivates perpetrators of hate crimes; these motivations often result in hate crimes being more violent than other similar crimes. The difference in the motivation of offenders also has significant consequences for victims, both physically and mentally. Victims of hate crimes are more likely to require medical attention than victims of non-bias crimes. Likewise, victims of hate crimes, and especially anti-LGBT hate crimes, often experience negative psychological outcomes, such as PTSD, depression, or anxiety as a result of being victimized for being a member of an already marginalized social group.

Hate crimes have been found to have more severe consequences than other parallel crimes that were not motivated by the offenders' hostility toward someone because of their real or perceived difference. Many countries today have hate crime laws that make it possible to increase the penalties for such crimes. The main critique against hate crime laws is that they punish thoughts. Instead, proponents of hate crime laws argue that sentence enhancement is justified because hate crimes cause greater harm. This study compares consequences of victimization across groups of victims to test for whom hate crimes hurt more. We analyzed data that were collected through questionnaires distributed to almost 3,000 students at Malmö University, Sweden, during 2013. The survey focused on students' exposure to, and experiences of, hate crime. A series of separate logistic regression analyses were performed, which analyzed the likelihood for reporting consequences following a crime depending on crime type, perceived motive, repeat victimization, gender, and age. Analyzed as one victim group, victims of hate crime more often reported any of the consequences following a crime compared with victims of parallel non-hate-motivated crimes. And, overall victims of threat more often reported consequences compared with victims of sexual harassment and minor assault. However, all hate crime victim groups did not report more consequences than the non-hate crime victim group. The results provide grounds for questioning that hate crimes hurt the individual victim more. It seems that hate crimes do not hurt all more but hate crimes hurt some victims of some crimes more in some ways.

This chapter canvasses the nature of hate crime victimisation as experienced by individuals residing in rural areas. A general introduction to hate crime is presented to familiarise the reader with the offence definition and parameters, including the psychological impacts of hate crime on victims. This is followed by an overview of the experiences of persons who are relatively more likely to fall victim to hate-based crimes, including individuals who identify as LGBTIQA+, ethnic minorities and First Nations peoples, people with disabilities and alternative subcultures. Though the overview of rural victimisation focuses on distinct groups to bring attention to their unique experiences of hate-based victimisation, the intersectional complexity of this form of victimisation must not be overlooked – individual victims of hate crime may not fit neatly into just one group and may possess multiple characteristics that serve to compound their experience. The chapter concludes with consideration of how hate crime victimisation may be reduced and prevented in rural areas.

Much of the academic, practitioner and voluntary sector interest in victims of hate crime have focused upon the impacts of hate crime and the practical and emotional support needs and services for victims. Our own work has been somewhat divergent from this. We were commissioned to identify how hate crime reporting could be improved in a northern town, and made inclusive across different equality groups. We undertook a small scale study that examined individual decision making by hate crime victims in whether or not to report incidents, and how the available reporting arrangements and associated publicity materials affected these decisions (Wong & Christmann, 2008). Somewhat to our surprise, what appeared to be a critical issue in terms of whether or not hate crime policies were likely to succeed was also a much under researched area. Whilst our own research findings cannot be generalised beyond the study site, it did allow us to test out and consider more thoroughly some of the assumptions implicit in policy developments around hate crime reporting, specifically the policy goal of full reporting. We want to reflect back on these findings and the broader research literature to pose some questions on the adequacy and utility of the current reporting agencies approaches and the general policy direction to hate crime victims. We believe this has merit because the statutory criminal justice agencies and the voluntary sector are grappling with the challenges of adopting hate crime in its broadest sense, and providing a responsive, effective and victim centred service across markedly different vulnerable groups. Pertinent questions can be asked about what the current policies on hate crime can be expected to achieve given the nature of victim decision making on the critical issue of whether to report their victimisation. We will draw out some implications that the legacy of the Lawrence Inquiry has had for strategic thinking, policy making and make some tentative suggestions on how these might be improved. We argue something that may be considered heresy among hate crime victimloogy circles and victim campaigning groups; that the current policy message concerning victim reporting does not reflect reality, and risks being discredited. What is required, some 10 years post Lawrence is more nuanced responses and ones which acknowledge: the distance travelled by criminal justice agencies in the intervening years; that the majority of hate crime is manifested as single incidents of harassment (which may not necessarily constitute crimes); and the unlikelihood of full reporting by the public, which realistically fits where the public are in terms of their expectations. In doing so we do not pretend to have any authoritative answers to these issues, but believe the questions are worth posing to prompt a debate between efficacy of response versus a largely unchallenged view of hate crime victimology.