Application of Prototype Theory to Perceptions of Gender-Motivated Bias Crimes

This study investigated how racial prejudice influences White college students' perceptions of hate crime. We also examined the moderating effects of the race of the victim of hate crimes and the absence of hate crime laws. Our sample included 581 White students in a predominantly White university located in a state that does not have a hate crime law. The study was set up in a 2 (race of the victim and the perpetrator) × 3 (level of assault) factorial design. Participants rated their perceptions of three scenarios (i.e., non-racially biased simple assault, racially biased simple assault, and racially biased aggravated assault). The dependent variables were perceptions of hate crime and willingness to report. The key independent variable was participants' level of racial prejudice. The moderators included race of the victim in each scenario and whether participants' state of origin has a hate crime law. Results suggest that higher levels of modern racism were associated with lower perceptions of hate crime and lower willingness to report racially biased simple and aggravated hate crime. When the victim was White, participants with higher levels of racial prejudice were more likely to perceive a hate crime and more willing to report it. The opposite was true when the victim was Black. The absence of state hate crime laws and race of victim were significant moderators. Our study suggests that racial prejudice is associated with lower perceptions of hate crime and willingness to report. Furthermore, the moderating effect of the race of victims provides insights on how racial prejudice can lead to a differential perception of hate crime, depending on whether one's racial in-group is targeted. Our findings also highlight the importance of having state-level hate crime laws to mitigate the linkage between modern racism and perceptions of hate crime.

Emerging scholarship indicates that bias crimes are concentrated in particular types of places. Currently, only a small number of studies consider the ecological factors that influence official reports of bias crime. Results from these studies indicate that the community processes and structures associated with the occurrence of non-bias crime may operate differently for bias crime. We use administrative and survey data from approximately 4000 residents living across 148 communities in Brisbane, Queensland to examine the ecological drivers of bias crime. Using multi-level logistic regression, we examine the community and household factors associated with residents’ perceptions of bias crime. Here, we focus not only on the structural demographics of the community, but also on the degree to which community cohesion influences whether or not residents perceive bias crime as a problem in their community. We find that poverty and ethnic diversity are positively associated with residents’ perceptions of bias crime. Further, residents living in communities with higher levels of community cohesion are less likely to perceive bias crime as a problem in their community. The level of community cohesion fully mediates the impact of ethnic diversity and partially mediates the effect of poverty on residents’ perceptions of bias crime.

Hate crimes have received substantial scholarly attention, largely focusing on victims from marginal groups. Large numbers of White Americans also report being the victim of racial hate crime, though very little research has sought to examine the etiology or meaning of anti-White hate crimes. The present work explores the neighborhood context of hate crimes against non-Hispanic Whites in a majority-White city—comparing police reports with self-reported victimizations. Police reports of anti-White hate crimes are most common in areas that have high rates of nonhate crimes and residential instability. Perceptions of bias incidents, by contrast, appear largely driven by the racial composition. Hate crimes against members of dominant groups appear fundamentally distinct from hate crimes against members of subordinate groups and require separate theoretical models of their substantive meaning and etiology. In general, White residents appear to interpret the motivations for victimizations through a racial lens—attributing anti-White motivations most often when they live near larger numbers of Black neighbors—and reporting them most frequently in disorganized and higher crime places. Implications for theory and research on hate crimes, racial threat, anti-White racism, and the effect of the racial composition on perceptions of crime are discussed.

Male and female young adults provided responses to open-ended questions about hate crimes. Results indicated considerable variability in their definitions, with perceptions of hate crimes differing with regard to demographic characteristics of both victims and perceivers. Victims may experience hate crimes differently because of who they are, why they are victimized, and with whom they share their experiences. In a separate study, males and females each evaluated a scenario of a hate crime perpetrated upon a male or female victim. Whether the crime was described as motivated by racial or religious bigotry, heterosexism, or was ambiguous was systematically varied. The demographic status of the participant appeared to determine how disruptive they regarded the crime scenario, and the likelihood that they would report personal knowledge of a victim of a similar type of assault. None of the participants was likely to report knowledge of a victim of a heterosexist assault. Policy implications of results from both studies are discussed.

Hate crimes undermine tolerance and social inclusion by conveying an “outsider” status of the victim and other group members to the broader community. Yet, limited research considers whether non-victims recognize hate crime incidents when they occur. Using census and survey data for 4,000 residents living in 145 communities, we ask whether local residents “see” hate crime when it happens in their neighborhood and whether the neighborhood context influences the association between residents’ perceptions of hate crime and self-reported hate victimization. We find that residents’ perceptions are positively related to victim self-reports; however, this relationship weakens in ethnically diverse and disadvantaged areas. This suggests that residents’ perceptions of hate crime may be more dependent upon the community context than non-hate crimes.

Previous research has found that reminding participants of their mortality creates a need for individuals to maintain and defend subjective cultural worldviews. As a result, mortality salient participants typically strive to uphold legal sanctions and also react negatively to individuals who espouse alternative worldview beliefs, exhibiting behaviors toward those targets ranging from verbal derogation to physical aggression. This paper extends this line of research by examining perceptions of hate crimes. Hate crimes represent a unique class of crime where both the perpetrator and victim may be viewed as worldview violators. Study 1 revealed that mortality salient participants were more supportive of hate crime legislation than were control participants when hate crimes were described in abstract terms and no specific victim was mentioned. In Study 2, a specific victim who posed a potential worldview threat was identified. In this case, mortality salient participants were less punitive toward offenders who attacked these specific worldview-threatening victims.

The majority of hate crimes in the United States are driven by racial bias. However, extra-legal factors such as the perpetrators' motivations, the races of the victims and perpetrators, and the presence or absence of hate symbols or slurs often result in ambiguity in the classification of crimes as hate crimes. This uncertainty evokes consideration of how such crimes are characterized and of how violent intra- and interracial crimes are perceived and responded to. The current study used violent crime vignettes to explore the effects of participants' levels of racism, perpetrator and victim race, and assault severity on perceptions of crimes as "hate crimes," victim blame, and sentence recommendations. These results contribute to the understanding of how intra- and interracial crimes are perceived and how individuals' levels of racism affect these perceptions.

Public policing in Northern Ireland has gone through a process of reform and governance change in reaction to the peace process and the requirement to shift from a police force, largely engaged in conflict-centred policing, to a policing service dedicated to civil policing and normalisation. During the past decade, Northern Ireland has witnessed a significant decline in recorded sectarian crime. This decline in ethnic conflict has been accompanied by a growth in support for the police, especially within the Catholic community. However, information pertaining to support for public policing is determined at national level and we know little about how residents of sites of previously high levels of political and sectarian conflict feel about policing reform and delivery. In this paper we show that the perception of sectarian crime is much greater than recorded sectarian crime. Moreover, the perception of sectarian crime is a significant predictor of negative attitudes regarding police performance. The paper offers a unique quantitative insight into perceptions of sectarian crime and posits a predicament that is not discussed or debated with regard to the delivery of community policing. The evidence presented offers a benchmark upon which such a debate could occur. We argue that knowledge of sectarian hate crime should not be centred at the national level, but at the more discrete scale of neighbourhood. Perceptions, whether linked to reality, signal or prejudice, can at times destabilise the peace-building process, yet are rarely attended to or discussed. Knowing the difference between recorded and perceived crime as either sectarian exaggeration or actuality would aid localised police-community interaction. Here we provide a statistical basis to stimulate such enquiry.

Recent state and federal legislation such as the Hate Crimes Prevention Act (HCPA) addresses hate crime prevention and punishment. Two pivotal questions that arise in the development of such legislation are (a) should hate crime perpetrators be subject to penalty enhancements? and (b) should protections be extended to sexual and transgender minority individuals? This article presents two studies addressing these questions employing a two-step vignette methodology. Jury-eligible community members provided sentencing and blame attribution ratings for one of three hate crime scenarios (i.e., anti-African American, antigay, or antitransgender), as well as penalty enhancement agreement (i.e., yes/no) and measures of need for affect (Study 1) and need for cognition (Study 2). Patterns of findings across studies suggest that participants comply with hate crime legislation instructions in general, but sentencing decisions are consistently moderated by whether a participant agrees with the penalty enhancement aspect of hate crime legislation. Moreover, need for affect and need for cognition differentially impact perceptions of hate crimes; need for affect demonstrated predictive associations with victim blame, whereas need for cognition moderated relations with perpetrator sentence and blame judgments. Results are discussed with emphasis on the state of federal hate crime legislation, antigay and antitransgender prejudice, and future directions in research and policy.

Hate crimes undermine tolerance and social inclusion by conveying an ‘outsider’ status of the victim and other group members to the broader community. Using the Australian Community Capacity Study (ACCS) data, this chapter explores the concentration of hate crime in Brisbane. First it explores whether non-victims recognise hate crime incidents their neighbourhood and considers how the neighbourhood context influences the association between residents’ perceptions of hate crime and self-reported hate victimisation. It goes on to identify the most salient neighbourhood demographics associated with violence and property hate crime incidents and the protective factors that could reduce these incidents, focussing specifically on place attachment, social cohesion and trust and contact with neighbours. Finally, as hate crime has a significant and deleterious effect on victim well-being, we specifically examine the impact of hate crime victimisation on a residents’ engagement in their community.

This paper reports on an exploratory study, which gathered LGBT+ young people’s (aged 15–22) experiences and perceptions of hate crime. Two design-led workshops were conducted in the North East of England, with the aim of identifying the reporting needs of LGBT+ young people. Participants in the first workshop were asked what types of ‘hate’ scenarios they would report to the police. Participants in the second workshop were asked to design hate crime reporting devices. Young people were ambivalent about reporting their experiences to the police as their victimization was intimately tied to people they were connected with (parents, school peers, and acquaintances). They highlighted a variety of response needs when reporting victimization. This article argues that acts of bullying and acts of antiLGBT+ hate crime are symmetrical in their tangibility. LGBT+ youth victimization is currently framed, within scholarly discourse, as a bullying issue involving peer victimization. However, the criminological discourse on LGBT+ adult victimization is framed as hate crime. The data provided bridges this gap by conceptualizing youth victimization as a form of hate crime, an important contribution in recognizing the report needs of young LGBT+ people.

The present set of studies investigated extra-legal factors in cases depicting bias-motivated assault. Study one focused on sexual orientation motivated hate crime. In this study, participants (N = 240) read a trial transcript depicting an assault on a man during a gay pride parade. The victim’s sexual orientation was varied (i.e., he either stated he was or was not gay) as was the victim’s involvement in the parade (i.e., he was either a spectator, marching in it quietly, or marching in it and shouting a pro-gay slogan). Results indicated that beliefs about whether or not the defendant should be convicted, victim blame and perceptions of the victim differed significantly among all conditions. Study two focused on hate crime motivated by race, specifically committed against Native American Indians (NAI). Inclusion in the minority group (victim is NAI vs. victim is not NAI) and involvement (watching parade vs. marching quietly in parade vs. marching and shouting in parade) were varied within the context of a bias-motivated assault that occurred during a Native American Heritage Pride Parade. Results indicated differences in victim blame based in group inclusion and differences in beliefs the crime was a hate crime based on involvement.

This study examines how police see and don't see hate crimes. Prior research has drawn mainly on the ambiguity of hate crime laws and definitions, as well as the struggles endured by law enforcement when investigating these cases. This thesis delves deeper into the issue by analyzing the forces that shape officers' perception of hate crimes and how they influence the way they identify, investigate and report bias-motivated incidents. This research focuses on a police force of a small municipality, of less than 75,000 people, located in a Mid-Atlantic state. An analysis of the department's police records and a focus group interview largely drive the findings of this research. Concepts including organizational norms, landmark narratives and classification of social problems are explored as factors that influence police handling of hate crimes. Findings illustrate that distinct properties must exist before police are likely to consider classifying a case a hate crime.

A mock juror investigation of blame attribution in the punishment of hate crime perpetrators

Objectives The purpose of this study is to examine how Asian hate crimes impact Korean American older adults’ daily life and their perception of social advocacy during COVID-19. Background In addition to the health crisis, Asian Americans have experienced more risk and challenges during the pandemic due to the explosion of anti-Asian hate crime incidents. Violence against older Asian Americans increases fear and anxiety not only for individuals directly affected but for entire Asian communities. In this regard, understanding older Asian Americans’ perception of hate crimes against Asians and their attitudes about social advocacy can help guide support and services for this population. Methods A qualitative approach was used for this study, including semi-structured interview guides with 23 Korean American older adults. Data organization was conducted with Nvivo12, employing thematic analysis to identify key themes and sub-themes. Results The findings showed that participants believed that rising anti-Asian hate crimes have restricted Asian American’s daily activities by increasing fear and feelings of being perpetual foreigners in American society. Participants believed that social action is necessary to change society, but they still hold passive attitudes on social action and have a lack of resources. They believed leaders and other powerful figures in the community rather than individuals should address social problems. Conclusion Findings from this study highlight the psychological impact of anti-Asian hate crimes and the importance of expanding support for ethnic minority older adults to voice out and promoting increased advocacy for this population.