Engendering Hate Crime Law

Abstract

As I was preparing to write this review, the national media was routinely reporting on two hate crime stories in the U.S. that, from my point of view, revealed lessons about the gendered nature of bias and violence. First, Dharun Ravi was serving time in Middlesex County Adult Correction Center as a result of being convicted of 15 charges, including bias intimidation, invasion of privacy, and evidence tampering, in connection with his use of a webcam to spy on his roommate’s liaison with another man (Parker 2012). After being the target of Ravi’s webcam, Tyler Clementi, an 18 year old student at Rutgers University, committed suicide by jumping off the GeorgeWashington Bridge on September 22, 2010 (Parker 2012). These events raise a series of questions about bullying, homophobia, and discrimination. Second, on February 26, 2012, George Zimmerman, a 28 year old multi-racial Hispanic American, fatally shot Trayvon Martin, a 17 year old African American male who was unarmed (Barry et al. 2012). The press emphasized Trayvon’s race, age, and dress—he was wearing a “hoodie” at the time of his death—as allegations of racial profiling unfolded alongside a discussion of community watch programs and “stand your ground” laws (Barry et al. 2012). In both of these high profile cases, the central figures are male and the social organization of gender is implicated in the violence. Tellingly, in neither of these cases has gender been discussed as an explicit consideration and, while working on this review, I was not exposed to equally high profile crime stories—much less crime stories that evoke the h-word (hate)—in the news that focused attention on girls andwomen and, in so doing, highlight the ways in which gender underpins bias motivated violence. Enter Gendered Hate: Exploring Gender in Hate Crime Law, in which Jessica Hodge takes the invisibility of gender in lay, political, and legal discussion of hate crime and hate crime law in the U.S. as a point of departure and offers a compelling set of interrelated arguments about “gendered hate” in the modern moment. She rightfully emphasizes that in the U.S. a corpus of “bias law” is institutionalized with provisions for race/ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, and other status provisions while gender provisions remains problematic (Jenness 2007). Drawing on a content analysis of media accounts, legislative histories, and interviews with criminal justice personnel, politicians, and advocates, Hodge advances a two-tiered central argument about this state of legal affairs in the U.S.: 1) bias motivated conduct based on gender is not on the same social and legal plane as bias motivated conduct based on other axes of social differentiation, thus it is largely rendered invisible; and 2) bias motivated conduct based on gender should be understood as bias motivated conduct much like other forms of well-known and accepted hate crime. The first tier argument is easily confirmed in the literature; indeed, Hodge makes effective use of extant literature to make this case. The second tier argument is where this book most forcefully advances our thinking about the nexus between the social organization of gender and bias motivated conduct that is criminalized in the U.S. While making her two-tiered argument, Hodge covers considerable empirical, historical, and conceptual territory. In the opening chapter, aptly titled “Why Does Gender Matter,” she draws on existing empirical work to make the case that: