English Law and Incitement to Racial Hatred

The sociology of sport literature details the nature and extent of racism in sport – mostly men’s sport, and in particular men’s football. The literature shows that racism was present in the men’s game in the United Kingdom (UK) before, and after, the inception of the 1993 Let’s Kick Racism Out of Football campaign (now Kick it Out). Sport sociologists have offered critical accounts of how racism impacts men’s football and men footballers. These analyses rarely cover women’s experiences or intersect with constructions of hate crimes and misogyny. Despite significant campaigning by feminist criminologists, the Law Commission, in its 2021 review, has recommended not to add misogyny to hate crime legislation. Currently, the law in England and Wales protects race or ethnicity, religion or beliefs, sexual orientation, disability and transgender identity. Hate crime literature has failed to consider the intersections of multiple forms of marginalization, such as the impact of both race and gender. Despite many police forces in England and Wales collecting data on misogyny, prosecutions are limited to the existing five hate crime strands, thus reducing the experiences of many women and girls to a single identity characteristic. This fails to acknowledge the reality of their lived experiences. In this chapter, we review the shortfalls in both sociological and criminological analyses of gender and racism in football. We demonstrate the value of a focus on women footballers in developing a feminist approach to gender, racism and hate crimes. In this way, we conclude that it is time to connect sexism, racism, misogynoir and football to ensure a hate crime framework that includes women and girls in sport.

Hate crime laws in England and Wales have emerged as a response from many decades of the criminal justice system overlooking the structural and institutional oppression faced by minorities. The murder of Stephen Lawrence highlighted the historic neglect and myopia of racist hate crime by criminal justice agencies. It also exposed the institutionalised racism within the police in addition to the historic neglect of minority groups (Macpherson, 1999). The publication of the inquiry into the death of Stephen Lawrence prompted a move to protect minority populations, which included the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. Currently, Section 28 of the Crime and Disorder Act (1998) and Section 146 of the Criminal Justice Act (2003) provide courts the means to increase the sentences of perpetrators who have committed a crime aggravated by hostility towards race, religion, sexuality, disability, and transgender identity. Hate crime is therefore not a new type of crime but a recognition of identity-aggravated crime and an enhancement of existing sentences.

This article argues that hate crime laws in England and Wales should be extended to protect age groups by aggravating offences that are based on or motivated by hostility to age groups. I critically assess the following arguments for this: that age-related hate crime can impose greater psychological distress than equivalent non-hate crime and this justifies the increased punishments that aggravated offences offer; that hate crime laws can justifiably protect older people because older people are relatively vulnerable to crime; that extending aggravated offences to protect age groups can justifiably punish hate crime offenders for their increased culpability in contributing to marginalisation of age groups; and creating distinct aggravated offences for age-hostile crimes has symbolic value to reflect the grave moral wrong of these crimes and to communicate that the state is committed to eradicating discrimination against age groups.

Hate crimes are crimes that are motivated by personal prejudice or bias. Hate-crime laws criminalise such conduct and allow for the imposition of aggravated penalties on convicted perpetrators. This article examines the historical, social and political factors which influenced the shaping and enactment of the first British hate-crime law. The South African context is also considered since the Department of Justice has recently released the Prevention and Combatting of Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Bill for public commentary and input. While Britain has had a long historical record of criminal conduct that was motivated by the race and the ethnicity of victims, it was only in the twentieth century that civil society first drew attention to the problem of violent racist crimes. Nevertheless, successive British governments denied the problem of racist crimes and refused to consider the enactment of a hate-crime law. Following a high-profile racist murder and a governmental inquiry, a British Labour Party-led government eventually honoured its pre-election commitment and passed a hate-crime law in 1998. Some parallels are apparent between the British and the South African contexts. South Africa also has a long historical record of racially motivated hate crimes. Moreover, in the post-apartheid era there have been numerous reports of racist hate crimes and hate crimes against Black lesbian women and Black foreigners. Despite several appeals from the academic and non-governmental sectors for the enactment of a hate-crime law, and the circulation for public commentary of the Prevention and Combating of Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Bill, such a law has hitherto not been enacted in South Africa. This article posits that the enactment of a hate-crime law is a constitutional imperative in South Africa in terms of the right to equality and the right to freedom and security of the person. While the enactment of a hate-crime law in South Africa is recommended, it is conceded that enacting a hate-crime law will not eradicate criminal conduct motivated by prejudice and bias.

This chapter engages in a creative exploration of how it is that the disabled body is constituted within the British legal system. In examining both the socio-spatial enactment and the socio-spatial implications of the legal constitution of the disabled' body, it unveils the role of state law in its instigating of a politics of othering', and most contentiously, in inadvertently contributing to the recent rise in disability hate crime. The chapter argues, the relationship between the law' and those that it categorises as being disabled' is intensely convoluted. Rather, the overarching aim of the discussion is to advocate the application of a critical and porous mode of thinking that is able to permeate and to thus challenge the pervasive influence of legally bounded ideology. The chapter describes that if the law can dispel the able/disabled categorical dualism that is inherent in its entrenchment and defining of disability', and aspire instead to engage with the continuum of ability.

This introductory book offers a coherent history of twentieth century crime and the law in Britain, with chapters on topics ranging from homicide to racial hate crime, from incest to anarchism, from gangs to the death penalty. Pulling together a wide range of literature, David Nash and Anne-Marie Kilday reveal the evolution of attitudes towards criminality and the law over the course of the twentieth century. Highlighting important periods of change and development that have shaped the overall history of crime in Britain, the authors provide in-depth analysis and explanation of each theme. This is an ideal companion for undergraduate students taking courses on Crime in Britain, as well as a fascinating resource for scholars.

This chapter aims to outline briefly the emergence of statutory offences of incitement against the background of sedition and blasphemy at common law. The emphasis is on the law of England and Wales and, in particular, on the emergence of the offences of incitement to racial hatred and of incitement to religious hatred. There is reference also to issues of freedom of speech.

For the past several years, I have been involved in a study of racially-motivated violence in the United Kingdom and its treatment under U.K. law. A major component of this study is a comparison of U.K. bias crime law with United States bias crime law. I have observed an extraordinary development in this area of the law, a development that is particularly striking because it has taken place over so short a period of time. Typically, when one does comparative work and discovered a dramatic change, there are two possible explanations: (i) something has really changed and you are on to a dynamic topic at a liminal time; or (ii) you never understood it well enough the first time. It is my hope that the former is the correct explanation although I cannot deny that I still fear the latter may be the case. In this paper, I would like to set out the a framework for understanding bias crimes, using the American context as a point of departure. I will then sketch the background of British bias crime law, along with the case for understanding recent developments as indeed an instance of dramatic legal change. Finally, I shall offer some tentative observations as to the reasons for these changes, or at least some of the reasons for these changes, and the implications of these observations for using bias crime law as a window into a society's self-perception as a multi-cultural society.

This chapter explores the issue of disability hate speech within the broader ­context of disability hate crime in the United Kingdom (UK). It discusses the possible motivations behind disability hate speech and the reasons why little focus has been given to this strand of disability hate crime in British criminal law both in terms of its recognition and trial. Disabled people in the UK are known to experience more harassment and hate than their nondisabled counterparts. “Disability” is one of five centrally monitored strands of hate crime, the others being race, religion/faith, sexual orientation, and gender identity. In the UK there are a number of legislative acts to respond to cyber-harassment. These include Malicious Communications, Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, the Protection from Harassment Act, Crime and Disorder Act, Communications Act, and Equality Act. In addition, when disability is taken into account, the harassment could also be addressed under the Disability Discrimination Act, Section 127 for disability hate crime.

I. The Williams Strategy It is an old problem for liberal theory how far people should have the right to do the wrong thing. Liberals insist that people have the legal right to say what they wish on matters of political or social controversy. But should they be free to incite racial hatred, for example? British and American law now give different answers to that specific question. The United Kingdom Race Relations law makes it a crime to advocate racial prejudice, but the First Amendment to the United States Constitution forbids Congress or any of the states from adopting any such law. Pornography in its various forms presents another instance of the same issue. The majority of people in both countries would prefer (or so it seems) substantial censorship if not outright prohibition of 'sexually explicit' books, magazines, photographs and films, and this majority includes a considerable number of those who are themselves consumers of whatever pornography is on offer. (It is part of the complex psychology of sex that many of those with a fixed taste for the obscene would strongly prefer that their children, for example, not follow them in that taste.) If we assume that the majority is correct, and that people who publish and consume pornography do the wrong thing, or at least display the wrong sort of character, should they nevertheless have the legal right to do so? Some lawyers and political philosophers consider the problem of pornography to be only an instance of the first problem I mentioned, the problem of freedom to speak unpopular or wicked thoughts. But we should be suspicious of that claim, because the strongest arguments in favor of allowing Mein Kampf to be published hardly seem to apply in favor of the novel Whips Incorporated or the film Sex Kittens. No one (I think) is denied an equal voice in the political process, however broadly conceived, when he is forbidden to circulate photographs of genitals to the public at large, or denied his right to listen to argument when he is forbidden to consider these photographs at his leisure. If we believe it wrong to censor these forms of pornography, then we should try to find the justification for that opinion elsewhere than in the literature celebrating freedom of speech and press. We should consider two rather different strategies that might be thought to justify a permissive attitude. The first argues that even if the publication and consumption of pornography is bad for the community as a whole, just considered in itself, the consequences of trying to censor or otherwise suppress pornography would be, in the long run, even worse. I shall call this the 'goal-based' strategy.

The enactment of the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 is the most recent legal mechanism developed to protect believers, beliefs and religious feelings in the United Kingdom. Despite the recognition of a certain degree of overlap between the different categories, this article proposes a broad distinction between legal devices which protect believers and those which safeguard beliefs and religious feelings. The common law offence of blasphemy is analysed, taking into consideration the response of both the UK courts and the European Court of Human Rights. The endorsement of the English law of blasphemy by Strasbourg is particularly relevant. Furthermore, this paper focuses on different instruments that, throughout the last few decades, have been articulated to protect the faithful, such as the crimes of religiously aggravated offences and the offence of incitement to religious hatred.