Hate and Bias Crime: Criminologically Congruent Law? A Review of Barbara Perry's Hate and Bias Crime: A Reader

Abstract

AbstractBarbara Perry (2003) Hate and Bias Crime:A Reader Routledge: New York, 520 pp., ISBN 0415944082.The last decade of the 20th century has seen a flurry of hate crime legislation and other state activities, none of which have had an appreciable effect on the frequency or certainly the severity of hate crime. Such initiatives are insufficient responses to bias-motivated violence, in that they do not touch the underlying structures that support hate crime. Abdicating responsibility for countering such violence to the state, then, will not be a sufficiently effective long-term strategy. Rather, the responsibility must be shared and distributed across institutional and interactional levels. Moreover, the ultimate goal is not only to attack hate crime, but to disrupt the institutional and cultural assumptions about difference that condition hate crime. To the extent that difference is socially constructed, it can also be reconstructed (Perry, 2003, p. 387)