Hate crime as cultural violence

PurposeThe purpose of this article is to provide a critical account of the hate crime (HC) paradigm by exploring its historical legal definition and the limitations in addressing the multiple and structural discriminations faced by minority groups. Specifically, the article focuses on the case of Italy, where in recent years a fierce debate over a proposed law on HC against LGBT+ and disabled people ended in its rejection due to neoconservative and Catholic opposition.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on critical socio-criminological literature on HC, the paper analyses the Italian debates and socio-legal context over the past two decades regarding discrimination against LGBT+ groups and its (lack of) criminalization. It also provides a secondary analysis of recent data on violence and discrimination against LGBT+ people, collected by the Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA).FindingsThe analysis of the debate and the data collected shows that the criminal definition of HC is insufficient to capture the wider range of social and cultural violence and discrimination against LGBT+ people. Indeed, data analysis shows the effect of the low level of recognition of rights on the propensity of people to denounce and of social practitioners to recognize, discrimination and violence against LGBT+ people. It is therefore argued that the discussion on HC should move beyond the criminalization of individual violence to be entrenched in a broader reflection over the lack of recognition of sexual citizenship rights which perpetuates the vulnerability of LGBT+ people.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to the international socio-criminological debate on HC. It argues for a comprehensive framework that recognizes the structural nature of discrimination and violence against vulnerable groups by framing discrimination and violence against LGBT+ people as a citizenship right rather than a criminal justice issue.

This article discusses why it is important to consider how cultural racism contributes to the construction of motives and justifications among individuals who have committed acts of structural violence, including, lynching, hate crime and police violence against African Americans. Cultural racism is also discussed as a factor that contributes to interpersonal structural violence in situations involving black offenders and victims.

The most troubling and perplexing aspect of the Rwandan Genocide is why so many joined the killings so quickly. This participation seems even less comprehensible given the violence’s terrifying intimacy: ordinary killers often turned on their Tutsi neighbors and family members, using machetes and other everyday tools. Searching for answers, journalists and even some scholars have clutched at comforting metaphors and mono-causal explanations: a ‘‘blood orgy,’’ tribalism, ethnic hatred, hate radio, a ‘‘culture of obedience,’’ structural violence, and ‘‘conspiracy to murder.’’ With bracing clarity and scrupulous fairness, Scott Straus painstakingly demolishes these simplistic notions and sets a new standard for empirical research on mass violence in The Order of Genocide. Using data from interviews with 210 convicted, confessed perpetrators and with a range of actors in five communities, Straus constructs a sophisticated explanation of how genocidal violence happened at the local level. First, he finds that most perpetrators in rural Rwanda were ordinary farmers (though rural elites and young thugs played a crucial role in driving the violence). Second, most of those ordinary perpetrators committed genocide for fairly banal reasons: ‘‘the Rwandans’ motivations were considerably more ordinary and routine than the extraordinary crimes they helped commit’’ (96). Third, he calculates that between 175,000 and 210,000 civilians participated in genocidal violence—an enormous number, to be sure, but far fewer than the half-million who now stand accused in Rwanda’s community courts (gacaca). Finally, he identifies three key factors behind the widespread participation: (1) anger, fear, and uncertainty caused by the renewed civil war; (2) opportunism linked to local power struggles; and (3) social pressure and coercion derived from intra-group dynamics, state authority, communal labor obligations, and social surveillance. The latter point is perhaps Straus’s most controversial finding. Challenging popular conceptions of the Rwandan Genocide, he writes that ‘‘intra-ethnic coercion and pressure [among Hutu] appear to have been greater determinants of genocidal participation than interethnic enmity [between Hutu and Tutsi]’’ (148). This explanation is consistent with many of the testimonies I have heard in gacaca trials, but more systematic analyses of those testimonies and more micro-level studies are needed. A constant refrain that Straus hears from confessed perpetrators is that they were following orders and that disobedience would have led to punishment or even death. This sounds like egregious self-absolution from admitted killers, but Straus makes us take it—and them—seriously. Nonetheless, it would have been helpful to parse perpetrators’ motivations more closely to distinguish better among group conformity

Mental health care among marginalized populations in the United States

Violence against women in politics is increasingly recognized around the world as a significant barrier to women’s political participation, following a troubling rise in reports of assault, intimidation, and abuse directed at female politicians. Yet conceptual ambiguities remain as to the exact contours of this phenomenon. In this article, we seek to strengthen its theoretical, empirical, and methodological foundations. We propose that the presence of bias against women in political roles—originating in structural violence, employing cultural violence, and resulting in symbolic violence—distinguishes this phenomenon from other forms of political violence. We identify five types of violence against women in politics—physical, psychological, sexual, economic, and semiotic—and three methodological challenges related to underreporting, comparing men’s and women’s experiences, and intersectionality. Inspired by the literature on hate crimes, we develop an empirical approach for identifying cases of violence against women in politics, offering six criteria to ascertain whether an attack was potentially motivated by gender bias. We apply this framework to analyze three cases: the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, and the murder of Jo Cox. We conclude with the negative implications of violence against women in politics and point to emerging solutions around the globe.

This hate crimes study uses a structural violence framework and Cox proportional hazards regression to examine time to arrest for perpetrators. The analysis focuses on incidents that occurred between 2019 and 2024 in New York City. Data were retrieved from the NYC Open Data portal and represent police-reported hate crimes. Results reveal that arrests take longer for felonies, assaults, and cases involving Asian and Jewish victims, while cases involving Muslim and White victims tend to be resolved more quickly. Borough-level differences were less predictive than offense type or victim identity. The study highlights disparities in law enforcement response, suggesting that systemic biases may shape justice outcomes. Additionally, the lower number of hate crimes reported by Hispanics could suggest fear of police. These findings have significant implications for public health, equity, and trust in institutions tasked with addressing hate violence.

Hate is currently enjoying the status of summum malum within the common sense of constitutional democracies. Hateful acts are criminalized and hate speech tests the limits of our commitment to free expression. This chapter shifts focus away from hate speech and crime and toward the structural conditions that normalize these various verbal and physical forms of violence. Building on insights from feminist and race critical theory and the sociology of power, it points the reader’s attention to three important dimensions of structural violence only partially captured by the legal definitions of hate speech and crime: the linguistic, the emotional, and the embodied. It then sketches a proposal about the forms of political solidarity we should stimulate as prophylaxis against hate and argues that certain artworks can reveal and confront the naturalized social, political, and cultural hierarchies that underprop hate speech and acts.

According to J. Caputi, “in mainstream discussion, violent crimes against women are frequently presented as inexplicable and their perpetrators as social deviants ... [Researchers] have argued for an awareness of the sexually political and conformist nature of such crimes and have invented the word ‘gynocide’ to name the range of systematic violence against women by men.” Similarly, crimes of violence and victimization against transsexual, transgendered and cross‐dressing persons are often characterized as either the actions of individuals (males) who do not live within the rules of society, or as being somehow provoked by victims through their deviancy with regard to gender expectation. In each case, these arguments are simply extensions of the traditional discourse regarding violence against women: either the perpetrator is a “mad dog” (i.e. a criminally deviant male) or the victim “asked for it” (via exhibiting the “provocative behavior” of failing to conform to gender role expectations).

Current Challenges in Addressing Youth Mental Health in the Context of Violent Radicalization.

The murder of Matthew Shepard, in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998, was the traumatic event that inspired Moisés Kaufman to write The Laramie Project. The author travelled to Laramie and built the play based on interviews with the townspeople. This essay examines the connection between verbatim theatre and biographical writing and the ways in which these connections and touching boundaries can be a valuable strategy in the depictions of personal and collective trauma, as well as forms of institutionalized and structural violence. The essay will explore the community’s relation to the hate crime committed and make clear the relation of the community with questions regarding homosexuality and homophobia. Through the analysis it will aim at rendering visible the community’s dealing with the shadow of intolerance cast over them and not just those directly involved in Matthew Shepard’s murder, while trying to distance themselves from a collective identity of brutality. The theoretical considerations carried throughout result from the attention to challenges that non-normativity poses on both individual and collective levels.

This chapter discusses the role that schools play in mitigating inter-ethnic tensions, with special reference to the Balkan conflicts (1991–1999), and the decade of fragile re-integration that followed them. The paper explores the role education can play in creating the conditions for inter-ethnic conflict; the responsibility of schools as places of reason, comfort and stability during the conflict; and the place of curriculum and pedagogy in either reproducing or reframing the narratives and myths that can lead to inter-ethnic peace making or trans-generational reproduction of the conditions for further conflict. The paper draws on relevant peace- and social psychology concepts such as ethnic distance, segregation and discrimination, negative and positive peace, stress coping strategies, and child psychology concepts to explain the power of school -sanctioned narratives in explaining ethnicity and conflict to children of impressionable age. Multi-ethnic primary schools in the former Yugoslavia are used to provide the historical context of episodic and structural violence and peace building attempts, for this conceptual paper.

The chapter assesses the systematic violence inflicted on Jews in Nazi Germany and on Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. What was arguably novel about the twentieth-century phase in the long history of the brutality that human beings have periodically shown to each other was the ideological prominence that was repeatedly given to the spurious idea of “race” as a legitimating basis for systematic violence. The approximately 6 million Jews who were slaughtered in the Holocaust or Shoah, and the 800,000 to 1 million Tutsi and Hutu who were killed in Rwanda in 1994, died because they belonged to an ethnic category whose very existence was deemed to threaten the health and even survival of the nation to which they belonged. Indeed, ideas of racial difference played a more prominent part in the history of collective human violence than in previous centuries. It is also undeniable that the churches in many cases proved receptive to such ideas to an extent that poses uncomfortable questions for Christian theology. For Christians, what is doubly disturbing about the unprecedented scale and rate of ethnic killing in these two cases is the seeming impotence of their faith to resist the destructive power of racial hatred. Ultimately, the two holocausts—in Nazi Germany and in Rwanda—both tell a depressing story of widespread, though never total, capitulation by churches and Christian leaders to the insidious attractions of racial ideology, and of the habitual silence or inaction of many Christians in the face of observed atrocities.

Ethiopia, Africa's oldest independent nation and a key player in the Horn of Africa’s security, has undergone significant political and economic transformations. Despite emerging as a regional powerhouse, Ethiopia faces a complex ethnic landscape with diverse demographic groups. The historically influential Tigray region, plunged into a civil conflict in November 2020, and involved ethno-regional militias, the federal government, and Eritrean forces. This conflict stems from historical tensions, including the autocratic rule of Meles Zenawi and the dominance of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali, who heralded for fostering unity, took office in 2018 but faced escalating ethnic tensions. Postponed elections and federal interventions fueled discontent, leading to the outbreak of the Tigray War in November 2020. Abiy's military offensive, initially portrayed as a targeted operation, escalated into a brutal conflict, drawing international concern. Accusations of civilian mistreatment and Eritrean involvement were initially denied but later acknowledged by the Ethiopian government. The Tigray War underscores the challenges of achieving ethnic harmony and political stability in Ethiopia. This paper analyzes the Tigray War in Ethiopia, tracing its origins from the 19th century to the present, examining its consequences. The article specifically employs the Protracted Social Conflict and Structural Violence Theories to explain the conflict. Received: 12-01-2024 Revised: 01-07-2024

Apart from wars, the Partition of India and Pakistan was one of the most horrific events in human history. Massacres, rapes, and sexual torture were used to promote racial hate, and women suffered a great deal more than males. Many people lost their lives, their homes, and even their identities. Therefore, this essay explores how the horrific Partition era affected the lives of women by turning them into silent victims of phallocentric or male supremacy through the Partition novels from which Shauna Singh Baldwin's What the Body Remembers and Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice Candy Man have been taken. Women were kidnapped, raped, forced into prostitution, and died during Partition. In the Rawalpindi area, where Muslim mobs preyed on women, systematic violence against women first appeared in March 1947. Before further attacks, many Sikh women committed suicide by jumping into water wells to save honour and avoid conversion. Due to phallocentric society's rules, the time of Partition was a traumatic experience for women on physical, emotional, political, social, and sexual levels. These female writers wrote about these experiences through a female perspective, which demonstrated resistance and retaliation against phallocentrism or the male point of view. Because of this, the present dissertation will add new aspects to the established canon of women, trauma, and phallocentrism.

News coverage of the shootings in Orlando highlighted a tension between the two frames broadcasters used in their reporting. Was this a homophobic hate crime or was this terrorism? Many elided the difficulty by calling it homophobic terrorism, but this could not resolve the tension. This article contends that because terrorism is closely equated with radicalized Muslims, the tension was sublimated into an existing orientalist frame where homophobia became a marker of fundamentalist Islamic culture. Instead, this article argues, these two frames should not be taken as cause and effect but as problems that share a common ailment: the presence of toxic masculinities. Beginning from a position that sees masculinity as constituted through violence in patriarchal culture, this article works through the idea that when there is a disillusionment with violence, masculinity under patriarchy turns toxic. What emerges then is not merely violence but “rage” as the praxis of toxic masculinities.