Hate Crimes: A Special Category of Victimization

Concern for immigrants as victims of crime or immigrant victims' access to justice has been scarce. The lack of research on the victimization of immigrants is undoubtedly related to the difficulty of obtaining valid data on the immigration status of crime victims. Another reason for the lack of research on immigrants as victims is what researchers working within the social constructionist tradition would describe as the process of defining victim categories and of 'making claims' (Spector and Kitsuse, 1977) on behalf of those categories. Victim-activists have been remarkably successful at placing a variety of victim categories and victim issues on the public agenda including elder abuse, hate crime, child abuse, intimate partner violence, and crime against the elderly. The fact that they have not cast 'immigrants' in the role of star victim' does not necessarily mean that concern about immigrant victimization does not exist at all. Rather, it is because certain immigrant troubles have been subsumed under politically hotter topics, such as 'hate crime' and 'domestic violence'. The articles included here reflect the fragmented and thin state of our knowledge about immigrants as victims of crime. Each of the articles makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the various dimensions of this increasingly significant problem. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)

Background: Extremism poses a cross-border social problem, lacking a universally accepted definition. In principle, so-called hate crimes are specific types of criminal offences that cut across all types of extremism. We can even talk about their conceptual overlap. A special category of hate crimes is represented by so-called verbal attacks, known as hate speech, which are considered an abuse of freedom of expression from an international perspective as well as in jurisprudence of the European Court on Human Rights. As a result of such a perception, their criminal sanction comes into consideration. In accordance with the principle of subsidiarity of criminal law repression, another method of sanctioning hate crimes and hate speech is also possible, namely by administrative law. The existence of “multiple legal regulations” on extremism as delict caused a dual sanctioning system of extremism. It leads to application problems in legal practice, for example, an unclear understanding of offences from criminal and administrative perspectives or even the weak possibility of investigating such acts by State power. The main objective of the contribution is to point out the dual legal regulation (criminal and administrative) of the sanctioning of extremism, in particular its special category – hate crimes and hate speech. Moreover, the objective of the contribution is to assess its unclear issues in legal understanding and to identify specific application problems caused by its dual system (criminal and administrative). Special attention is focused on applicable sanctions in both the criminal law area and administrative law areas. At the end, suggestions on how to solve indicated problems are introduced. Methods: The primary sources used for the elaboration of the contribution are scholarly sources (books, studies, scientific papers, etc.), legislative instruments (national and international legislation) and case law (of Slovak national courts and the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union). The authors use traditional methods of legal scientific (jurisprudential) research – general scientific methods and special methods of legal science (jurisprudence). The general scientific methods used in the paper are predominantly logical methods, namely, the method of analysis, the method of synthesis, the method of analogy, and the descriptive method. The descriptive method has been used to familiarise the reader with the current legal regulation of extremism. The method of analysis has been used regarding relevant legal provisions and case-laws of courts. The method of synthesis has also been used. The special methods of legal science used here predominantly include methods belonging to a group of interpretative methods, namely, the teleological method, the systematic method and the comparative method. The teleological method has been used to explain the purpose of legislative instruments. The systematic method has been used to classify the relevant applicable law. The comparative method has been used to examine the relationship between legislative perspectives – criminal and administrative. Results and Conclusions: Regarding extremism offences committed in the Slovak Republic, in specific cases, the decision making whether the committed offence is criminal or of an administrative nature depends on the attitude of the person who committed it. In the Slovak Republic, legislative amendments are intended to address the area of extremism offences, but they have not been introduced as final. A new legal regulation of the administrative offences of extremism is envisaged in terms of their definition. A new sanctioning policy of extremism administrative offences by juvenile offenders is also expected. Moreover, the application of probation in case of offences committed by juvenile delinquents in the area of extremism is recommended and preferred. It would highlight the importance of restorative justice, including its strengthening. Probation would allow the court, when sanctioning extremism in the criminal law area, to create a so-called tailor-made sanction, which would strengthen the individualisation of the sanction, the educational purpose of the sanction and the achievement of both the purpose of the sanction and the purpose of the Criminal Code, which is to protect society from criminal offences and their perpetrators. Even the Constitutional Court of the Slovak Republic partially examined the modification of the elements of criminal offences of extremism.

This chapter analyses recent theoretical and empirical contributions that have emerged in the opening decade of the twenty-first century. The post-9/11 era has seen dramatic shifts in how one's conceptualise and responds hate crime, although many areas of enquiry remain underdeveloped. The chapter explains an extensive online search of journals and texts addressing hate crime. It identifies four broad categories dominating the literature: making sense of hate crime; 'categories' of victimisation; hate groups; and responding to hate crime. The chapter discusses hate crime literature has tended to be very broad and non-specific in its focus. That is, little scholarship devotes attention to specific categories of victims. The chapter also explains a renewed emphasis on research focusing on the distinct or even comparative experiences of narrowly defined communities. It argues several areas in which there is great scope for development, beginning with consideration of the broader impacts of hate crime.

There is an ongoing debate amongst hate crime scholars about the categories of victims that should be included within hate crime legislation. Some commentators argue that affording protection to groups based on predefined characteristics results in many victims being excluded from the legislation. They would prefer a more inclusive approach that would offer protection to a potentially limitless number of groups. This paper considers the question from a doctrinal perspective, and argues that a principled way of deciding the characteristics of hate crime is required. It will conclude that the core concern of hate crime legislation is with the furthering of the broader equality agenda and, as such, the victims of hate crime should form an exclusive group based on those characteristics protected under equality legislation. This approach can help provide a theoretical framework for hate crime legislation that can be more easily accommodated within criminal law principles.

The emergence of hate crime legislation in Great Britain and the United States has generated public debate and has increasingly been the focus of academic work. Relatively little research has examined how and why certain victim categories might be considered and then dismissed from the hate crime policy domain. Drawing on original qualitative research, this article aims to fill that gap by focusing specifically on the exclusion of age and gender from hate crime policy in Britain by exploring the ways in which decisions are made about the characteristics of hate crime victim groups by policy makers and activists. This article asks important questions about how different forms of violence are conceptualized and understood by practitioners and theorists alike. It also addresses how claims for victims’ rights are framed to make changes to the criminal justice system.

The Blue Lives Matter movement began in 2014 as a rejoinder to accusations of police racism in the United States. Blue Lives Matter advocates for the expansion of hate crime statutes to include police and other first responders as protected victim categories. Four US states have enacted such reforms: Louisiana, Kentucky, Mississippi and Texas. With some minor exceptions, this is the first time that hate crime laws have been extended to a victim category that represents an authoritative arm of the state. This article examines the social significance of these laws. Drawing on the results of a critical discourse analysis of legislative debates surrounding the enactment and attempted enactment of blue hate crime laws, the article argues that these laws pit police and Black citizens against each other. In situating new legal protections for police within hate crime statutes, blue reforms contain an implicit attempt to reframe the history of police brutality toward Black Americans by claiming that police are a subjugated and targeted minority at the hands of a Black community of dangerous and biased perpetrators: a new black/blue relation of power.

Despite its significance as a specific category of hate crime, anti-Jewish crime has received little attention in the scholarly literature on policing hate crime. Whereas hate crimes against Jews figure prominently in the annual hate crime statistics published by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States, there are no routinely published police data on anti-Jewish incidents in the United Kingdom. Given the concerns about a rise in anti-Semitism in Britain in recent years, this article expands on written and oral testimony provided by the author to the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry Into Anti-Semitism. It illuminates the inadequacies in the police monitoring of, and use of data on, anti-Jewish incidents and discusses the shortcomings in the context of the value of hate crime data for police services.

Hate Crimes: A Special Category of Victimization

Hate crimes were first recognised as a specific category of criminal conduct in the United States of America. Evidence of such recognition is supported by a number of state level and federal hate-crime laws that were enacted in the United States between the early 1980s and 1990s. There is a tendency in some American literature, however, to trace the recognition of hate crime as a specific category of criminal conduct to two specific historical time periods. The first historical period that is usually considered, is the nineteenth-century post-American Civil War period when federal civil-rights statutes were passed by the American Congress to protect vulnerable groups of people who were victimised because of their race and prior status as slaves. The second time period that is considered is the mid-twentieth century, post-Second World War era up to the period of the Civil-Rights Movement. Irrespective of the origins of hate crime as a category of criminal conduct, their recognition has spawned a new category of crime and criminal laws in the United States of America and internationally. Contemporary hate-crime laws recognise a wide spectrum of prejudices and biases. Despite the international trend, particularly in democratic Western nations towards the recognition of hate crimes and the enactment of hate-crime laws, the Republic of South Africa has yet to enact a hate-crime law.

Keywords: Political Instability, Corruption, Economic Growth, Political Conflict1.IntroductionThe major aim of this paper is to examine the empirical relations between economic growth and a broad group of political instability factors including corruption, government instability, internal and external conflicts, religious and ethnic tensions, democratic accountability and bureaucracy quality. Moreover, one of the main objectives of our paper is to explore the effects of serious problems such as political instability and corruption on economic growth for Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries during the period 1984-2012. Thus, most of the countries in our sample are developed countries of the world.The main contribution and distinctive characteristic of this article is to focus not only on the relationship between political stability and economic growth, but also on the relations between some specific categories of political instability and economic growth. It is generally accepted that corruption is an element of political instability as well. In this paper, we employ system GMM estimator for linear dynamic panel data models in order to overcome a potential endogeneity problem.The relationship between political instability and economic growth has been an issue of concern for long. Political instability is one of the conventional themes of the modern political economy theory. Modern theory of political economy suggests that political stability plays a significant role in economic growth of a country. Thus, an unstable political system could seriously hinder economic growth. Within the theoretical framework of modern political economy, a government is considered to be inefficient if policy objectives vary over a short period of time. Thus, coalition governments are a serious threat and to be more prone to the political stability. Moreover, modern political economy theory emphasizes that political instability also affects the level of economic growth in the country as the rates of economic growth are correlated with persistent policies of government and how government perform these policies (Barro, 2013).On the other hand, corruption is a widespread phenomenon in several countries around the world, which are regarded by economists as seriously harmful to economic growth (Aisen & Veiga, 2011). The majority of academic research reveals that corruption impedes economic growth, creates political instability, weakens the state's capacity to tax, undermines spending programs, increases the cost and lowers the quality of public investment (IMF, 2016). Some economists consider that corruption can also have distributional consequences. Corruption increases income inequality and poverty through lower economic growth, biased tax systems favoring the rich, and lower social spending (Gupta, Davoodi & Alonso-Terme, 2002). However, some researchers suggest that the impact of corruption on economic growth is related with factors such as the country's legal and institutional framework, quality of governance and political regime. Thus, in some highly regulated countries, corruption can compensate for red tape and institutional weaknesses and overcome the government failure in the economy (Campos, Dimova & Saleh, 2010). Since there is a large consensus that corruption hinders economic growth and increases socio-economic inequalities, international organizations such as the World Bank and OECD emphasize that corruption is among the greatest obstacles to economic and social development (OECD, 2013).The remaining part of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents a brief literature review. Section 3 provides information about the data, empirical model, and empirical methodology. Section 4 contains empirical results. Section 5 includes a summary and concluding remarks.2.Brief Literature ReviewAlesina, Ozler, Roubini, & Swagel (1992) define political instability narrowly as the tendency of the change in cabinet either by constitutional or unconstitutional means. …

ECP02-02 - Culture and ethnicity as a variable in diagnostics and therapy

This article takes an interest in gendered memory politics and addresses the dearth of research on gender and commemoration in relation to the genocide in Rwanda. It analyses elite-produced gendered narratives at key sites of commemoration and investigates their affective role in constituting the post-genocide Rwandan state. Through a methodological approach of ‘the situated gaze’, three central observations are made. First, women are mourned as a specific category of rape victims and mothers. Second, women’s experiences of sexual violence are at the same time censored and de-individualized. Third, no other experiences, beyond being a victim, are taken into account. The article finds that the top-down affective memory politics circumscribes the role women played during and after the genocide, and restricts their agency within the present state project of ‘national unity and reconciliation’.

This chapter discusses the notion of victimhood as this pertains to climate change. Each section deals with a specific victim category — non-human environmental entities, children and young people, and Indigenous communities. Each grouping has its own specific histories, stories, and issues. What perhaps unites the discussion is an underlying emphasis on adopting an ecocentric perspective that incorporates social and ecological justice. From a human perspective, ecocentrism attempts to strike a balance between the need to utilise resources for human survival and the need to develop rules that facilitate the benign use of the ecosphere. Thus, for example, ensuring the preservation of biocentric values becomes integral to maintaining long-term human needs. To do this means minimising the victimisation of both the human and the non-human — in essence, to assert a form of ecological citizenship.

Relevance. Currently, there is an increased interest in the tragedy of the civilian population in Russian society. This is reflected both in numerous scientific publications and in procedural actions. Belgorod, Voronezh, Oryol regional courts recognized the war crimes of the Nazis and their accomplices as genocide.Purpose: to consider, based on the materials of the Extraordinary State Commission of Federal and Regional Archives, a special category of victims of Nazi crimes – the elderly.Objectives: to determine the criteria of old age, to find out the number of victims of crimes – the elderly in the territories of the Voronezh, Kursk and Oryol regions, to consider various ways of killing the elderly and the elderly.Methodology. The basis of this scientific research is a complex of general dialectical method of scientific cognition, general scientific methods of analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction and private scientific methods of cognition.Results. The study became an objective proof of the extermination policy of the Nazis and their accomplices on the territory of the regions of the Central Chernozem region. Numerous archival documents confirming that the elderly population and the elderly were one of the mass victims of war crimes are cited.Conclusion. The elderly population and the elderly, due to their psycho-physiological characteristics, due to their inability or limitation to physical labor, were among the first to be destroyed. They were considered by the Nazi leadership as an extra, absolutely unnecessary ballast, which had to be disposed of.

There is limited research in India focusing on the criminal justice system issues involving a special category of victims and accused suffering from unsoundness of mind. According to the Mental Health Care Act, 2017, they need immediate mental health services, as denial of the same is a violation of their fundamental right. Despite several advancements, people with unsound mind serving their sentences in the prisons constitute a major lot of the total prison population in India, despite the fact that they are the most helpless targets of human rights violations. Section 84 of the Indian Penal Code provides a constitutional right to an accused with unsound mind to seek defense against prosecution; but due to lack of awareness and acceptance and also due to outdated testing methods, the law is not under frequent practice and not exercised to its complete worth. By compromising on the procedure established by law, they are kept under trial in judicial custody. Thus, there is an urgent need to identify and address such victims and provide them with right care and protection that the constitution entitles them. This review article is an attempt to explore and highlight this issue, to raise a voice for identification of such violations, to provide means to deliberate medicolegal aid, and lastly to find out probable solutions, recommendations, and suggestions for a better administration of justice by providing legal security to the protection of basic human rights of people with an unsound mind.