Hate Crimes: New Social Movements and the Politics of Violence. Valerie Jenness , Kendal BroadHate Crimes: Criminal Law and Identity Politics. James Jacobs , Kimberly Potter

Review article: Discourses on law in policing David Dixon (1997) Law in Policing. Legal Regulation and Police Practices, Oxford: Oxford University Press, xviii + 365pp. hb, £40.00. Harry Avis (1999) Drugs and Life, Fourth Edition, WCB/McGraw‐Hill. 260 pages. £34.99. Nicholas Dorn (Ed.) (1999) Regulating European Drug Problems, The Hague: Kluwer Law International. 302 pages. Karim Murji (1998) Policing Drugs, Aldershot Ashgate. 195 pages. £35.00. Nigel South (Ed.) (1999) Drugs Cultures, Controls and Everyday Life, London: Sage. 164 pages. £45.00/£14.99. Hate crime controversy: Opposing views on hate crime legislation and enforcement practices Violent Racism: Victimisation, Policing and Social Context. Benjamin Bowling (Oxford: Clarendon Press). 1998, XL+ £35 hbk/E14.95 pbk, 377 pp. Hate Crimes: Criminal Law and Identity Politics. James Jacobs and Kimberly Potter (New York: Oxford University Press). 1998, £35 hbk, 212 pp.

Analysis of US hate crime legislation reveals a significant overall trend involving: (1) the inclusion of a notion of hate motivation on the part of the offender; (2) the provision for enhanced penalties; and (3) the identification of particular victimized groups who are listed in state and federal hate crime statutes. Whether or not a person is recognized as a hate crime victim in US statutes has been shown to be heavily influenced by the strength of social movements based on politicized identities. It is argued that this alignment problematizes the position of victims who are the targets of hate crimes yet who fail to organize on the basis of identity politics, lack political clout, have insufficient moral status, or who see hate crime legislation as an ineffective way of dealing with their particular concerns. This paper examines the barriers to achieving hate crime victim status for persons who are targeted because of their occupations or sexual orientation. The specific examples I will use are doctors and other workers in abortion clinics, sex workers and paedophiles. These widely disparate groups have been selected as examples to highlight some of the moral status, politicized identity and social movement and lobbying strength issues that are currently involved in being recognized as a victim of hate in the US. It is argued that Australia should not proceed down the track of introducing hate crime legislation. Hate crime legislation is the source of serious social disquiet and acrimony in the US. There are inequities built into the alignment between proving hate intent and the enhanced penalty approach that involve giving higher symbolic status to some bodies and not others. As the experience in the US shows, this has a dangerous potential to undermine social cohesion and community faith in equality before the law as well as creating a breeding ground of resentment.

IN THE ARMS OF AFRICA: THE LIFE OF COLIN M. TURNBULL. Roy Richard Grinker. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000, xiv + 354pp., $27.95. Reviewed by R. A. Horne. HATE CRIMES: CRIMINAL LAW AND IDENTITY POLITICS. James B. Jacobs and Kimberly Potter. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Reissued in paperback 2001. x + 212 pp. Reviewed by Ralph Wedgwood. CREATIVITY: WHERE THE DIVINE AND HUMAN MEET. Fr. Matthew Fox. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, pb, 2002, $21.95. Reviewed by R. A. Horne.

PRONOUN ENVY: LITERARY USES OF LINGUISTIC GENDER. Anna Livia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 237 pp. Reviewed by Julia Penelope. HATE CRIMES: CRIMINAL LAW AND IDENTITY POLITICS. James B. Jacobs and Kimberly Potter. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Reissued in paperback 2001. x + 212 pp. Reviewed by Ralph Wedgwood.

The Evolution of Identity Politics

Early in the 1980s, a new category of crime appeared in the criminal law lexicon. In response to what was said to be an epidemic of prejudice-motivated violence, Congress and many state legislatures passed a wave of “hate crime ” laws that required the collection of statistics and enhanced the punishment of crimes motivated by certain prejudices. This book places in socio-legal perspective both the hate crime problem and society’s response to it. From the outset, Jacobs and Potter adopt a sceptical if not critical stance. They argue that hate crime is a hopelessly muddled concept and that legal definitions of the term are riddled with ambiguity and subjectivity. Moreover, no matter how hate crime is defined, the authors find no evidence to support the claim that the US is experiencing a hate crime epidemic--nor that the number or rate of hate crimes is at an historic zenith. Furthermore, assert the authors, the federal effort to establish a hate crime accounting system has been a failure. The authors argue that hate crime as a socio-legal category represents the elaboration of an identity politics that manifests itself in many areas of the law. However, the attempt to apply the anti-discrimination paradigm to criminal law generates a number of problems and anomalies. The underlying conduct that hate crime law prohibits is already subject to criminal punishment. Jacobs and Potter maintain that there is no persuasive rationale for saying that hate crimes are “worse “ or “more serious “ than similar crimes attributable to other anti-social motivations. Also, they argue that the effort to single out hate crime for greater punishment, in effect, is an effort to punish some offenders more seriously because of their bad beliefs, opinions, or values, thus implicating the First Amendment. Jabobs and Potter show that the recriminalization of hate crime has little (if any) value with respect to law enforcement or criminal justice. Indeed, enforcement of such laws may in fact exacerbate intergroup tensions rather than eradicate prejudice.

Hate crime is a problem in many countries around the world. Scholars define hate crimes as unlawful conduct directed at different target groups, which can include violent acts, property damage, harassment, and trespassing (see Hate crime: An emergent research agenda. Annual Review of Sociology 27.1 [2001]: 479–504). Hate crime perpetrators target their victim’s race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, or disability, but also a variety of other characteristics. Several social movements (e.g., the civil rights movement, women’s movement, and LGBT movement) laid the foundation for anti-violence movements and placed the hate crime discourse on the political and legislative agenda. One way to better understand hate crime is to explore how governments in different parts of the world address the issue of crimes motivated by hate or prejudice. Targeted laws and policies transformed hate violence from ordinary to extraordinary crime (see Hate crime policy in western Europe: Responding to racist violence in Britain, Germany, and France. American Behavioral Scientist 51.2 [2007]: 149–165). Different countries implemented hate crime legislation in order to condemn crime committed due to prejudice or bias against an individual or group of people, introducing such legislation during different periods in time. The United States emerged as the leader of hate crime policy approaches, implementing legal responses to prejudice and bias in the early 20th century. The United States was also the first country to circulate the term “hate crime” during the 1980s (see Hate crime: An emergent research agenda. Annual Review of Sociology 27.1 [2001]: 479–504). Europe and the Asia-Pacific region followed suit in implementing their own responses to hate crime. The diversity of hate crime legislation in different countries makes it difficult to combine the legislative contexts under a common framework. A controversial debate exists around the need for a separate set of hate crime legislation. Scholars dispute the seriousness of the hate crime offense, the possibilities of proving motivational aspects of the hate crime, criminalizing hate, and introducing more severe punishments. They also debate the utilization of the civil versus the criminal code, the inclusion of different protected categories under hate crime legislation, the symbolic character of hate crime, and the social and political impact of hate crime legislation. This bibliography reviews key resources on hate crime legislation, including its historical context, its globalization, and the socio-criminological debate around hate crime legislation.

In the UK and USA ‘Hate crime’ has become a topic of public controversy and social mobilization around issues of violence and harassment. This has largely but not exclusively addressed racism, homophobia and gender based violence. This article has three objectives. First, to situate hate crime legislation within a broad theory of modernity;secondly to examine the politics of its emergence as a public issue; thirdly to use data from the authors' recent research in Greater Manchester to illuminate the complexity of the concept of ‘hate crime’. The centrality of ‘hate crime’ to current debates derives from the importance of rights-based regulation of complex societies and the juridical management of emotional life. Hatred and violence have become problematic behaviour thrown into relief by a long term civilizing process. Hate crimes have thus acquired powerful rhetorical focus for mobilization of victim and identity politics. With reference to racist violence in Oldham and elsewhere in Greater Manchester, we argue that in its application and construction, however, ‘hate crime’ is a complex phenomenon that might dramatize rather than regulate the problems it seeks to address.

Changes in the international situation during the last decades have become the reason for new conflicts and aggravations at the national level. The 2015 European migrant crisis (Refugee crisis), 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine have become a catalyst for increase in hate crimes. In order to recognize the criminal offense as a hate crime in the sense of the Latvian regulatory framework, it is necessary to establish two criteria: (a) the composition of the criminal offence is included in the Criminal Law; (b) a motive of hatred against a particular protected group of society can be stated in the criminal offence. It is the motive – hate or prejudice – that distinguishes hate crimes from other types of crimes.Prejudice is a negative assessment of a social group and its members. These are objectively unfounded assumptions and erroneous generalizations that, in the opinion of the offender, separate the representatives of this group from the rest of society. Persistent prejudices are called stereotypes. Unlike prejudice, stereotypes are not necessarily negative in nature. However, stereotypes are not based on objective truth either. It follows from court practice that hate crimes were directed against several groups of Latvian society: against ethnic groups (Latvians, Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, Gypsies or Roma, etc.), against representatives of various religious denominations, against asylum seekers, against people from other countries, against sexual minorities as well as against other groups. Stereotypes are often based on personal or negative cultural experiences of previous generations.In this context, it can be mentioned that it is specifically culture that is the basic factor according to which it is possible to understand, identify and reduce hate speech. Professor Aleksandrs Krugļevskis believed that with a change in cultural understanding, expanding public participation in cultural processes, the level of legal awareness will rise and tendencies, intentions to commit a criminal offense will disappear. Criminal law as a cultural factor creates a system that corresponds to the level of education and culture of the people. The above also corresponds to the vision of Latvia’s cohesive society policy “Guidelines for Cohesive and Active Civil Society 2021–2027”: mutual trust, participation, and cooperation between different social groups have improved among Latvian residents, and the level of tolerance has increased, stereotypes and prejudices against different social group representatives have decreased.Statistical data show that since the start of the war in Ukraine, the number of registered hate crimes in Latvia has increased. These show the relevance of the chosen topic. The authors of the article offer their vision of the problem of hate crimes, studying hate crimes as a cultural phenomenon, paying special attention to the experience of Latvian society in this area.

This article explores how bias crimes differ from parallel crimes and why this distinction makes a crucial difference in our criminal law. Bias crimes differ from parallel crimes as a matter of both the resulting harm and the mental state of the offender. The nature of the injury sustained by the immediate victim of a bias crime exceeds the harm caused by a parallel crime. Moreover, bias crimes inflict a palpable harm on the broader target community of the crime as well as on society at large. The distinction between bias crimes and parallel crimes also concerns the perpetrator's state of mind and, specifically, his bias motivation toward his victim. Bias motivation is an essential element of criminal liability and the greater level of harm caused warrants their enhanced punishment. The punishment of an individual offender for the commission of a bias crime, however, is warranted by the state of mind with which he acts. Part I of this article discusses the differences between bias crimes and parallel crimes and explores the distinctiveness of perpetrators and victims of bias crimes along with the impact of bias crimes beyond that on the immediate victim. After establishing a typology of positive bias crime law, the author discusses the outward manifestations of these crimes. Part II demonstrates that bias crimes ought to be punished more severely than parallel crimes. Part III considers the aspects of bias crimes that are relevant in the punishment of an individual offender. Whereas the harm caused by bias crimes generally justifies the enhanced punishment of these crimes, the resulting harm to a particular victim does not, in and of itself, warrant the enhanced punishment of the perpetrator. Bias motivation of the perpetrator, and not necessarily the resulting harm to the victim, is the critical factor in determining an individual's guilt for a bias crime. The author concludes that the discriminatory selection model of bias crimes is an insufficient theory of bias crime, whereas the racial animus model offers a far richer theory. Discriminatory selection of a victim may often provide important evidence of racial animus, and in some instances even fully persuasive evidence. But selection ought to play the role of proof for animus and not the greater role of element for guilt.

This review provides an overview of the emergence, content, and institutionalization of hate crime law as a unique form of criminal and civil rights law originating in the United States and increasingly finding a home in other countries. From the introduction and politicization of the term hate crime in the late 1970s to the increased enforcement of hate crime law at the beginning of the twenty-first century, social movements have constructed the problem of hate-motivated violence; politicians at the federal and state levels have passed legislation defining the parameters of hate crime; appellate court judges have decided the constitutionality of hate crime law; and law enforcement officials have classified, reported, investigated, and prosecuted incidents as hate crime. At the same time, media attention to hate crime has increased, defining the concept for the masses while leading to and reflecting growing acceptance of the idea that criminal conduct is different when it involves an act motivated by (some types of) bigotry, hatred, or bias and manifested as discrimination against (some types of) minorities. An examination of these changes suggests that lawmaking transcends the moment at which a statute is adopted; it is best understood as a larger process of policy domain formation that is enabled and constrained by a policy community intimately connected to extralegal political processes and the workings of loosely coupled bureaucratic structures comprising the criminal justice system.

If the enactment of hate crime legislation serves to address social injustice, what social groups are deserving of its special protection? This question continues to challenge policy makers and legislatures globally. In the US, where modern hate crime statutes were first enacted, different group characteristics have been included at both state- and federal-level legislation. The Hate Crime Statistics Act 1990 was the first piece of federal legislation that required the Attorney General to collect data on hate crimes motivated by race, ethnicity, religion, disability and sexual orientation bias. In 1994 Congress enacted the Hate Crimes Sentencing Enhancement Act, which required the US Sentencing Guidelines Commission to enhance penalties for crimes motivated by bias against a victim’s race, colour, national origin, ethnicity, religion, gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation. However, federal jurisdiction initially extended only to race, colour, national origin and religion, meaning that crimes motivated by bias towards a victim’s sexual orientation, gender or disability could only be pursued if the federal government obtained jurisdiction in some other way. This limitation of jurisdiction was changed by the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act 2009, which extended the reach of federal law to cover sexual orientation, gender or disability. State legislators have also taken diverging approaches to legislating for hate crime, using different models of legislation and including different protected characteristics. There are currently 47 States in the USA with hate crime statutes. All of these states include hate based on race, religion, and ethnicity, while 34 cover disability, 34 sexual orientation, 30 gender, 22 transgender/gender identity, 14 age; 6 political affiliation and 3 (and additionally Washington, D.C.) protect homelessness.

Forgotten Friends. ODIHR and Civil Society in the Struggle to Counter Hate Crime in Poland

This chapter suggests that problems over the perception of the nature of hate crime mean that often victims of disablist hate crime are overlooked. Developed partly through campaign group activism and high profile cases, hate crime has become a solid part of criminal justice policy and practice. The legal framework recognises different forms of crime motivated by prejudice or hostility towards victims based on their race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or disability. However, this chapter demonstrates that there are particular problems with the implementation of provisions related to disablist hate crime which can be understood by utilising Christie’s ‘ideal victim’ typology. Born out of an identity politics which sought recognition for the specific harms of hate crime, the development of policy has been shaped by sometimes simplistic perceptions of what it is to be victimised, often framed around issues of stranger danger and attributing recognition to ‘deserving victims’. This reliance on identity politics often means that victims of disablist hate crime are portrayed as weak and vulnerable, which can contribute to anxiety. This chapter shows the relevance of Christie’s ideal victim thesis due to an increasing emphasis on identity politics being used to determine ‘deserving’ and ‘legitimate’ victims.

If our knowledge about so called ‘hate crime’ was confined to what we read in the national newspapers or see on the television news then the impression that we would be most likely left with is that hate crime offenders are out-and-out bigots, hate-fuelled individuals who subscribe to racist, homophobic, and other bigoted views who, in exercising their extreme hatred target their victims in premeditated violent attacks. Whilst many such attacks have occurred, the data on incidents, albeit limited, suggests instead that they are commonly committed by ‘ordinary’ people in the context of their ‘everyday’ lives. Considering the everyday circumstances in which incidents occur, this paper argues that by imposing penalty enhancement for ‘hate crime’ the criminal law assumes a significant symbolic role as a cue against transgression on the part of potential offenders.