Is There a Gap in Canada’s Hate Crime Laws? The Identification Of Soft Violence as a Tool for Current Right-Wing Extremist

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Isn’t Every Crime a Hate Crime? The Case for Hate Crime Laws

Supporters of hate crime legislation suggest that the primary reason for the codification of hate crime laws is “to send a strong message of tolerance and equality, signaling to all members of society that hatred and prejudice on the basis of identity will be punished with extra severity.” However, hate crime laws may actually be accomplishing the opposite effect of tolerance and equality because they encourage U.S. citizens to view themselves, not as members of our society, but as members of a protected group. The enactment of hate crime legislation at the federal and state levels has led to unintended consequences and unfair practices. Today, the controversy regarding the effectiveness of hate crime laws is debated, and people question whether this type of legislation is beneficial to society. This article will candidly reevaluate hate crime legislation. Part II will provide the definition of the term “hate crime” and the theoretical justification for enhanced sentencing involving discrimination-based conduct. Focus will be placed on data that disproves the theory that hate crime laws reduce or deter future hate crimes. It will also explain the underlying reasons for the enactment of hate crime laws, such as the media’s role and political influences, and it will present several of the misconceptions associated with hate crime legislation. Part III will present the unintended consequences associated with the enactment of hate crime statutes, including constitutional violations. It will also explain why hate crimes are rarely prosecuted, and will focus on the inconsistency, redundancy, and arbitrary usage/application of hate crime legislation. Part III will also present an individual’s response to the negative, unintended effects of hate crime legislation. Part IV will determine that hate crime legislation is not cost-effective. Part V sets forth a recommendation on improving community efforts to educate or reeducate citizens on respecting diversity. Finally, the article analyzes hate crime laws from supporting and opposing viewpoints and concludes that there is no need to separate hate crimes from other types of crimes as a means to promote a more tolerant, equal, and stable society.

Hate crime policy has developed from the early legislation of the 1968 Civil Rights Act to the 2009 Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crime Prevention Act, to be increasingly inclusive in terms of identity and comprehensive in terms of ramifications. Hence a body of scholarship around the trajectory and implications of hate crime laws has developed, as has a robust discourse on the definitions of hate crime itself and theories on who perpetrates bias-motivated violence and why it occurs. Between definitions of hate crime, a tension exists between legal definitions and those of theorists who are attempting incorporate understanding of context into the definition. Similarly, the theories on who perpetrates hate crimes and why they occur exhibit tensions between strain-based theories. While some scholars have deployed Merton’s (1938) strain theory associated with societal anomie, others point to changing norms. As hate crime laws have become more inclusive of sexual orientation and gender identity/expression, avenues of research into the disparities in experience of bias-motivated crimes between enumerated categories has increased. Persistent in the research on hate crime is the deficiency of data on victimization and ramifications beyond direct victims. While data on the scope of the policies is clear, inconsistencies in data collection around victimization render available resources insufficient. Most recently, research on hate crime policy has intersected with queer theory to question whether hate crime laws are positive for the LGBTQ community or society at large. Organizations such as the Silvia Rivera Law Project, for example, have pushed back on calls for inclusive hate crime laws via challenging the propensity to provide additional resources to the prison-industrial complex. Furthermore, queer scholars of history find a disconnect between the origins of the LGBTI movement in resisting police powers to be antithetical to promoting increased police powers in the form of hate crime legislation.

This study investigated how racial prejudice influences White college students' perceptions of hate crime. We also examined the moderating effects of the race of the victim of hate crimes and the absence of hate crime laws. Our sample included 581 White students in a predominantly White university located in a state that does not have a hate crime law. The study was set up in a 2 (race of the victim and the perpetrator) × 3 (level of assault) factorial design. Participants rated their perceptions of three scenarios (i.e., non-racially biased simple assault, racially biased simple assault, and racially biased aggravated assault). The dependent variables were perceptions of hate crime and willingness to report. The key independent variable was participants' level of racial prejudice. The moderators included race of the victim in each scenario and whether participants' state of origin has a hate crime law. Results suggest that higher levels of modern racism were associated with lower perceptions of hate crime and lower willingness to report racially biased simple and aggravated hate crime. When the victim was White, participants with higher levels of racial prejudice were more likely to perceive a hate crime and more willing to report it. The opposite was true when the victim was Black. The absence of state hate crime laws and race of victim were significant moderators. Our study suggests that racial prejudice is associated with lower perceptions of hate crime and willingness to report. Furthermore, the moderating effect of the race of victims provides insights on how racial prejudice can lead to a differential perception of hate crime, depending on whether one's racial in-group is targeted. Our findings also highlight the importance of having state-level hate crime laws to mitigate the linkage between modern racism and perceptions of hate crime.

This paper aims to examine the significance of xenophobia and hate crimes in multicultural societies. It begins with outlining the general discussions about multiculturalism, xenophobia and hate crimes. It identifies hate crimes that related to xenophobia in multicultural society and introduces hate crime laws in Australia. While Australian multicultural policy has its roots in government responses to the post settlement issues facing migrants, through the 1980s and 1990s policy was articulated more broadly as an element of Australia's nation building narratives. Today all Australian States and Territories have active policies and programs dealing with multiculturalism. As other multicultural societies, Australia confronts with challenges in building a multicultural society. One of them is xenophobia and hate crimes related to race, ethnic, religions. A number of common law countries have introduced legislation designed to respond to the problem of prejudice-related crime, commonly referred to as hate crime law. Whilst the heavier penalties imposed by hate crime laws are designed to denounce, and thereby deter, prejudice-related violence, it is apparent that these laws are meant to do more than punish and deter. They aim to condemn, not just criminal conduct per se, but also racism, homophobia, religious intolerance and the like. In this way Australia seek to make a broad moral claim that prejudice is wrong and to thereby reinforce pro-social values of tolerance and respect for marginalized and disadvantaged groups. This paper argues that hate crime laws are necessary in order to prevent hate crimes related to multiculturalism and suggests that Australian hate crime laws can be implied to sustain multiculturalism in Korea.

Hate crimes have been found to have more severe consequences than other parallel crimes that were not motivated by the offenders' hostility toward someone because of their real or perceived difference. Many countries today have hate crime laws that make it possible to increase the penalties for such crimes. The main critique against hate crime laws is that they punish thoughts. Instead, proponents of hate crime laws argue that sentence enhancement is justified because hate crimes cause greater harm. This study compares consequences of victimization across groups of victims to test for whom hate crimes hurt more. We analyzed data that were collected through questionnaires distributed to almost 3,000 students at Malmö University, Sweden, during 2013. The survey focused on students' exposure to, and experiences of, hate crime. A series of separate logistic regression analyses were performed, which analyzed the likelihood for reporting consequences following a crime depending on crime type, perceived motive, repeat victimization, gender, and age. Analyzed as one victim group, victims of hate crime more often reported any of the consequences following a crime compared with victims of parallel non-hate-motivated crimes. And, overall victims of threat more often reported consequences compared with victims of sexual harassment and minor assault. However, all hate crime victim groups did not report more consequences than the non-hate crime victim group. The results provide grounds for questioning that hate crimes hurt the individual victim more. It seems that hate crimes do not hurt all more but hate crimes hurt some victims of some crimes more in some ways.

This work addresses a central question in both social problems theory and sociolegal studies: how can we understand and account for the content of legal categories that define social problems and attendant victims? It offers an empirical analysis of the emergence and evolution of federal hate crime laws—the Hate Crimes Statistics Act, the Violence Against Women Act, and the Rate Crimes Penalty Enhancement Act—that determine who is and is not eligible for hate crime victim status. By examining the legislative histories of these laws as evidence of “critical discursive moments” (Gamson 1992), I show how the substantive character of the law was shaped over time: 1 first establish a historical context for federal hate crime law: then I analyze how an important element hate crime law—the adoption of select status provisions, such as race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and disabilities—unfolded such that some victims of discriminatory violence have been recognized as hate crime victims while others have gone unnoticed. In particular, people of color, Jews, gays and lesbians, women, and those with disabilities increasingly have been recognized as victims of hate crime, while union members, the elderly, children, and police officers, for example, have not. The findings suggest that the content of federal hate crime law was shaped by a series of temporally bound institutionally qualified processes whereby: 1) the empirical credibility of the scope of hate crime as a social problem was established by the claimsmaking of established social movement organizations; 2) a trio of core provisions for hate crime law—race, religion, and ethnicity—was cemented as the anchoring provisions of all hate crime law through discursive strategies that rendered particular types of violence empirically credible and worthy of federal attention; 3) the domain of the law expanded to include additional provisions, most notably sexual orientation and gender, in qualitatively distinct ways; and 4) the increased differentiation of legal subjects in subsequent law occurred in ways consistent with previously established and institutionalized policy pedigrees. Taken together, these findings reveal how microlevel processes of categorization work, mesolevel processes of social movement mobilization, and larger processes of institutionalization interface as political actors create and coalesce around legal meanings that define both “condition-categories” and “people-categories” (Loseke 1993).

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 article discusses how maximising freedom of expression increases both liberty and equality. The article focuses on the rationale that is used by many western societies to enact laws to prevent what is termed a ‘hate crime’. A hate crime is usually defined as an offence that is motivated by an offender's beliefs about an immutable characteristic of the victim, such as race, sex, religion, or national origin. The proponents of hate crime laws often believe that restraints on expression, such as racist speech, are justified as a means by which to reduce bigotry and its by product ‐ discrimination. However, in this article, the author concludes that hate crime laws actually diminish liberty and equality and adversely affect a vastly disproportionate number of minority group members. Indeed, actually, hate crime laws may promote a perception of inequality, because they permit more severe punishments for offenders solely on the basis of the race, sex, religion, or national origin of offenders’ victims.

This chapter considers overlapping legal and policy issues related to hate crimes, summarizing the problem with an emphasis on societal responses. The theoretical insight that law can be understood as an expression of societal values is combined with an emphasis on the empirical study of law in action. The approach taken is theoretical and conceptual in nature, but is also informed by relevant case law and various empirical studies and is concerned to suggest how hate crime research can address issues of both theoretical and policy significance by analyzing how hate crime law is practiced. Some of the findings are that hate crime law can be seen to express values in a wide variety of settings and to express values intentionally, neither of which has been properly acknowledged to date. It is important for public policy analysis and practice as well as for theory development to acknowledge the limitations of both rational choice/deterrence approaches and moral education theories in the hate crime policy domain. Instead of understanding criminal law as a type of threat or type of instruction, in the case of hate crimes the law may be practiced and evaluated most realistically without assuming that hate criminals will be attentive to potential legal sanctions or amenable to moral education. The discussion includes elements of literature review, policy debate, theoretical analysis, and methodological reflection suggesting how hate crime law can be analyzed as expressive law in action, providing material relevant for students, theorists, policy-makers and analysts, and researchers.

Many Confederate monuments were erected during the Jim Crow era, sending symbolic messages of intimidation and hostility to the Black population. Yet no studies have examined the relationship between contemporary Confederate memorialization and bias crime. Drawing from research on hate crime law compliance, we posit an inverse relationship between Confederate monuments and mobilization of hate crime law, such that compliance with hate crime laws will be lower in communities with memorialization, but that among complying agencies, anti-Black hate crime rates will be higher. To examine these relationships, we combined data from the Uniform Crime Report Hate Crime Statistics and the American Community Survey with Confederate monument data from the Southern Poverty Law Center. We conducted analyses predicting a) monument presence, b) agency non-compliance, and c) anti-Black hate crime. Results indicate that monuments are located in communities exemplifying a challenge to racial hierarchies: economically advantaged communities with larger Black populations. Regarding hate crime, analyses show that (1) the American South is associated with reduced compliance, and, (2) after accounting for compliance, Confederate memorialization is associated with increased anti-Black hate crime. These findings have implications for intergroup conflict and the impact of local symbolism on the formal mobilization of hate crime law.

In light of the Christchurch terror attack, a review of New Zealand’s hate crime laws is needed. This paper considers one potential reform option - the adoption of a separate hate crime offence. Firstly, I reconsider the question of whether hate crimes are the type of conduct that should be additionally criminalised. Additional criminalisation of hate crimes is necessary for a number of reasons. Hate crimes are a violation of the victim’s human rights and cause additional harm, to the victim and wider society. The increased moral reprehensibility of hate crimes makes deterring these crimes particularly important. I then critique the sentence enhancement approach, arguing that New Zealand’s current hate crime provision is inadequate. There is uncertainty in the weight that should be attributed to hate crime, the balancing exercise undertaken in sentencing gives insufficient recognition to the hate crime element and sentencing fails to deter hate crime offending. I also consider some issues with a separate hate crime offence: the limited nature of the provisions and the potential difficulties in prosecuting. I then consider the fair labelling principle. A separate offence is important for fair labelling of hate crime. The offence would more accurately communicate the nature of the wrongdoing to the offender, the public and other criminal justice agencies. It would also give more recognition to the victim. There are a number of issues that would need to be addressed if a separate offence were enacted. In particular, which underlying offences should be covered by the separate offence, which characteristics or grounds of hostility should be protected and the requisite motive or causation that should be required. This paper considers how these issues might be addressed. I conclude that New Zealand’s current approach to hate crimes is inadequate and change is needed. More consideration of the exact scope of any changes is required, particularly to determine whether to adopt a separate hate crime offence or a hybrid system.

Far-right violent extremism is the most pressing form of domestic violent extremism (DVE) facing the United States. While there is a consensus that far-right violent extremism poses a genuine risk to the United States, the relevance of women within far-right violent extremism remains understated and under-researched. The misinformed perceptions about women and their propensities for violence must be acknowledged and rectified to ensure a proper analysis of the state of far-right violent extremism in the United States. The far-right social media platform Gab has been utilized to explore underlying conceptions about women in far-right extremism as well as fill the gap in the perceptions about women’s roles in extremism and violent extremism that are currently held by practitioners. A stronger commitment to the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda, a framework that reconceptualizes women within discourses about security, promises to rectify the widely held misconceptions about women’s involvement in far-right violent extremism. By reviewing the conceptual shortcomings of those tasked with protecting against far-right violent extremism, the larger goal of securing the United States and beyond can be realized.

The Hate Crime Beliefs Scale (HCBS) is an assessment of attitudes about hate crime laws, offenders, and victims. The original HCBS includes four subscales (negative beliefs, offender punishment, deterrence, and victim harm), while a shortened and modified version from the United Kingdom (UK; HCBS-UK) consists of three subscales (denial, sentencing, and compassion). We conducted a psychometric test of the HCBS in order to identify a best fitting structure with possible item reduction. A total of 463 participants completed the original HCBS, measures of social dominance orientation (SDO) and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), and demographic questions. Factor analyses revealed good fit of the data for a Hate Crime Beliefs Scale-Short Form (HCBS-SF), largely modeled after the HCBS-UK. The three subscales were: denial (i.e., downplaying hate crime severity and low support for hate crime laws), sentencing (i.e., support for more punitive offender punishment), and compassion (i.e., understanding and concern for victims). All subscales possessed acceptable internal consistency. The denial subscale was positively associated with RWA subscale and SDO scores. The sentencing and compassion subscales were significantly negatively correlated with SDO and RWA subscale scores. Republicans held the least supportive views of hate crime laws, concern for victims, and punishment of offenders. Data underscore the importance of evaluating hate crime beliefs in public opinion and other contexts. The HCBS-SF better captures hate crime related attitudes than the previously developed longer version of the HCBS.

The impression often conveyed by the media about hate crime offenders is that they are hate-fuelled individuals who, in acting out their extremely bigoted views, target their victims in premeditated violent attacks. Scholarly research on the perpetrators of hate crimes has begun to provide a more nuanced picture. However, the preoccupation of researchers with convicted offenders neglects the vast majority of hate crime offenders that do not come into contact with the criminal justice system. This book widens understanding of hate crime by demonstrating that many offenders are ordinary people who offend in the context of their everyday lives. The book takes a victim-centred approach to explore and analyse hate crime as a social problem, providing an empirically informed and scholarly perspective. The book draws out the connections between the individual agency of offenders and the background structural context for their actions. It adds a new dimension to the debate about criminalising hate in light of concerns about the rise of punitive and expressive justice, scrutinising the balance struck by hate crime laws between the rights of offenders and the rights of victims.