The normality of everyday ‘hate crime’

Abstract

The experiences of victims show that in general, ‘hate crime’ offenders are not an aberration, or politically motivated extremists confined to the margins of society. Instead, many are ‘ordinary’ people who offend in the unfolding contexts of their everyday lives. The ordinariness of offenders and offending is arguably a further key dimension in the conceptualisation of ‘hate crime’, when victims' experiences are placed at the centre of understanding about ‘hate crime’. This line of argument is pursued in this chapter in the spirit of conceptualising ‘hate crime’ as a scholarly domain characterised by an analysis of the commonalities and differences between various forms of oppressive violence. In that spirit, this chapter unravels the situational dynamics of anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim and other racist incidents, incidents against people with a disability and homophobic incidents. It illuminates the connections between background structure and the foreground of offender action in cases of ‘hate crime’, providing the missing link between the macro-societal ideological edifice and the micro-level actions of offenders.