The Shaping, Enactment and Interpretation of the First Hate-Crime Law in the United Kingdom - An Informative and Illustrative Lesson for South Africa

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.

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.

This dissertation consists of three essays that provide empirical evidence that informs the ongoing debate over the passage of gay and lesbian rights legislation. In Chapter 2 the difference-in-difference-in-difference methodology is used to examine the effect that the passage of a private employment anti-discrimination law has on the relative earnings and employment of gays and lesbians. The results of this analysis indicate that the passage of this law does not have an impact on either relative earnings or employment for lesbians, but it does have an impact on these labor market outcomes for gays. In particular, the passage of this anti-discrimination law increases the relative earnings for gays by 7.5% and reduces their relative probability of being employed by 2.4%. In Chapter 3 a gravity model of state-to-state gay and lesbian migration flows over the period 1995-2000 is estimated in order to analyze the revealed preferences of gays and lesbians for private and public employment anti-discrimination, hate crime, and domestic partnership laws. The results of this examination indicate that private employment anti-discrimination laws reduce in-migration, while public employment anti-discrimination and hate crime laws increase in-migration. Therefore, it appears that gays and lesbians prefer to live in places with public employment anti-discrimination and hate crime laws, and not in places with private employment anti-discrimination laws. In Chapter 4 a spatial hedonic autoregressive model is estimated for the Columbus, OH MSA to examine the impact that the percentage of gay and lesbian households in conservative and liberal neighborhoods has on the house prices in those neighborhoods. The results of the analysis indicate that a .1% point increase in the percentage of gay and lesbian households increases house prices in liberal neighborhoods by .81% and reduces house prices by .24% in conservative neighborhoods. Thus, evidence is provided that is consistent with gay and lesbian households being an amenity to liberal neighborhoods, but a disamenity, likely due to prejudice, to conservative neighborhoods.

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.

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 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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hate crime laws are a highly controversial legal approach in society's response to intergroup violence. Argument acceptance, knowledge, and individual differences were examined in relationship to attitudes about these laws. These variables were also considered in terms of efforts to influence a peer's beliefs about hate crime laws. One‐hundred and sixty‐seven participants completed a measure of knowledge of human rights laws, Gough's Pr scale, the Selznick and Steinberg anti‐Semitism scale, and Cuellar's Machismo scale. Hate crime attitudes were measured on an affect rating scale and six statements reflecting arguments favoring and opposing hate crime laws. Peer influence was examined on Interpersonal Power Inventory (IPI). Results showed that while most participants endorsed positive attitudes about hate crime laws, men—and both women and men who endorsed machismo attitudes—were more likely to agree with media distortion and identity politics arguments opposing hate crime laws. The Pr and machismo scales predicted greater effort on the IPI to influence peer attitudes about hate crime laws, after controlling for demographic differences of the participants. These findings indicate that more explicitly biased individuals were more effortful in trying to change the attitudes of peers concerning the legitimacy of hate crime laws.

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.

Criminal laws that punish discriminatory “hate crime” offenses relating to race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and other status characteristics trace their roots back to the nation’s founding. Unlike today, in early America, status distinctions in law, particularly racial ones, were intended to restrict the exercise of civil rights. Today’s hate crime laws are the refined modern progeny of an important class of remedial post–Civil War laws and constitutional amendments. Although the Supreme Court has vigorously upheld enhanced punishment for hate crimes over the last decade, it has also established restrictions on the government’s authority to punish bigoted conduct and expression. This article examines, through an analysis of historic cases, laws, and constitutional changes, the legal evolution that culminated in the passage of modern hate crime laws.