Hate Crime Research Articles

'We are not the virus'-Experiences of racism among East & Southeast Asian heritage young people in London during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The spread of COVID-19 was accompanied by news reports of surging racism, xenophobia, and hate crime all over the Global North targeting individuals of East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) descent. However, little empirical research has documented the impacts of COVID-19 on child and adolescent ESEAs. We describe and analyse the mental health experiences of young ESEA Londoners during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. We purposively recruited 23 young people (aged 9-20) of ESEA heritage through social media and existing ESEA networks and analysed transcripts using thematic analysis. Participants experienced distress from being exposed to multiple forms of racism ranging from strangers on the street avoiding or harassing them to classmates at school or university making racist 'jokes', comments or 'banter'. Participants worried about hate crimes reported in news media and experienced anxiety from seeing pervasive racist content in online social media. Some participants responded by physically isolating themselves at home for long periods, whilst others chose to participate in activism, providing a sense of agency. Action by parents and school authorities was reported to help prevent further bullying, but respondents did not always feel able to approach these for help. Our findings put into focus the strain on young ESEA Londoners' mental health caused by COVID-related racism and jar against simplified depictions of metropolitan places, such as London, as centres of cosmopolitanism and tolerance. To promote the emotional wellbeing of young ESEAs, future policy should facilitate action by schools and universities against anti-ESEA racism and support ESEA community-building efforts to enhance resilience in the face of racism.

To deny or dismantle? Responding to victims of targeted hostility in higher education

With the increasing diversification of higher education, the volume of targeted hostility that students are subjected to on the basis of their identities or perceived ‘differences’ has increased. Typically overlooked within conventional studies of hate crime, incidents of targeted victimisation within higher education are likely to mirror, if not exceed levels exhibited within broader society. Nonetheless, with an absence of robust research evidence exploring this phenomenon, institutions’ responses are often varied, ineffective, or absent. Through a mixed-methods approach involving a survey of 565 student respondents and 39 follow-up interviews undertaken at a UK-based university, this article discusses the nature, impact, and support needs of victims of targeted hostility within higher education. The article unpacks the commonalities and distinctions between victimisation encountered within a campus environment as compared with wider society. Drawing from this study’s research evidence, we argue that while the nature of victimisation within universities holds significant parallels to equivalent encounters within wider society, there are specific challenges within higher education, which can amplify the risk, fear, and impacts of targeted hostility. These challenges require responses within higher education, which acknowledge and prioritise evidence-based, victim-led interventions for prevention, reporting, and support.

Activities of the United Nations in combating gender-based crimes

The article is dedicated to the issue of the United Nations activities in preventing and eradicating gender-based crimes. It is indicated that gender-based violence and gender-motivated killings can be classified as hate crimes motivated by intolerance towards certain groups of the population. It is noted that an important contribution to combating gender-based crimes was made by the General Assembly, the Secretary-General, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, the Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences, and other bodies, institutions and structures of the Organization. In particular, the UN General Assembly has adopted a number of resolutions in this area, including Resolution 68/191, which set out recommendations to Member States and UN bodies, agencies and institutions on measures against gender-related killing of women and girls. In pursuance of this recommendation, an open-ended intergovernmental expert group meeting was convened to review promising practices and formulate a number of practical recommendations on ways and measures to improve the effectiveness of efforts to prevent and investigate gender-related killings. It is indicated that since 2019, UNODC has been implementing the Global Programme on Strengthening Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Responses to Violence against Women, providing specific solutions that complement existing UN joint programmes and country projects. It is noted that the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women has played an important role in combating gender-based crimes. In particular, in its concluding observations on the periodic reports of States parties and in the context of relevant follow-up procedures, the Committee consistently condemns gender-based violence. In addition, the Committee provides clarification of the standards related to the elimination of such violence and the related obligations of States parties. The article also focuses on the work of the Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences in this area.

In Case You Haven't Heard…

In a poll fielded last December by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), most adults said they were anxious about their personal finances (59%) and uncertainty for the new year (54%). The Healthy Minds Monthly poll found that more than one‐third (38%) were anxious about their mental health — a trend consistent with the prior year's polling. Just under half (44%) of adults said they anticipate experiencing the same level of stress at the start of 2024 as they did at the start of 2023, while one in four said they expect more stress. The poll was fielded by Morning Consult from Dec. 2–4, 2023, among 2,202 adults. The polls run each month throughout the year, tracking information on mental health and anxiety. Over the past year, adults have remained the most anxious about inflation, a recession and gun violence. During this period, adults have consistently been least anxious about the COVID‐19 pandemic. Other topics about which Americans have been anxious have included hate speech and hate crimes, which peaked at 67% in November; and international conflict, which also peaked in November at 70%. Worries about artificial intelligence, while on the minds of many Americans, stayed relatively flat at about 55% since August 2023.

Tackling Gender-Related Violence: How Can Theory Inform International Professional Education Projects?

Is it helpful to share feminist theory with youth practitioners and is there room for it on short training courses such as in EU Action Projects? Can theoretical work on intersectionality, and the concept of gender-related violence (GRV) which grew from it, be shared in training interventions with professionals who work with children and young people? This article is based on the findings of the EU co-funded GAP Work Project that sought to improve GRV intervention and referral through training for practitioners in everyday (rather than specialist) contact with children or young people in four countries. Summarising how the project worked, and how theory informed it, including a brief account of how the concept of GRV worked in practice, guides the selection of material from the wider Project Final Report and offers a reflection on how educators used theory in the training, sometimes explicitly in the sessions. It therefore contributes our experiences to discussions about the design and implementation of education and training about violence and abuse. It concludes by sharing resources for designing and implementing training on sexual harassment, violence and hate crime, including from other recent projects that offer resources for incorporating an intersectional perspective when developing local government plans, programmes, and projects.

Countering Violent Extremism in Bangladesh: Harnessing Faith Perspectives for Peace and Progress

Bangladesh has seen recent years the growing incidence of violence extremism across the nation evidence the revival of hate crime, communalism and fundamentalism. Attack on minorities, dissidents and bloggers shows the existence of different terror outfits, though the law enforcers rejected the possibility of having interlink with global terror networks like Al-Qaeda, IS and Taliban. The religious dogmatism, intolerance, and misinterpretation mainly cause the spread of religious extremism. Government and Nongovernment organizations have taken different initiatives to combat this violent extremism. However, it fails to foil the growing incidents indicates some loopholes in the approach. The article mainly examined the different initiatives taken by the GOs, NGOs and International actors in combatting religious extremism. It has also developed a model of combatting violence extremism with especial reference to contribute in national policy formulation process. In doing so, it has examined the reports, proceedings, articles, news articles and other materials.

Endorsing Annexation? The Whitlam Government's De Jure Recognition of the Soviet Baltic States

In August 1974, the Australian Labor Party Government under Prime Minister Gough Whitlam announced it had recognised the incorporation of the Baltic states into the Soviet Union de jure. Historical writing around this diplomatic recognition is scarce and sheds little light on why the policy was enacted. Using previously unavailable archival evidence, as well as other sources including testimony from Government and public service workers, this article demonstrates that the recognition was induced primarily by Whitlam, the Department of Foreign Affairs, and Sir James Plimsoll, Australia's ambassador to the Soviet Union. These actors were motivated by varying considerations. These included an adherence to realist foreign policy principles, concerns regarding Australian–Soviet bi‐lateral relations, convictions around the legitimacy of Baltic self‐determination, and ethnic prejudice against Australians of Baltic descent.

Economic decline, ethnonationalism and civil war onset

AbstractWithin the scholarship on the causes of civil wars, GDP per capita represents a strong and robust variable. Less attention, however, is paid to the role of economic decline. When it is included at all, scholars tend to consider it only in the period just prior to the onset of war. This paper argues that the impact of economic decline has been underestimated, for in addition to its short‐term effects, evidence from case studies reveals that a particular pattern is often evident during periods of sharp economic decline, in which ethnonationalist actors ascend in political power while scapegoating minority populations. The resulting increase in interethnic tensions raises the risk of large‐scale civil violence even many years after a major recession. The cases of Yugoslavia, Ivory Coast and India show the long‐term effects of a common exogenous shock‐ the global recession of the late 1970s‐ in the form of rising ethnonationalist political actors, setting the stage for large‐scale interethnic civil violence long after the initial economic shock.

Why Don't South Asians in the U.S. Count As “Asian”?: Global and Local Factors Shaping Anti‐South Asian Racism in the United States*

In a 2020 U.S. survey, more Asian Indians than Chinese indicated that they were worried about post‐Covid‐19 hate crimes. Yet, post‐Covid violence against people of Asian background has been viewed as being directed against “Chinese‐looking” individuals. This is just one example of how South Asians are overlooked in discourses about Asian Americans. This theoretical paper provides an expansion of the racial formation framework to explain this exclusion. We demonstrate how global factors, including the foreign engagements of the United States shaped the development of the Asian American group and category, and why, even though Asian Americans can be brown, yellow, white, or black, an East Asian phenotype is viewed as denoting an “Asian” body in the United States. We also discuss how the racialization of religion shapes anti‐South Asian racism, a factor largely ignored in the literature on racial formation and Asian Americans. We end by calling for the inclusion of South Asians in Asian American literature to challenge many of the reigning paradigms regarding Asian America and anti‐Asian racism.

COVID-19, Racial Discrimination and Civic Engagement Among Filipino American and Korean American Young Adults

The COVID-19 pandemic provoked a spike in racial discrimination and hate crimes against Asians in the U.S. Although research substantiates the harmful impact of discrimination on health and mental health, limited research has examined how it influences civic engagement among Asian American young adults. Using cross-sectional data from the Midwestern U.S., this study investigated how the experience of anti-Asian racism was associated with civic engagement among Filipino Americans ( n = 260; M age = 22) and Korean Americans ( n = 340; M age = 21) during the pandemic. Results showed that Filipino American women reported more COVID-19 related racial discrimination than Filipino American men. Women, regardless of ethnicity, exhibited more civic engagement than men. Various forms of COVID-19 discrimination were associated with more civic engagement in both groups, except that assault was associated with less civic engagement among Korean Americans. The study results underscore the importance of providing tailored resources for targeted Asian American subgroups to promote continued civic engagement.

Obstacles to Inclusive Disability Hate Crime Policy Process: Targeting the Cognitively Impaired Elderly Victim Group

In England and Wales, Section 146 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 made disability hate crimes legal. This advocated for increased sentencing for perpetrators whose crimes were motivated by or demonstrated hate against a person with a handicap or a perceived disability. Currently, this additional sentencing provision is the only legal option for prosecuting disability hate crime perpetrators. This thesis explores the experience and aftermath of hate crimes committed against England’s cognitively challenged senior victim group. The cognitively challenged elderly victim group is far more likely to face bias and violence; they have a greater likelihood of re-victimisation and suffer significant suffering as a result of hate crimes. To date, the voices of cognitively deficient elderly victims and survivors have been mostly absent from scholarly research and hate crime policies. As a result, the purpose of this article is to look into present policy barriers and how the cognitively challenged senior victim group might best receive support, justice, and interventions following discriminatory hate crimes. There has been little examination and discussion of intersectionality in disability studies and hate crime research. Common ideas fail to adequately reflect the multifaceted, overlapping, and complex experiences of danger and victimisation. This paper builds on studies on hate crimes against the cognitively deficient elderly victim group. It noted the challenge of categorising individual encounters as one type of hate crime. Victims and their relatives recognised that they were targeted for a variety of reasons, including their inability to care for themselves and their age. The study contends that the present strand-based approach to hate crime conceals a multitude of cross-identity characteristics that, when combined, might raise the danger of victimisation while decreasing a victim’s chance of reporting their experiences. To address vulnerability, safety, and hate crime against disabled people in England and Wales’ criminal justice, health, social care, and refuge systems, barriers to including the cognitively impaired senior victim group in the policy process are presented, allowing for targeted suggestions and changes on relevant issues.

Leading the Horse to Water? Investigating the Impact of Ride-Hailing Services on Hate Crimes

Hate crimes, which stem from prejudiced attitudes, have a distributionally detrimental impact on societal stability. Although inter-group contacts are potentially an effective means for reducing prejudice and subsequently decreasing the number of hate crimes, scholars have recently recognized the possibility of negative contacts that might actually amplify prejudice. As a result, the question of whether intergroup contacts truly possess the ability to effectively decrease hate crime numbers remains inconclusive. In addition, prior contact research primarily relies on laboratory experiments because the establishment of intergroup contacts in a field setting is challenging. Examination of the effectiveness of intergroup contacts hence merits further investigation in a real-world setting. In this article, we propose that ride-hailing services, which naturally connect individuals from different backgrounds, offer an avenue to facilitate intergroup contacts in practice, which could potentially reduce prejudice and the volume of hate crimes. Leveraging the staggered introduction of this technology into counties in the United States, we conducted a series of analyses to empirically evaluate the contact effects in the open field. Our analysis reveals a notable decrease in the number of hate crimes (particularly a 5.75% reduction in racial hate crimes) after the introduction of ride-hailing services. These findings remained consistent across various robustness tests. Additional moderation analysis suggests that the increased interaction between different groups, facilitated by ride-hailing services, is the most likely explanation for the observed decrease in hate crimes. We further conducted an extensive survey involving real ride-hailing drivers and passengers. The results from our survey provide direct evidence that ride-hailing services create natural and constructive environments where positive interactions and mutual understanding can develop among diverse groups of people. This, in turn, helps mitigate prejudice and hate crimes within society, as observed in our analysis. This study not only extends the existing body of literature on contact theory but also sheds light on how modern technologies can play a pivotal role in curtailing hate crime, yielding both theoretical and practical implications.

The shadow of fear: hate crime victimization and stress after Charlottesville.

Recent years have witnessed an increase in highly publicized attacks targeting members of ethnoracial and religious minority groups. To date, existing research has primarily focused on the tendency for such "trigger events" to generate violent aftershocks. We argue that beyond such ripple effects, highly salient trigger events significantly increase hate-crime related stress among racial and ethnic minorities. Additionally, we explore whether these effects are limited to the group most clearly targeted, or if they "spill over" to other minoritized communities. To study reactions to hate crimes, we draw upon national survey data (N = 1,122) in combination with a natural experiment involving the Unite the Right rally and vehicle attack in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017. We employ an "unexpected event during survey" design to estimate the causal effect of the Charlottesville rally on stress about hate crimes. We first show that there was an increase in anti-Black hate crimes in the 2 weeks following the Charlottesville incident. We also find a corresponding increase in stress due to the perception of personal vulnerability to hate crimes among African-Americans. However, we do not observe a significant increase in levels of stress following the trigger event among Hispanics and Asian Americans. Our results suggest that highly publicized instances of intergroup violence can have significant impacts on stress about hate crime victimization within the target group. However, we find that this effect is short-lived, and that both violent aftershocks and the general climate of fear spurred by hate crimes may be racially bounded.

An Exploratory Analysis Examining the Relationship Between Protective and Risk Factors of Bullying and Hate Crime Victimization Within Schools

ABSTRACT Over the years, scholars have argued that there are similarities and differences between bullying and hate crimes within Americas’ schools. However, no known study has tested the claims that bullying and hate-related victimization are more similar (or different) and whether they share similar protective and/or risk factors. Utilizing the 2019 NCVS School Crime Supplement, the present study draws on several theoretical traditions to examine the protective and risk factors associated with bullying and hate-related victimization in schools. Skewed logistic regression models find that while there are some similarities between the protective and risk factors among bullying and hate-related victimization, there are also some noticeable and distinct differences. The findings fill important theoretical and empirical gaps in the bullying and hate crime literature. Further, the findings offer important policy implications as it relates to detection and prevention of bullying and hate-related victimization within schools.

How does the media contribute to the rise of hate crimes against foreign domestic helpers in Hong Kong? An unfair problem frame and agenda setting.

Hate crimes are widespread in Hong Kong society. Foreign domestic helpers working in Hong Kong also experience unfair agenda-setting by the media due to their dual economic and social disadvantages, and the media tries to portray them in a hostile social role. At the same time, the media creates negative social images of minority groups through news coverage, which leads to an increase in social hate crimes against them. This study used WiseSearch, a Chinese newspaper collection and analysis platform, to explore how Hong Kong news media use news themes and content to create a negative image of Hong Kong foreign domestic helpers in order to understand the media origins of hate crimes against Hong Kong foreign domestic helpers. Ultimately, the study found that local news media in Hong Kong are more inclined to cover the legal disputes of foreign domestic helpers in the agenda-setting process. In addition, they are more likely to associate foreign domestic helpers with "fear" rather than "rest assured." The study also found that because of the news value orientation, Hong Kong media tended to treat foreign domestic helpers as outsiders and less sympathetically when writing news stories.

Elections and Hate Crimes in the United States

Elections and Hate Crimes in the United States

Elderly transgender mental health: Global and local challenges

ABSTRACT Elderly transgender mental health has been a neglected facet of mental health for many years. The current article reviews the global and local challenges faced when catering to elderly transgender mental health. These include trauma and stigma that may be faced when seeking mental health services, in addition to the stigma of belonging to the transgender community. There are many barriers in access to health-care services that have been highlighted, and there are factors such as social discrimination, victimization, hate crime, and domestic violence that add to the barriers. Lack of proper clinics that cater to their needs, improper coverage in health-care insurance, and lack of coverage of sex-change operations also add to the existing burden. Workplace issues and their impact on mental health along with stigma and workplace discrimination are also discussed. The review tries to give an overview of the issues faced, so that clinicians treating these populations are appraised of the same.

Hate Crimes and Analyst Forecast Behaviors Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic

Hate Crimes and Analyst Forecast Behaviors Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic

«ЯЗЫК ВРАЖДЫ» КАК ФАКТОР ВОЗНИКНОВЕНИЯ СОЦИАЛЬНОГО КОНФЛИКТА

The article highlights the problem of the emergence of “hate speech” based on interethnic and interstate conflicts. The factors influencing the emergence of extremism and hate crimes are identified. The measures taken to resolve interethnic conflicts and curb their escalation at the state level, as well as models of social cohesion as a mechanism for regulating social conflicts are analyzed.

Trans people, well-being, and labor market outcomes

Acceptance of one’s gender identity and congruence between one’s gender identity and outward appearance are associated with less adverse mental health symptoms, and greater life and job satisfaction. However, trans people are subject to human rights violations, hate crimes, and experience higher unemployment and poverty than the general population. Trans people often feel that they are citizens who are not allowed to be themselves and practice their authentic identity. Many biased treatments of trans people could be attenuated if legal protections and inclusive workplace practices were in place.