Hate Crime Laws Research Articles

Gendered Hate: Exploring Gender in Hate Crime Law

Gendered Hate: Exploring Gender in Hate Crime Law

Gendered hate: exploring gender in hate crime law

Gendered hate: exploring gender in hate crime law

The Rise of Hate Speech and Hate Crime Laws in Liberal Democracies

Since the 1960s, many liberal democracies have instituted laws that penalise hate speech and hate crimes in ways that limit the freedom for racists to express themselves. This article examines the legislation and enforcement of provisions against incitement to racial hatred, Holocaust denial, and crimes motivated by racial bias in Western Europe and the United States. Viewed over time, the pace of change has more closely resembled a slow creep than a slippery slope, and the extent of legislation and enforcement has differed across countries in different domains. This article documents the trend and highlights causes for concern, yet concludes that it is possible to enact and enforce laws that limit these forms of racism without being overly inimical to freedom of expression and opinion.

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

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

Isn’t Every Crime a Hate Crime?: The Case for Hate Crime Laws

AbstractThe process to create hate crime laws in the United States has wrestled with the core issues of freedom of speech and greater harm. This article looks at the evolution of bias crime laws, culminating with President Obama’s signing of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act in 2009. The constitutionality of the laws is ‘discussed and suggestions for sociological research are made. Four elements of hate crime laws are discussed; criminality, intent, perception, and protected statuses. The logic of hate crime laws is based on the argument that hate crimes are a form of terrorism, designed to intimidate large groups of people. Readers should be familiar with the basic case for the existence of such laws.

Policing Hatred: A Case Study of an English Police Force

This article makes an important contribution to the field of hate studies by advancing the understanding of hate crime policing in the United Kingdom. The article presents an ethnographic case study on hate crime policing within a small-city police station in England. The study focused primarily on the police station’s Community Cohesion Unit (CCU), which was responsible for supporting hate crime informants, and for monitoring and assisting police officers handling hate incidents and hate crimes. The case study is mostly descriptive and exploratory in nature. Its primary objective is to provide needed insight into the inner workings of a police unit in order to obtain systematic knowledge on how hate crime laws are enforced in real-world settings. The study does not aim to present a new theory of hate crime policing; but in gathering fresh data from a new source, the study suggests potential directions for future empirical work and theoretical inquiry.

Hate Crime Laws: Punishment to Fit the Crime: A response to Jesse Larner

Jesse Larner sounds a shrill alarm in his broadside against hate crime laws ("Hate Crime/Thought Crime," Spring 2010), raising a variety of seemingly dire libertarian, First Amendment, and slippery-slope arguments. Yet, despite the fact that federal and state hate crime laws have been on the books for forty years, he fails to illustrate his parade of horribles with a single actual case to demonstrate the kind of "policing of mind and tongue" about which he frets. Larner recognizes that hate crimes are a "real problem" and asks many of the right questions about the purpose and application of these laws. But Larner's questions have been thoroughly examined—and answered—by police officials and prosecutors who have enforced them and by dozens of court decisions interpreting these laws. Larner is wrong about the impact of hate violence, the policy purposes of hate crime laws, and their constitutionality.

Sexual Orientation-Based Hate Crimes on Campus: The Impact of Policy on Reporting Rates

Federal Bureau of Investigation data for the last 10 years have tracked sexual orientation-based hate crimes on university and college campuses. Many states have passed hate crime laws that include sexual orientation and laws that mandate law enforcement hate crime training. At the same time, many campuses have amended their institutional antidiscrimination policies to include sexual orientation. This article reports on a study that examined the impact of these three types of policies and how they affect hate crime reporting rates. Results indicated that institutions located in states with hate crime laws that include hate crimes, with mandated law enforcement training that includes hate crime content, and with their own institutional policy, report the highest rates of sexual orientation-based hate crimes. Given prior research findings that hate crimes are severely underreported, the author discusses the implications for state and institutional commitment on hate crime reporting rates.

Victim Blame in a Hate Crime Motivated by Sexual Orientation

A jury simulation paradigm was employed for two studies exploring levels of victim blame in a case of bias-motivated assault based on sexual orientation. In the first study, participants were grouped according to their score on the Index of Homophobia (IHP) scale as either reporting high or low support for gay and lesbian community members. The label of the crime (i.e., bias-motivated assault versus first-degree assault) as well as the gender of the victim were systematically varied. Results indicated that attributions of blame against the victim varied as a function of participants' attitudes toward minority sexual orientation. As extra-legal factors likely contribute to victim blame in these cases, the second study explored such factors as location and “provocation.” Jurors in the second study read a transcript depicting an attack on a gay man by a man in either a local bar (i.e., not a gay bar) or a gay bar. Within location conditions, jurors were presented with either “provocation” by the victim (i.e., asking the perpetrator to dance and putting his arm around him) or alternatively no provocation was presented. Results revealed significant differences of victim blame depending on condition. Participants in both the local bar and provocation present conditions were more likely to blame the victim for the attack than those in the gay bar or provocation-absent conditions. Implications for hate crime law and attribution theory within the courtroom are discussed.

Firebombs and Ferguson

This short work responds to the arguments made by Gail Mason in her article in this issue on hate crime laws and the decision of Dunn v R. This article adds one or two extra ideas for reflection and argues that the balance was struck correctly in Dunn v R.

Prejudice and Paedophilia in Hate Crime Laws:Dunn v R

This article considers the recent case of Dunn v R where it was decided by the NSW Supreme Court that sentence aggravation provisions for ‘hate crimes’ apply to paedophiles. This controversial decision is analysed against the backdrop of hate crime laws in Australian jurisdictions. The author argues that the decision in Dunn does little to further the social justice ideals of hate crime laws as a whole.

Scotland's approach to hate crime law

Hate crime law in Scotland is distinct. The law was extended to cover religious hate crime in 2003, and has been extended to cover disability, sexual orientation and transgender identity by the Offences (Aggravation by Prejudice) (Scotland) Act 2009 (Scottish Parliament, 2009a). The coverage of transgender identity in relation to the law is unique in Europe. The legislation was developed through a consultative process that led to consensus on the exclusion of similar provisions for age and gender crime. Scotland has not extended the offence of stirring up racial hatred to other forms of hatred. Hate crime prosecution rates are significantly higher in Scotland, and much higher for religious crime, in comparison with England and Wales.

Contemporary Hate Crimes, Law Enforcement, and the Legacy of Racial Violence

This article investigates the association between past lynchings (1882 to 1930) and contemporary law enforcement responses to hate crimes in the United States. While prior research indicates a positive correlation between past levels of lynching and current social control practices against minority groups, we posit an inverse relationship for facets of social control that are protective of minorities. Specifically, we hypothesize that contemporary hate crime policing and prosecution will be less vigorous where lynching was more prevalent prior to 1930. Analyses show that levels of past lynching are associated with three outcome variables germane to hate crime policing and prosecution, but the effect of lynching is partly contingent on the presence of a minority group threat. That is, past lynching combined with a sizeable black population largely suppresses (1) police compliance with federal hate crime law, (2) police reports of hate crimes that target blacks, and in some analyses (3) the likelihood of prosecuting a hate crime case. Our findings have implications for research on law and intergroup conflict, historical continuity in the exercise of state social control, and theories that emphasize minority group threat.

Oppression by Scientific Method: The Use of Science to “Other” Sexual Minorities

Lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) civil rights have become a major focus of the legislative agenda of a variety of organizations in support of and in opposition to those rights. This growing interest in LGB civil rights can be seen through the increasing news reports and political discussions concerning marriage equality, the addition of sexual orientation as a protected class to hate crime laws and workplace nondiscrimination legislation, the elimination of the military’s “don’t ask don’t tell” policy, and the right of LGB people to adopt children. As these issues move to the forefront, different groups attempt to use scientific reports, studies, and perspectives as one way to promote their viewpoints.

The Emergence, Content, and Institutionalization of Hate Crime Law: How a Diverse Policy Community Produced a Modern Legal Fact

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.

The Context of Minority Group Threat: Race, Institutions, and Complying with Hate Crime Law

A wealth of research suggests a direct association between minority group size and government social control, such as arrest or imprisonment rates. Prior work in this vein, however, gives scant attention to (1) types of law that explicitly address intergroup conflict and (2) regional variation in the salience of minority group threat. At the same time, research on organizational responses to law indicates that institutional linkages to legal environments dictate policy innovation and compliance, yet the relevance of such linkages for law enforcement agencies is less clear. The present research investigates these themes by focusing on law enforcement responses to hate crime in the United States. Data from a sample of large municipal and county policing agencies and their degree of compliance with the federal Hate Crimes Statistics Act are analyzed. Main effects models show that compliance with federal hate crime law is less likely in places with larger black populations, an intriguing finding in light of extant work suggesting that both formal social control and race-based hate crime offending are typically more prevalent where more blacks reside. This effect of black population size on compliance with hate crime law, however, is contingent on region. A positive correlation in the Northeast contrasts with an inverse association in the South. The findings also suggest that organizational facets of law enforcement agencies, notably their engagement in community policing, are associated with compliance. The results elaborate and qualify group threat explanations of government social control and contribute to a burgeoning literature on the utility of organizational theory in the realm of law enforcement.

Hated Identities: Queers and Canadian Anti-hate Legislation

Drawing on queer theory and post-structuralism, this article explores two “gay bashings,” the murders of Alain Brousseau and Aaron Webster. In both cases, we argue that the application of anti-hate crime legislation reveals the troubling nature of attempts to legally fix sexual identities. The law imagines gayness to be innate and obvious. These cases show that sexual identity is fluid and contingent. Our study also shows that, through the application of hate-crime law, sexual identification is not necessarily self-determined. Politicized communities, legal actors, assailants, and media all participate in naming someone's “gayness.”

The Reconstitution of Law in Local Settings: Agency Discretion, Ambiguity, and a Surplus of Law in the Policing of Hate Crime

An important yet poorly understood function of law enforcement organizations is the role they play in distilling and transmitting the meaning of legal rules to frontline law enforcement officers and their local communities. In this study, we examine how police and sheriff's agencies in California collectively make sense of state hate crime laws. To do so, we gathered formal policy documents called “hate crime general orders” from all 397 police and sheriff's departments in the state and conducted interviews with law enforcement officials to determine the aggregate patterns of local agencies' responses to higher law. We also construct a “genealogy of law” to locate the sources of the definitions of hate crime used in agency policies. Despite a common set of state criminal laws, we find significant variation in how hate crime is defined in these documents, which we attribute to the discretion local law enforcement agencies possess, the ambiguity of law, and the surplus of legal definitions of hate crime available in the larger environment to which law enforcement must respond. Some law enforcement agencies take their cue from other agencies, some follow statewide guidelines, and others are oriented toward gaining legitimacy from national professional bodies or groups within their own community. The social mechanisms that produce the observed clustering patterns in terms of approach to hate crime law are mimetic (copying another department), normative (driven by professional standards about training and community social movement pressure), and actuarial (affected by the demands of the crime data collection system). Together these findings paint a picture of policing organizations as mediators between law-on-the-books and law-in-action that are embedded in interorganizational networks with other departments, state and federal agencies, professional bodies, national social movement organizations, and local community groups. The implications of an interorganizational field perspective on law enforcement and implementation are discussed in relation to existing sociolegal research on policing, regulation, and recent neo-institutional scholarship on law.

Institutionalizing Collective Memories of Hate: Law and Law Enforcement in Germany and the United States

The institutionalization of distinct collective memories of hate and cultural traumas as law and bureaucracy is examined comparatively for the case of hate crime law. A dehistoricized focus on individual victimization and an avoidance of major episodes of domestic atrocities in the United States contrast with a focus on the Holocaust, typically in the context of the destruction of the democratic state, in Germany. Such differences, in combination with specifics of state organization and exposure to global scripts, help explain particularities of law and law enforcement along dimensions such as internationalization, coupling of minority and democracy protection, focus on individual versus group rights, and specialization of control agencies.

Transgender Patients: Implications for Emergency Department Policy and Practice

August 2005 31:4 young woman trauma patient has arrived in the A department (ED). When her clothes are cut off, her breasts and male genitalia are apparent. Will the care she receives be inf luenced by this discovery? Ideally, gender expression and identity should not make a difference in health providers’ care delivery. But in reality, negative attitudes and lack of knowledge can compromise the care of transgender (TG) patients. What if she were your child? Would you want her to be treated, as any other patient, with dignity and respect? What if she is subjected to ridicule and shame, with inappropriate examinations or inadequate treatment? ‘‘Transgender’’ is an umbrella term for several distinct but related groups, which include cross-dressers, gendervariant individuals, and transsexuals (TS). Transsexuals often express the feeling of being ‘‘trapped inside the wrong body,’’ and they may undergo medical and surgical treatments (sexual reassignment/transition) to align their outer appearance with their gender identity. ‘‘Gender identity’’ refers to the internal sense of feeling male or female, regardless of biologic sex, and it may be firmly expressed by even very young children. Some TG persons do not completely identify with either gender. Gender expression and gender identity are unrelated to sexual orientation. Transgender people may define themselves as heterosexual, gay, lesbian, or bisexual. Public policy and legislation affecting TG status and rights vary. To date, six states, 62 cities, and 10 counties have passed laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression. Eight states have transgenderinclusive hate crime laws. However, most health insurance policies specifically exclude all procedures related to being TS. In fact, transsexual people are routinely denied health policy coverage solely because they are TS. Even those who