Hate Crime Offenders Research Articles

Juvenile Social Media Hate Crime and Community Safety: Indonesia’s Constitutional Overview and Restorative Justice Challenges

This study aims to analyze the emerging juvenile criminal trend within social media usage. Utilizing normative legal research method, this study focuses on the potentials and challenges of employing restorative justice for juvenile hate crime offenders. Analysis supported by statutory approach found that Indonesia normatively supports youth development but doesn’t specifically connect the restorative justice approach with the concept of community safety. Through the statutory approach, this study also found that there’s no recognition on the different nature of hate crimes, especially among youth, which could have different and unique negative effects on community safety. These findings serve the purpose of expanding the literature and providing deeper insights for the development of legal framework to support the application of restorative justice approach in Indonesia, by expanding it to include concept of community safety.

The Consequences of Hate Crime Victimization: Considering Prejudicial Attitudes as an Outcome of Interracial Bias-Motivated Conflict

Objectives: While extant research has largely framed prejudicial attitudes as a precursor to hate crime offending, the current research considers the possibility that negative outgroup attitudes may also be an important consequence of hate crime victimization as well. Methods: Using survey data from 3,183 respondents across the United States, this research employs a series of regression models to examine the relationship between hate crime victimization and three different types of prejudicial attitudes: anti-Asian xenophobia, anti-Hispanic xenophobia, and anti-Black prejudice. Results: Results indicate that hate crime victimization is significantly and positively associated with all three prejudicial attitudes, such that those who experienced a hate crime are more likely to report higher levels of anti-Asian xenophobia ( b = .455; p < .001), anti-Hispanic xenophobia ( b = .408; p < .001), and anti-Black prejudice ( b = .360; p < .001). Results also indicate that these patterns are both offender race-specific and stronger for more recent victimization, compared to less recent victimization. Conclusions: When interpreting these results within a pattern matching framework, we argue that they suggest important initial evidence that prejudice may not be just a precursor to hate crime offending, but also a possible consequence of hate crime victimization, thus implying a potentially cyclical relationship between intergroup offending and victimization that should be the subject of future research.

Sociodemographic and psycho social Differences Between Hate Crime Offenders and Other Non-Bias-Motivated Criminals: Implications for Prison Rehabilitation Programs.

Hate crimes have severe consequences for the victims and for all members of the victim's social category. Prison programs must address the criminogenic needs of the participants, especially in this kind of crime, in order to prevent recidivism. This study seeks to understand the role of prejudice and aggression in the execution of hate crimes, in order to design effective interventions for hate crime offenders. Sociodemographic, criminological, and psychosocial variables were assessed in a sample of 33 hate crime offenders sentenced to prison or community service and in a group of 38 non-bias-motivated criminals (n = 71). The individuals convicted of hate crimes have higher reactive and proactive aggression, subtle prejudice, homophobia, and social dominance orientation. The implications of these results for the Penitentiary Administration programs will be discussed.

The Limits of Vulnerability: Arguments Against the Inclusion of Sex Workers Within Hate Crime Policy in England and Wales

On 23rd September 2020, the Law Commission launched their Hate Crime consultation paper, which suggested including ‘sex worker’ as a protected characteristic when considering hate motivated violence. The inclusion of sex workers in policing hate crime policy had already been implemented in Merseyside in 2002, and Yorkshire in 2017 (Sanders and Campbell, 2020). From a policing perspective, this approach has its advantages: it encourages a more coordinated approach to crimes against sex workers, as well as having an educative and awareness raising function around the discrimination they face (Sanders and Campbell, 2020; Chakoraborti and Garland, 2012). However, those who advocate for this approach caution that whilst it is an important first step to address crimes against sex workers, it can only go so far in a legal framework where sex work is still criminalised (Campbell, 2019; Campbell, 2014; Platt et al., 2018). This article challenges the idea that increased hate crime legislation will reduce violence against sex workers, suggesting that it may in fact put sex workers in even greater harm by increasing their interaction with the police. We emphasise that there is limited evidence that higher sentences deter hate crime offenders, and it is almost impossible to assess whether this type of legislation even provides the educative function it claims to. This paper argues that full decriminalisation of sex work is the most effective first step to responding to violence against sex workers, rather than increased legislation and tougher sentencing (CPS, 2019). In doing so, we add to the growing body of literature evidencing how full decriminalisation increases safety of sex workers. We also aim to contribute to a broader understanding that harsher sentencing and increased carceral responses do not best protect vulnerable communities of any sort.

Women who commit hate-motivated violence: Advancing a gendered understanding of hate crime

Prior research has noted that women have played an important role in both organized hate groups and organized racial violence. Most hate crimes, however, are not committed by hate groups and very little research has examined the role of women in more common, otherwise unorganized, forms of bias-motivated violence. This omission has resulted in a disconnect between our understanding of women's involvement in organized bigotry relative to more common forms of bias-motivated violence. Following this, the current research explicitly considers the role of women in hate-motivated violence using data from the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), 2010–2016. Results demonstrate that, while women are indeed less likely to be involved in bias-motivated violence relative to men, there is significant variation in this pattern, such that women are more likely to be involved in racially motivated violence than other offenses, but especially unlikely to be involved in violence motivated by sexual orientation bias. Further, results from multinomial logistic regression analyses indicate significant differences in incident characteristics according to both female involvement and bias motivation, suggesting that the nature of violence varies by both gender and bias motivation. The results suggest the importance of considering gendered differences in hate crime offending.

Ageism as a Hate Crime: The Case for Extending Aggravated Offences to Protect Age Groups

Abstract This article argues that hate crime laws in England and Wales should be extended to protect age groups by aggravating offences that are based on or motivated by hostility to age groups. I critically assess the following arguments for this: that age-related hate crime can impose greater psychological distress than equivalent non-hate crime and this justifies the increased punishments that aggravated offences offer; that hate crime laws can justifiably protect older people because older people are relatively vulnerable to crime; that extending aggravated offences to protect age groups can justifiably punish hate crime offenders for their increased culpability in contributing to marginalisation of age groups; and creating distinct aggravated offences for age-hostile crimes has symbolic value to reflect the grave moral wrong of these crimes and to communicate that the state is committed to eradicating discrimination against age groups.

Addressing Hate Crime in New Zealand: A Separate Offence?

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.

Gay Visibility and Disorganized and Strained Communities: A Community-Level Analysis of Anti-Gay Hate Crime in New York City.

Recent years have seen increased attention to the problem of hate crime, including such crime motivated by anti-gay bias. Although there is a growing body of research regarding the context of hate crime offending, there is a relative dearth of work investigating the community-level context of anti-gay hate crime. The current study investigates the community-level determinants of anti-gay hate crime in New York City from 2006 to 2010, using data obtained from the New York Police Department (NYPD)'s Hate Crimes Task Force (HCTF), one of the nation's leading hate crime police units. Using a framework drawing on group conflict and criminological theories, the current study examines anti-gay hate crime as an outcome of gay visibility, social disorganization, and economic strain. It is hypothesized that greater gay visibility, as well as social disorganization and poor and worsening economic conditions over time will be associated with increases in anti-gay hate crime. Results show that gay demographics, measured by static visibility and increasing gay populations over time, are shown to consistently predict higher levels of anti-gay hate crime. Adding to the generally mixed findings on the role of economic conditions in explaining hate crime, this study also finds that anti-gay hate crime occurs in more disadvantaged communities and communities marked by poorer economic conditions. The findings show anti-gay hate crime to be an outcome of gay visibility, disadvantage, and poor economic conditions, indicating that anti-gay crime may be an angry response to the strains present in the community. The study concludes with a discussion of the findings and implications for policy makers and practitioners.

Hatred Simmering in the Melting Pot: An Analysis of Hate Crime in New York City, 1995–2010

Hate crime inflicts a variety of harms on victims, communities, as well as society at large. Scholars have long sought to understand the motivations and conditions behind hate crime offending. Green and his colleagues conducted the classic neighborhood studies examining the conditions that foster hate crime. Using data on hate crime in New York City from 1995 to 2010 from the New York Police Department’s Hate Crimes Task Force, the current study replicates and extends Green and colleagues’ neighborhood studies, investigating whether their findings hold true over an extended period of time in New York City as the city underwent major demographic changes. Using a group conflict framework, the current study extends prior work testing hypotheses derived from defended neighborhoods, social disorganization, and strain theories to explain ethnoracial hate crime.

The criminal careers of those imprisoned for hate crime in the UK

Hate crime research has increased, but there are very few studies examining hate crime offenders. It is, therefore, difficult to determine to what extent those who perpetrate this offence might be different from those who have not committed hate crime. This study is the first to provide an account of the demographics and criminal histories of those serving time in prison for committing a hate crime. It is based on a large complete population of offenders in the UK. Hate crime offenders released from prison were found to have prolific criminal careers, having committed a wide range and large number of different types of offences. When compared with those who committed a general (non-hate) violent offence, violent hate crime offenders were significantly older and were considerably more prolific in their previous offending. Violent hate crime appeared quantitatively, as opposed to qualitatively, different from violent non-hate crime, but this was less clearly true when those who had committed public order hate crime were compared with other public order offenders. Interventions to reduce the later offending of violent hate crime offenders should be based on the effective interventions that exist for violent offenders, but should take into account knowledge about the surprisingly prolific criminal careers of hate crime offenders.

Working with hate crime offenders

This paper discusses the experience of the ADAPT programme for perpetrators of racially motivated offences. It argues that lessons can be drawn from the content of the programme and its evaluation that are particularly relevant in a context in which xenophobic resentment has acquired an air of political legitimacy, following the EU referendum in Britain and the election of Donald Trump. The paper suggests the kinds of evaluation of such programmes which may be helpful, and that the current political context may require practitioners not only to work with the immediate issues of offending but to become involved more broadly in educational and political interventions.

Preventing Hate Crime

This report provides a comprehensive review of interventions that are currently being used to combat hate crime in England and Wales. The report complements another piece of work which was commissioned by the Equality and Human Rights Commission on the causes and motivations of hate crime and we recommend that both of these reports be read together (Walters, Brown and Wiedlitzka 2016). We have divided the report into three parts, the first and second examine the evidence-base for criminalisation, policing, and criminal justice and education-based interventions aimed at tackling hate. Here we pinpoint a number of emerging practices, using case studies, to highlight the ways in which hate-based incidents can be effectively challenged. We note also the limitations in research and offer recommendations for better evidence gathering to support the improved use of such practices. The third part of this report focuses on barriers to the effective management of criminal justice interventions for hate crime. In this final part of the report we set out a list of recommendations to enhance the effective management of hate crime offenders and the prevention of hate crime more generally. These recommendations are based on extensive consultations with research, policy and practitioner experts working in the area of hate crime.

Youth hate crime offending: the role of strain, social control and self-control theories

Much of the existing research on hate crime focuses on the perspective of victims, while relatively little is known of the offenders. This study examines the prevalence of hate-motivated offending in the form of assaults and bullying, and variables that may explain some of the influences for such behaviour. It compares hate-motivated offenders to both non-offenders and offenders committing non-hate-motivated acts. Our data are based on a nationally representative youth survey collected in 2012 (n = 4,855) from Finnish students attending ninth grade (ages 15–16). It relies on three central theories in criminology: strain, social control and self-control theories. Frequent parental fighting, low parental supervision, low social control and male gender were significant factors in explaining hate crime offending. Our results suggest that the three criminological theories are relevant in the analysis of hate crime offending among Finnish youth.

Hate crimes hurt some more than others: implications for the just sentencing of offenders.

An accumulation of research evidence indicates that hate crimes are more serious than similar but otherwise motivated crimes in respect of the greater post-victimization distress for victims. Such evidence has been used by advocates of hate crime laws to justify greater penalties for hate crime offenders. However, in focusing on the commonalities of the post-victimization impacts inflicted by hate crimes, the research evidence to date has obscured the diversity of reactions between victims. Consequently, this article expands the evidence by illuminating the variation in reported victim impacts. The analysis presented uses data from the Crime Survey for England and Wales on racially motivated crime and reveals that not all victims report being affected by hate crime, not all victims are affected the same way, and some victims of racially motivated crime report less of an emotional impact than some victims of equivalent but otherwise motivated crimes. It is reasoned that in any individual case of hate crime the motivating sentiments of the offender provide an unreliable indicator of the harms inflicted on the victim. Therefore, a blanket uplift in penalty in every case which rests on the offender's motivations cannot be justified if the justification for sentence uplift is to give offenders their just deserts for the harms they inflict. Instead, the justification must rest on the culpability of the offender for the harms they may or may not actually inflict. Just as there is variation in victim impacts, there will be variation in offender culpability: Discretion and flexibility in sentencing is therefore necessary to ensure justice for offenders.

From Thrill to Defensive Hate Crimes: The Impact of September 11, 2001

For a period of time following the original usage of the term “hate crimes” in the late 1980s, there existed a gap in the literature of criminology and social science generally regarding important factors underlying the motivation of hate crime offenders. Researchers recognized that certain criminal behavior had its basis in hostility toward people who were different in socially significant ways from the perpetrator. Yet little was systematically articulated to connect various hate crimes with relevant sociological and social psychological explanatory variables. As a result, those practitioners who deal with hate crimes on a daily basis—for example, prosecu- tors and law enforcement personnel—were at a loss to identify the distinguishing characteristics of hate-motivated offenses. Recognizing this gap in the literature, my colleague Jack McDevitt and I sought to establish an exhaustive typology of offender motivations and to elucidate the range of factors associated with these motives.

Historical Events and Spaces of Hate: Hate Crimes against Arabs and Muslims in Post-9/11 America

This research investigates variation in hate crime offending against Arabs and Muslims across U.S. counties in the months before and after September 11, 2001. Four questions are of particular interest. First, what were the determinants of anti-Arab and Muslim hate crimes prior to 9/11? Second, in what social contexts were Arabs and Muslims at greatest risk of victimization? Third, to what extent did hate crimes against these groups increase after the terrorist attacks? And last, did the predictors of hate crimes against Arabs and Muslims change appreciably after 9/11? Findings show that hate crimes targeting Arabs and Muslims increased dramatically in the months following 9/11, although the structural determinants and geographic concentration of these crimes remained largely consistent after the attacks. Negative binomial regression results further suggest that counties with larger concentrations of Arabs and Muslims have higher incidents of such hate crimes, which likely reflects the availability of targets for this type of offending. At the same time, the likelihood of victimization for a given Arab or Muslim person is lowest in counties where the percent Arab or percent Muslim is highest, in line with a power-differential perspective on discrimination and intergroup violence. The findings imply that terrorist attacks may indeed incite retaliation and set off a wave of hate crime offending, but the location of these crimes is likely to remain consistent after a galvanizing event.

Hate crimes: v.1: Understanding and defining hate crime; v.2: The consequences of hate crime; v.3: The victims of hate crime; v.4: Hate crime offenders; v.5: Responding to hate crime

Hate crimes: v.1: Understanding and defining hate crime; v.2: The consequences of hate crime; v.3: The victims of hate crime; v.4: Hate crime offenders; v.5: Responding to hate crime

Criminal Law and the Routine Activity of ‘Hate Crime’

If our knowledge about so called ‘hate crime’ was confined to what we read in the national newspapers or see on the television news then the impression that we would be most likely left with is that hate crime offenders are out-and-out bigots, hate-fuelled individuals who subscribe to racist, homophobic, and other bigoted views who, in exercising their extreme hatred target their victims in premeditated violent attacks. Whilst many such attacks have occurred, the data on incidents, albeit limited, suggests instead that they are commonly committed by ‘ordinary’ people in the context of their ‘everyday’ lives. Considering the everyday circumstances in which incidents occur, this paper argues that by imposing penalty enhancement for ‘hate crime’ the criminal law assumes a significant symbolic role as a cue against transgression on the part of potential offenders.

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.

The Cronulla riots: exposing the problem with Australia's Anti-vilification laws

The hate crime legislation is introduced in the UK and US to send a strong message to the community that serious racism leading to violence will not be tolerated in a democratic society but such laws are not implemented in Australia because of which violence motivated by racial and ethnic hatred in the Sydney beach town of Cronulla is considered under standard criminal laws. Hate crime legislation must be introduced by Parliament which includes all violent acts which are motivated by racism, ethnic or religious hatred in order to enable the police and the courts to successfully prosecute those who partake in acts such as those carried out in Cronulla as hate crime offenders.