Hate Crime

Concepts, Policy, Future Directions

Neil Chakraborti

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351564090
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Hate crime has become an increasingly familiar term in recent times as problems of bigotry and prejudice continue to pose complex challenges for societies across the world. Although greater recognition is now afforded to hate crimes and their associated harms, the problem is still widespread and many key questions remain unanswered. Are we doing enough to protect vulnerable members of society? Are we doing enough to address the offending behaviour of hate crime perpetrators? Are there better ways of understanding and responding to hate crime?

This book brings together contributions from leading experts in the field to address these and other contested issues in this fascinating and often controversial subject area. Drawing upon innovative work being undertaken nationally and internationally, the book offers fresh ideas on hate crime scholarship and policy and in so doing enables readers to re-evaluate the concept of hate crime in the light of fresh research, theory and policy.

It provides much-needed ways of taking the 'hate debate' forward as well as offering practical suggestions for developing both scholarship and policy in a more progressive manner.

Part One
Developing Understandings of Hate Crime

Chapter 1
The more things change ... post-9/11 trends in hate crime scholarship

Barbara Perry

In 2002 I presented an inaugural hate crime conference keynote address (Perry 2002), which was later published as ‘Where do we go from here? Future directions in hate crime scholarship’ (Perry 2003a). The paper was offered as a ‘synopsis of what we don’t know about hate crime’. I return to my musings from 2002 to see how far we have come since that time. I assess recent theoretical and empirical contributions that have emerged in the opening decade of the twenty-first century. The post-9/11 era has seen dramatic shifts in how we conceptualise and respond to hate crime, although many areas of enquiry remain underdeveloped. I tease out some of the scholarly advances, while also pointing out themes in need of further exploration.

A great deal has changed since that paper was delivered, and many factors conducive to hate crime have emerged or been exacerbated in the intervening years. Terrorists struck again, most notably in London and Madrid. Far right political parties have gained substantial ground across Europe. The global economy has slumped into a devastating recession, leaving millions unemployed and bitter. The implications of these processes for hate crime are thus frequent themes in the emerging literature: the effects of the 9/11 attacks on anti-Muslim violence, the relationships between politics, culture and hate crime, the role of economic uncertainty on xenophobic violence – all are thus among the issues under the magnifying glass.

In preparation for this chapter, I conducted an extensive online search of journals and texts addressing hate crime. In the end, I had before me over 120 pages that contained over 500 abstracts, which I then traced back to the source. Clearly, I didn’t read all 500 pieces in detail, but only closely enough to discern kernels at the core of each. I was able to identify four broad categories dominating the literature: making sense of hate crime; ‘categories’ of victimisation; hate groups; and responding to hate crime. In what follows, I try to offer a concise overview of the themes attendant with each of these categories. I conclude with a brief discussion of two new venues that have sought to pull together what might be called the field of hate studies.

It should be noted at the outset that, in addition to the array of journal articles, a number of books related to the theme of hate crime have also been published in the intervening years. In particular, several anthologies that bring together diverse streams and perspectives have contributed to our knowledge of the issue at hand. Among these are Chakraborti and Garland (2009), Gerstenfeld (2004), Iganski (2002), Perry (2003b), Prum et al. (2007) and Winterdyk and Antonopoulos (2008). Each of these is well worth a peek. They contain analyses by leading scholars that range from the local to the global, the mundane to the extreme, the historical to the contemporary.

Making sense of hate crime

When I was writing in 2002, I was most disturbed by the appalling lack of efforts to theorise hate crime in any sophisticated way. That, fortunately, has changed dramatically in the intervening years. There have been a number of very strong pieces that have advanced our conceptual understanding of the dynamics of hate crime. Many of these have drawn on psychological constructs, highlighting the individual motivations for engaging in such violence. Craig (2002) and Sullaway (2004) have both presented useful overviews of the ways in which psychology has contributed to our understanding. Hamer (2006), for example, draws on psychoanalytic notions of transference and projection to account for racialised violence specifically. The great value of this literature is that it typically lays out concrete clinical interventions intended to reduce hate crime.

Social theory has also advanced the field of hate studies. Lyons (2007, 2008), for example, has published several tests of community-based theoretical models, including social disorganisation and defended communities. Blazak (2001, 2004) has made very good use of strain theory and propaganda theories to ‘make sense’ of skinheads, especially. In 2005, Blee published an article entitled ‘“Racial violence in the United States’. This deceptively simple title disguises a very strong analysis that provides ‘a more rigorous exploration of the communicative, interpretive, and contextual nature of racial violence’. Increasingly, scholars are turning to cultural studies – especially identity theories – to account for hate crime. This has been especially the case for LGBT studies (Dunbar 2006), but also with respect to race and ethnic studies (Hoover and Johnson 2003/2004; Tomsen 2006).

One approach that I find especially intriguing draws upon cultural geography. Flint (2004a) has made an explicit foray into the field with the publication of an innovative collection of essays specifically devoted to the geography of hatred and intolerance. Here contributors offer varied explorations of the ways in which organised and informal groups assert their territorial claims in efforts to purge their neighbourhoods, cities, regions or nation of the encroaching threats represented by people of colour and gay men and lesbians in particular. The authors share the recognition that ‘imperatives of the territorial defense of places and spaces result in the adoption of exclusionary visions and practices’ (Flint 2004b: 9).

In the same year, Neil Chakraborti and Jon Garland (2004) published another related anthology, entitled Rural Racism. Here we see theoretical approaches to the ‘geography of hate’ as played out in rural contexts. The authors explore the dynamics of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, or those who are ‘out of place’ in the historically and prototypically white landscape. Careful attention is paid to the ways in which ‘community’ has come to be defined in rural settings, and how this subsequently excludes racial and ethnic minorities in cultural, social and political contexts.

One of the most exciting hallmarks of recent hate crime scholarship has been the apparent maturation of empirical approaches within the field. There is an astounding diversity of methodologies currently being applied in efforts to more fully document and comprehend the problem. Sadly there are still what I would consider to be too many projects grounding their analyses in official data. I am often asked to review such papers, and generally reject them on the basis that they are ‘fatally flawed’ to the extent that they rely – uncritically – on police data and Uniform Crime Reports. Nonetheless, these are slowly being supplanted by more rigorous quantitative projects and more insightful qualitative projects.

Psychologists have contributed to our knowledge in part through survey research on the immediate effects of hate crime on victims (Herek et al. 2002; Parks and Woodson 2002). Several experimental design studies have also emerged, most notably those exploring perceptions of hate crime. Some of these have revolved around how members of vulnerable communities interpret and react to hypothetical accounts of animus-motivated violence. The intent here is generally to understand the differential assessment of the seriousness of hate crime across groups. Not surprisingly, this literature tends to find that communities historically vulnerable to hate crime – Asians, Jews, sexual minorities and others – are more likely to classify relevant scenarios as hate crime, and to suggest harsher penalties (Boeckmann and Liew 2002; Lee et al. 2007).

A related set of experimental studies has looked at how the features of a scenario shape perceptions. Such elements as the race of the perpetrator and victim or the severity of the act seem to shape whether an event is thought to constitute a hate crime, as well as sentencing responses (Cowan and Mettrick 2002; Saucier et al. 2008). An intriguing finding is emerging in some of this literature. For example, for her study of student perceptions of hate crime, Miller (2001) hypothesised that students of criminal justice would understand the concept better than other students and thus be more likely to identify incidents as hate crime. She was proven wrong, in that these students were less likely to define relevant scenarios as hate crime. Along similar lines, Olivero and Rodrigo (2001) studied law enforcement students and found that they were more homophobic than students from other majors, and thus less sympathetic to hate crime victims. Findings such as these raise serious questions about whether the relatively well-educated next generation of criminal justice practitioners will be any more effective in responding to hate crime than their peers. Indeed, without concentrated training in this area, they are likely to reproduce the culture of apathy and neglect.

Alongside the large body of quantitative approaches are myriad qualitative explorations. Content analysis has been effectively applied to the study of hate groups, examining such elements as hate music (Grascia 2003), and especially internet websites (Stern 2001/2002; Gerstenfeld et al. 2003; Weatherby and Scoggins 2005/2006). The resultant scholarship has provided valuable insight into the cultivation of a sympathetic audience and enhanced membership.

Surprisingly few scholars have used interview or focus group approaches in spite of the potential these have for providing rich and nuanced data. Among the hundreds of pieces I reviewed for this chapter, only a handful employed either or both of these techniques. I made extensive use of both in my interviews with Native Americans, interviewing nearly 300 participants and conducting focus groups in each community I visited (Perry 2008). Sandra Wachholz’s (2005) innovative study on violence against homeless people was grounded in 30 in-depth interviews, which revealed that hate crime in this context – like so many others – was intended to define ‘their place’. Generally, interview participants have been victims, or at least potential victims. Even fewer studies – quantitative or qualitative – focus on perpetrators. Brian Byers’ work on attacks against the Amish (Byers and Crider 2002) is an interesting exception, in that the analysis is based on the narratives of offenders. Also interesting are the few studies in which former members of white supremacist groups have shared their stories with researchers, shedding valuable light on recruitment, organisational structure, and exiting (Gadd 2006). Nonetheless, studies of this side of the victim–offender equation are rare, meaning that much of our conceptualisation of offender motives remains speculative.

Another approach that lends deeper insight into the dynamics of hate crime is the case study, especially as they are used in the consideration of sensational incidents (Mason 2007). The technique is important both for humanising the victims and for putting the incidents into context. For the most part, these treatments of specific incidents of hate crime are not simply descriptive, but provide valuable analysis and insight into the broader social, cultural and political contexts in which they occur, such that they allow us to understand the enabling environment that allows hate crimes to persist. For example, a number of articles examining the Australian Cronulla Beach ‘race riots’ were published in 2006 and 2007. These bring to the fore the intersecting impacts of race (Hartley and Green 2006), gender (Ho 2007), moral panics (Lattas 2007), and the politics of multiculturalism (Halafoff 2006) on social and cultural relations in that country. More so than any other similar event, Cronulla laid bare the role of state rhetoric and practice in shaping a ‘culture of hate’ (Poynting 2006).

In a similar vein, a handful of articles on the Matthew Shepard murder in Wyoming explore both the context and the effects of his killing. Two pieces are of particular interest. Karen Franklin (2003) makes the case that the murder may have played some role in the Lawrence v. Texas case in the US, which finally put paid to sodomy legislation. The decision, it is argued, was a public acknowledgement of the role that homophobic practices – including legislation – play in shaping anti-gay violence like that perpetrated against Shepard. Monique Noelle’s (2002) article examines a different class of impacts: that is, the psychological effects on the broader gay community. She observes a ‘vicarious traumatisation’ effect, whereby non-victims are in fact terrorised by awareness of anti-gay violence perpetrated against others.

One final piece of the puzzle by which we ‘make sense’ of hate crime is the impact of animus-based violence. We have by now a sound inventory of the effects of hate crime on the immediate victim: for exampl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables, figures and case studies
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Future developments for hate crime thinking: who, what and why?
• Part One: Developing Understandings of Hate Crime
• Part Two: Developing Responses to Hate Crime
• Index