The Routledge International Handbook on Hate Crime

Nathan Hall, Abbee Corb, Paul Giannasi, John Grieve, Nathan Hall, Abbee Corb, Paul Giannasi, John Grieve

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136684432
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This edited collection brings together many of the world's leading experts, both academic and practitioner, in a single volume handbook that examines key international issues in the field of hate crime. Collectively it examines a range of pertinent areas with the ultimate aim of providing a detailed picture of the hate crime 'problem' in different parts of the world. The book is divided into four parts:

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• An examination, covering theories and concepts, of issues relating to definitions of hate crime, the individual and community impacts of hate crime, the controversies of hate crime legislation, and theoretical approaches to understanding offending.

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• An exploration of the international geography of hate, in which each chapter examines a range of hate crime issues in different parts of the world, including the UK, wider Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand.

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• Reflections on a number of different perspectives across a range of key issues in hate crime, examining areas including particular issues affecting different victim groups, the increasingly important influence of the Internet, and hate crimes in sport.

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• A discussion of a range of international efforts being utilised to combat hate and hate crime.

Offering a strong international focus and comprehensive coverage of a wide range of hate crime issues, this book is an important contribution to hate crime studies and will be essential reading for academics, students and practitioners interested in this field.

1 Theories and concepts

1 Framing the boundaries of hate crime¹

Neil Chakraborti

DOI: 10.4324/9780203578988-1

Hate crime has become an increasingly familiar term in recent years as the harms associated with acts of bigotry and prejudice continue to pose complex challenges for societies across the world. It is rightly seen as a human rights issue that has wider social and political ramifications beyond simply identifying criminal justice ‘solutions’ and the culpability of individual offenders. However, whilst hate crimes are now afforded greater recognition throughout all levels of society – from law-makers, law-enforcers, academics, students, activists and from ‘ordinary’ members of the public – some significant challenges remain. These continue to create uncertainty within the domains of hate crime scholarship and policy, particularly when it comes to making sense of the concept in a way that allows us to maximise its ‘real-life’ value to victims of hate crime.

On the one hand, questioning the value of our hate crime scholarship and policy-making may feel counter-intuitive to many of us who continue to praise the underlying principles of the hate crime movement and to marvel at its strengths: both as an umbrella construct to connect various forms of bigotry and as a bureaucratic term that lends itself to policy- and not just theory-building. Hate crime is a politically and socially significant term that cuts across disciplines, across communities and across borders. It is a concept which has inspired legal and social change designed to protect people from being persecuted simply because of who they are, or who they are perceived to be. It is an area of policy that has been prioritised regionally, nationally and internationally and which has been central to the governance of community cohesion.

At the same time, most of us would agree that there remains much about hate crime which we do not know, and this has implications for the ‘real-life’ value of our theorising and policy-making. This has a great deal to do with how we frame the parameters of hate crime. A vivid illustration of this can be seen in the official hate crime figures that are presented by different countries in an attempt to understand the scale of the problem within the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE) region. Figures collated by the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights show considerable variations between OSCE member states: for instance, the number of hate crimes recorded by police in England, Wales and Northern Ireland in 2011 – 44,519 – contrasts quite dramatically with the corresponding numbers for countries such as Germany (4,040), Poland (444), Spain (115) and Italy (68) (ODIHR, 2012: 23–25). In reality, these figures are not an accurate measure through which to gauge international comparisons of hate crime: they are more a reflection of the way in which hate crimes are defined, publicised, recorded, reported and statistically collated by different countries, than of any genuine disparity in levels of hate crime.² Moreover, whilst this set of police-recorded figures from England and Wales paints a much more realistic picture than that offered by most other states, it does not begin to paint anything like a full picture. Recent sweeps of the Crime Survey for England and Wales – which accounts for experiences of victimisation not necessarily reported to the police – indicate that approximately 278,000 hate crimes are committed each year (Home Office, 2013), a total which is far higher than corresponding ‘official’ figures. Moreover, I would argue that the ‘real’ figure of hate crimes taking place is likely to be higher still but remains elusively unquantifiable, as many cases of hate crime are simply not recognised as hate crimes by criminal justice agencies, non-governmental organisations or by victims themselves.

This point is important because it shows that our understanding of hate crime is contingent upon the way in which we choose to frame the boundaries of hate crime. Within the discussion that follows, I call for a re-think in how we frame these boundaries, and I challenge the way in which narrow constructions of identity and community have led us to overlook a range of significant issues. As long as such issues remain peripheral to the ‘hate debate’ we risk marginalising the experiences of many victims, and thereby reducing the ‘real-life’ impact of hate crime theorising and policy-formation. Before outlining those issues, let us first consider the key features that have shaped our common understanding of hate crime.

Conventional boundaries

Hate crime is a social construct which has multiple meanings to different actors and which is subject to a myriad of interpretations. There is therefore no single universal framework that defines the way in which we conceive of the problem, although some notable efforts have been made by policy-makers and scholars to develop a common understanding that can generate workable responses to hate crime. One such attempt has come from The Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), whose guidance for OSCE member states describes hate crimes as ‘criminal acts committed with a bias motive’ (2009: 16). For ODIHR, this bias does not have to manifest itself as hate for the offence to be thought of as a hate crime, nor does hate have to be the primary motive. Rather, it refers to acts where the victim is targeted deliberately because of a particular ‘protected characteristic … shared by a group, such as “race”, language, religion, ethnicity, nationality, or any other similar common factor’ (2009: 16). Importantly, ODIHR’s guidance does not seek to specify which protected characteristics should form the basis of a member state’s hate crime policy, aside from making reference to aspects of identity that are ‘fundamental to a person’s sense of self and to the relevance of ‘current social problems as well as potential historical oppression and discrimination’ (2009: 38).

This broad, pan-national framework for understanding hate crime was developed in recognition of the significance of hate crime across Europe and the pressing need for states, statutory and non-governmental organisations to acknowledge and respond to the problem. However – and as illustrated by the divergence in hate crime figures collated by different countries referred to above – there is little evidence of a shared understanding of the concept across nations. As such, inconsistencies abound when it comes to defining what a hate crime is, who the potential victims are and what type of legislative response is most appropriate (for further discussion, see Garland and Chakraborti, 2012). To some extent, this is an inevitable and understandable result of the way in which different countries’ histories have shaped their prioritisation of different forms of hate crime. In countries such as Germany, Austria and Italy, for example, the connection of hate crime to right-wing extremism and anti-Semitism is clearly a legacy of tragic events from the twentieth century, while an emphasis on challenging racism in the UK is perhaps attributable to the mass migrations from the Caribbean and south Asia to the UK from the late 1940s onwards. Although a universal consensus on the implementation and prioritisation of hate crime policy may be unfeasible, the significance of ODIHR’s guidance in the context of the discussion that follows lies in its broad interpretation of hate and the targets of hate.

A similarly broad interpretation is evident too within the hate crime policy framework of the UK. A key source of guidance comes from the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), whose operational definition is enshrined within their guidelines for police forces in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (ACPO, 2000; 2005; 2014). As with ODIHR’s hate crime guidance ACPO’s policy framework makes specific reference to prejudice as well as hate, and it requires police forces to record not just hate crimes but all hate incidents, even if they lack the requisite elements to be classified as a notifiable offence later in the criminal justice process. In this context ACPO takes its lead from the landmark Macpherson Inquiry, whose attempts to address the deep-rooted institutional racism identified as being embedded within police culture by that Inquiry resulted in the adoption of a more flexible interpretation of a racist incident.³ Accordingly, the hate crime guidance issued by ACPO stipulates that any hate incident, whether a prima facie ‘crime’ or not, should be recorded if it meets the threshold originally laid down by the Macpherson definition of a racist incident – namely, if it is perceived by the victim or any other person present as being motivated by prejudice or hate.

As for the protected characteristics that give rise to a hate crime, ACPO’s guidance refers to five strands of monitored prejudice or hatred: race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity and disability. This has facilitated a level of consistency in the way in which hate crimes are recorded and monitored by police forces, and successive governments have now passed a series of laws offering protection against expressions of hate crime falling under each of these strands. However, this does not preclude other forms of prejudice or hatred from being treated as hate crimes by local areas, as acknowledged within a recent government action plan (HM Government, 2012), and illustrated in April 2013 when Greater Manchester Police became the first police force within the UK to record attacks against members of alternative subcultures as hate crime.

In an academic sense Barbara Perry’s (2001) conceptual framework is arguably the most influential. Whilst it is not the only one to have influenced the development of hate crime scholarship (see for example, Lawrence, 1999; Jacobs, 2002), it has left an indelible imprint upon contemporary hate crime discourse throughout the world (see, inter alia, Hall, 2005; Iganski, 2008; Chakraborti, 2010; Garland, 2012). It also offers much-needed theoretical substance to the more operationally-oriented frameworks described above. For Perry, hate crimes are acts of violence and intimidation directed towards marginalised communities, and are therefore synonymous with the power dynamics present within modern societies that reinforce the ‘othering’ of those who are seen as different. Indeed, the process of ‘doing difference’ is a central theme of Perry’s framework which sees hate as rooted in the ideological structures of societal oppression that govern normative conceptions of identity. Within such a process, hate crime emerges as a response to the threats posed by ‘others’ when they attempt to step out of their ‘proper’ subordinate position within the structural order. It is, in other words, a mechanism through which violence is used to sustain both the hegemonic identity of the perpetrator and to reinforce the boundaries between dominant and subordinate groups, reminding the victim that they are ‘different’ and that they ‘don’t belong’.

Perry’s framework has been of considerable value, not least because it helps us to think about hate crime within the broader psychological and socio-political contexts that condition hostile reactions to the ‘other’, and to recognise that hate crimes are part of a process of repeated or systematic victimisation shaped by context, structure and agency (Kelly, 1987; Bowling, 1993). But notwithstanding the significant advances made as a result of this framework – and through the operational guidance described above – I would argue that there is scope to develop our thinking even further to maximise the ‘real-life’ value of our theorising and policy-making. There remains much about hate crime that remains un- or under-explored, and this is a result of the way in which conventional constructions have been used to shape the parameters of what is categorised as hate crime without giving due regard to whether this satisfactorily accounts for the experiences and motivations that are connected to various manifestations of hate. As a result, certain realities of hate crime victimisation and perpetration have remained peripheral to the ‘hate debate’. In the section that follows I outline a series of significant, yet ‘peripheral’ issues that could, and should, be considered alongside the more familiar aspects of hate crime discourse.

The case for extending boundaries

It is often said that hate crime policy creates and reinforces hierarchies of identity: some victims are deemed worthy of inclusion within hate crime frameworks whereas others invariably miss out. This is a now-familiar criticism of conventional hate crime policy (see, inter alia, Mason-Bish, 2010; Jacobs and Potter, 1998) but...