The term âhate crimeâ has come under increasing scrutiny and sharp focus after cases such as Stephen Lawrence, who was murdered in a racist attack in Britain in 1993, to the long history of racially-motivated hate crimes and violence committed against minorities in Europe and the United States, which culminated in new hate crime legislation and policies. Whilst there is no universal definition of a hate crime, in the United Kingdom, it is acknowledged that hate crime is not simply motivated by hate, but can be categorised as crimes that are targeted at a person because of hostility or prejudice towards that personâs disability, race or ethnicity, religion or belief, or sexual orientation/transgender identity. Indeed, hate crime has received increasing media attention following major incidents such as the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, the July 2005 bombings in London and the Woolwich attack in the UK in 2013, which led to a spate of reprisal attacks against Muslim communities. Whilst hate crimes can affect a wide range of people who are frequently persecuted and targeted, this chapter will focus on the concepts and terminology around hate crime and examines how the convergence of hate crime on the internet has also led to a new spate of online Islamophobic responses, which have become more prevalent post Woolwich and the Paris shootings of 2015.
Background and Context
Hate crime is not limited to just physical attacks, but includes a wide range of potential crimes from offensive graffiti, damage to property, abusive and threatening messages, harassment, intimidation and verbal abuse (Perry 2001). Anti-Muslim hate crime falls under the category of religious hate crime, which is where it is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by a hostility or prejudice based upon a personâs religion or perceived religion (Keats 2014). In particular, post Woolwich and the death of drummer Lee Rigby in the UK, evidence shows that there has been an increase and rise in online Islamophobia and this chapter will provide some background and context into the reasons and causes for the proliferation of this online hate.
As noted previously, online hate can come in many different forms and shapes, from racial harassment, religiously motivated abuse including anti-Semitic abuse, and directed abuse more generally which targets someone because of their disability, gender, culture, race and beliefs (Gerstenfeld 2013). Cyberspace therefore becomes a virtual minefield where offenders or âtrolls or trollingâ specifically target people through online pre-meditated abuse and specific targeting of a victim, which a perpetrator has identified (Perry and Olsson 2009). The internet troll, who is named after the character from a childrenâs story, specifically aims to target and harass an individual(s) because of their perceived difference (see Chapter 5 for further discussion). In effect, the internet troll aims to use cyberspace as a means to create a hostile space, where online hate can permeate (Keats 2014).
For example, the ex-football player, Stan Collymore has been repeatedly targeted by internet trolls and suffered a widespread amount of online racist abuse as a result. Collymore used Twitter to tell his 739,000 followers (at the time of writing) about the systematic online abuse which he was suffering. He stated that:
In the last 24 hours Iâve been threatened with murder several times, demeaned on my race, and many of these accounts are still active. Why? ⌠I accuse Twitter directly of not doing enough to combat racist/homophobic/sexist hate messages, all of which are illegal in the UK. (BBC News 2014)
It does appear that the use of social media in particular, has profound consequences when misused and allows perpetrators a safe space to create a hostile virtual environment by using threatening messages. For example, the UK Member of Parliament, Stella Creasy and the feminist campaigner and freelance journalist Caroline Criado-Perez, were subjected to abusive threats which included rape via Twitter. Some of the comments posted online included: âEveryone jump on the rape train, @CCriadoPerez is the conductorâ. And: âHey sweetheart, give me a call when youâre ready to be put in your placeâ (cited online in The Huffington Post 2013). Since those cases, Twitter has tried to alleviate peopleâs fears by creating a button that would help report abuse and flag up tweets considered to be in breach of their code of conduct (Waldram 2013). But is that enough?
Clearly, online abuse is therefore not restricted to online Islamophobia, however this chapter aims to shed light on this ânewâ digital form of racism, which following the Woolwich attacks has become the prime focus for the police and other agencies having to investigate online hate crime. Moreover, this is reinforced by statistics from the police and organisations, such as Tell MAMA (Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks) who are based in the UK and who have reported a significant increase in the amount of people reporting online anti-Muslim abuse to them (Tell MAMA 2013). Feldman et al. (2013: 21) found that: âThe majority of the incidents of Muslim hate crime reported to Tell MAMA are online incidents and 300 (69%) of these online cases reported a link to the far right.â
These facts are not isolated, as the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), also revealed a similar trend that had seen them receive over 136 complaints of online anti-Muslim abuse reported through its âTrue Vision websiteâ which deals with hate crimes, since the death of Lee Rigby (ACPO 2013). True Vision is the policeâs main cyber tool in tackling online hate and is used as a means of helping the police create a safer online environment.
The website states that it will examine illegal content that threatens or harasses a person or group of persons because of hostility towards their race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or transgender status (see Chapter 7, for more detail). It adds, however that: âMost hateful or violent website content is not illegalâ and gives victims of online hate three options in dealing with the incident. These include reporting the material to the police, or reporting the material to a hosting company or contacting the website administrator to remove the material (True Vision 2013).
Clearly, threatening and abusive comments, whether it be by visual images, fake online profiles, Facebook messages, YouTube videos and tweets such as the above, can have a detrimental direct effect on the victims who are targeted as well as their families (Waddington 2010). What the above cases demonstrate is that online behaviour can be normalised by offenders which allows a perpetrator to use in many cases anonymity, manipulation and social control to target their victims (Douglas et al. 2005). However, whilst this form of cyber hate often remains invisible, sometimes due to offenders deleting tweets, comments or posts and also because the perpetrator can hide their identity, the threat remains very real for the victims it targets (Hall 2013).
Indeed, trying to ascertain all the potential threats and risks posed online does pose a major challenge for the security services, the police and the government (see Chapter 7). Cyber hate within the policing context therefore requires due diligence and an investigation that determines potential online offenders, offensive online messages and those they believe can be prosecuted alongside the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) rules. Communications via social media sites, like Twitter, can also be a criminal offence. The new CPS guidelines published in 2013 state that there must be either a credible threat of violence or communications which specifically target an individual or group of people, communications which amount to a breach of a court order and communications which may be considered grossly offensive, indecent, obscene or false (CPS Guidelines 2013).
In many of these cases people can be charged for comments made via social networking sites under âracially motivatedâ or âreligiously motivatedâ crimes through the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, the Malicious Communications Act 1988, the Communications Act 2003 and the Public Order Act 1986 (Coliandris 2012). Overall, policing cyberspace and peopleâs activity via social media sites remains difficult and the recent Leveson Inquiry (2012) in the UK which was set up by the British government to investigate the culture, practices and ethics of the Press also acknowledges that it is problematic to regulate.
Following the Woolwich attack, a number of arrests were made where people had posted comments on Twitter and Facebook which were deemed to incite racial hatred or violence. In one case, a person was convicted under the Malicious Communications Act 1988 after an offensive message was posted on Facebook (Urquhart 2013). Cyber hate regulation therefore requires the police and other agencies to act quickly and more effectively in relation to online Islamophobic abuse. At the moment cyberspace does resemble a virtual minefield of hate and therefore policing it requires a shift in thinking from authorities which gets them thinking and acting not in an abstract black and white way, but in a more innovative and nuanced way that helps the police prosecute people for cyber hate as well as educating people of the dangers of online abuse (Chan 2007). I will now begin to explore some of the complexities around the term âhate crimeâ.
Complexities Surrounding the Term Hate Crime
There is no universal definition of a hate crime, although we have a myriad of interpretations and examples of terms that have been used to define what might constitute a hate crime. In the United Kingdom, a hate crime is any criminal offence which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by a hostility or prejudice based on a personâs race or perceived race because of their disability, race or ethnicity, religion or belief, sexual orientation, or transgender identity. Craig (2002: 86) states that this equates to any illegal act which intentionally selects a victim because of those prejudices against the victim.
This type of crime can also be committed against a person or property and the victim does not have to be a member of the group at which the hostility is targeted. Indeed, the notion that an offender must be motivated by hate for there to be a hate crime is problematic. Chakraborti and Garland (2009:4) make the case that: âin reality crimes do not need to be motivated by hatred at allâ, and Hall (2013: 9) states that âhate crime isnât really about hate, but about criminal behaviour motivated by prejudice, of which hate is just one small and extreme partâ, which does raise important questions about re-thinking what hate crime actually means. For example, how should we define it? Why is it happening? And how do we prevent it from happening in the future? Perry (2001: 10) argues that hate crime is about offenders pursuing a level of control and power and states that a hate crime must involve:
acts of violence and intimidation, usually directed towards already stigmatized and marginalized groups. As such it is a mechanism of power and oppression, intended to reaffirm the precarious hierarchies that characterize a given social order. It attempts to re-create simultaneously the threatened (real or imagined) hegemony of the perpetratorâs group and the appropriate subordinate identity of the victimâs group. It is a means of marking both the Self and the Other in such a way as to re-establish their âproperâ relative positions, as given and reproduced by broader ideologies and patterns of social and political inequality.
Interestingly, Chakraborti and Garland (2009: 6) note how Perryâs definition extends to all âmembers and groupsâ who are victimised and marginalised and as such they argue Perryâs definition provides a more fluid and comprehensive interpretation of the meaning of hate crime. They state that: âCrucially, it recognizes that hate crime is not a static problem but one that is historically and culturally contingent, the experience of which needs to be seen as a dynamic process, involving context, structure and agency.â
In respect to the motivation element surrounding the term, Hall (2013: 3) makes the case that:
In this sense then it is societyâs interest in the motivation that lies behind the commission of the crime that is new. That motivation is, of course, an offenderâs hatred of, or more accurately, prejudice against, a particular identifiable group or member of a particular identifiable group, usually already marginalized within society, whom the offender intentionally selects on the basis of that prejudice.
Thus for Hall (2013: 16) it is clear that hate crime is a social construct and is susceptible to a process of crime which can relate to the new socio-legal problems of how we deconstruct hate crime. Similarly, Gerstenfeld (2013: 9) argues that hate crime has no borders and therefore we cannot simply measure it through domestic problems but that instead it requires an international approach that involves working with wider partners such as the United Nations, the European Union and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to share ideas, experience and good practice that can help tackle the problem of hate crime.
Furthermore, this involves dialogue and discussion about how cyberspace is policed since hate crime on the internet has become a more widespread problem since the rapid growth of the internet (Iganski 2008). Indeed, the convergence of hate crime and Islamophobia on the internet has provided a new platform by which a number of anti-hate websites and groups have appeared online in order to perpetuate a level of cyber hate not seen previously (these are discussed in further detail in Chapter 4). Sheffield (1995: 438) argues therefore that hate crime is: âviolence motivated by social and political factors and is bolstered by belief systems which (attempt to) legitimize such violenceâ.
In 2007, the Police Service, Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), Prison Service (which is now the National Offender Management Service) and other similar agencies that make up the criminal justice system agreed that hate crime should only consist of five separate strands and that this could be monitored centrally. As noted previously, those monitored strands are: race, religion/faith, sexual orientation, disability and gender-identity. Interestingly, UK policy also deems crimes committed against a person because of hostility towards someoneâs age, gender and/or appearance could also constitute a hate crime, despite not being part of the five monitored strands. Hall (2013: 5) argues that: âThese definitions are notable because they allow for anyone to be a victim of hate crime, and for any offence or inciden...
