Introduction
This chapter will consider the conceptualisation of hate crime and hate incidents within the UK. It seeks to locate hate crime within an historic framework by considering the diverse ways in which racism was manifested in British society and the underlying reasons for the concerns that were articulated. This discussion forms the background for a more detailed discussion of hate crime and its underlying causes in recent history.
Conceptual Ambiguity and Inconsistency
As has been argued elsewhere, national laws and international crime and security infrastructures do not occur by themselves, but remain social products embedded within political, social, and moral processes (Laverick 2016: 28). National, regional, and international hate crime infrastructures, including legislative and policy frameworks, are no exception. Chakraborti and Garland (2012: 500–501) for example, explain that scholars now largely recognise hate crimes as social constructs, emerging from a complex network of events, structures, and underlying processes. As a consequence, domestically and internationally, hate crimes are regarded as having no straightforward meaning, resulting in conceptual ambiguity, differences in understanding and variation in approach, with implications for measurement, reporting, recording, monitoring, responses, and interventions (see also Brax and Munthe 2015: 1688; Chakraborti and Garland 2015: 1; Chakraborti 2016: 578; Chakraborti and Hardy 2017: 149; Perry 2016: 611).
Much debate has taken place within hate crime scholarship around the terminology of ‘hate’ and the role it plays to motivate hate crime perpetrators in committing hate incidents and hate crimes. As a consequence, scholars have utilised terms such as ‘discrimination’, ‘bias’, ‘prejudice’, ‘ethnoviolence’, ‘hostility’, ‘racial harassment and violence’, ‘targeted victimisation’, and ‘targeted harassment’ alongside ‘targeted hostility’. The proliferation of terminology highlights a level of discomfort around the use of the term ‘hate’ and growing recognition, prompted by research findings, that the presence of ‘hate’ is not necessarily central to the commission of hate crime (Chakraborti and Hardy 2017: 149; Chakraborti 2017: 389). This point is recognised within the UK’s victim centred definition.
As was noted by Chakraborti and Garland (2012: 500), the concept of hate crime was initially used within North America to describe violence targeted against minority communities, emphasising commonalities in experience of prejudiced victimisation suffered by different minority groups. Consequently, hate crime law governs criminal conduct that involves an element of prejudice or bias on the part of the perpetrator towards a presumed attribute of the victim (Mason 2014). Within the United States, legislation has been passed at both federal and state level and as noted by Mason-Bish (2011: 298), ‘as a general rule its focus is about penalty enhancement for crimes of hate’. These developments have been mirrored across the world with states introducing hate crimes as specific offences subject to sentence uplift if there is sufficient evidence of hostility or bias motivation (Chakraborti 2016: 579).
Laws criminalising racial or ethno-religious intimidation and violence have a long history in parts of Europe and the United States (Mason 2014: 77). However, scholars observe that there is currently no single, universally accepted definition or framework of analysis. Despite this situation, it has nevertheless been argued that ‘academics and policy makers now tend to think in broadly similar directions’ (Chakraborti 2016: 579) so that, ‘for the most part at least’, hate crimes are conceived ‘as acts of hostility (not simply hate and not necessarily criminal acts alone) directed towards a person’s identity or “difference”’ (Chakraborti 2016: 579).
The way in which hate crime acts as a mechanism of ‘power and oppression’ has also been emphasised, with scholars emphasising the nature and function of hostility and the relationship between the actors suggesting that hate crime consisted of ‘acts of violence and intimidation, usually directed towards already stigmatized and marginalized groups’ (Perry 2001: 10). Consequently, it has been argued that hate crime comprises a means to ‘reaffirm the precarious hierarchies that characterise a given social order’ by simultaneously re-creating ‘the threatened (real or imagined) hegemony of the perpetrator’s group and the appropriate subordinate identity of the victim’s group’. The purpose of hate crime has been summarised as being ‘a means of marking both the Self and the Other in such a way as to re-establish their “proper” relative positions’ (Perry 2001: 10).
These considerations help to account for hate crimes lacking any straightforward meaning, resulting in conceptual ambiguity, differences in understanding and variations in approach—factors which have important implications for their measurement, reporting, recording, monitoring, and for responses and interventions to address them (issues that are considered more fully in Brax and Munthe 2015; Chakraborti and Garland 2015; Chakraborti 2016; Chakraborti and Hardy 2017; Perry 2016).
A History of Hate Crime
As detailed elsewhere (Shilliam 2017: 286–289, cited in Laverick and Joyce 2019, forthcoming), the concept of race was central to the ordering and administration of empire and the European colonial project that began in 1492. Thus, racial concepts were used by conquerors from Spain to justify the dispossession of indigenous people from their lands and to dehumanise, traffic and enslave Africans, followed by other European nations including the English who used the Royal African Company in 1672 to generate ‘a monopoly over English trade with West Africa’. Later, a ‘cultural calculas of race’ (that had previously been used to differentiate Jews, Muslims, heathens, and Christians), served to become ‘a standard of civilization’ thereby becoming an ordering principle of world politics.
Ideas regarding the impact of population growth and increased interaction between different groups of people (described as ‘dynamic density’) comprised a key element of modernisation approaches. Associated with the work of Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), scholars examined the impact of processes of rapid social change upon social and political order. Societal transformation was regarded as potentially undermining traditional mechanisms of social control, creating social strain and pathological conditions within society (including the loss of social cohesion and increase in crime) (Ritzer 1996). These ideas were later picked up by theorists of late modernity, post-modernism and more recently within globalisation scholarship, examining the impact of social transformations and globalising processes (including the increased mobility of people, money, goods and ideas) upon society, culture, structures of governance, security, crime, and crime control.
Reflected within media, policy and security discourse, such trends are regarded as generating risks, threats, and challenges, requiring action at state and international level to pursue progressive reform, using institutions, legislation, normative frameworks, and collaborative action to address contemporary collective security issues. Thus, immigrant populations, migrant workers, and refugees have become conceptualised as economic, political, and ideological security threats within both state and regional political discourse and policy.
The following discussion examines the historical manifestations of this discourse which also remains prevalent today and creates tension with state efforts to remove discrimination, prejudice and abuse from British society.
Anti-Semitism
While Irish peoples were the first to be colonised under English imperial expansion (Shilliam 2017: 294), Jews have ‘uniquely been the subject of campaigns of intimidation and violence – since long before the creation of Israel, long before the Holocaust, long before the Spanish Inquisition, even before the Romans crucified Jesus’ (Evans 2012: x).
The term ‘anti-Semitism’ was first used by the German, Wilhelm Marr, in 1879 (Runnymede Commission on Antisemitism 1994: para 15). It has been argued that ‘Antisemitism has poisoned the history of the world for more than two millennia’ (Runnymede Commission on Antisemitism 1994: para 11) and has a long history in Europe where Jews have been depicted over the centuries ‘as essentially different from the majority, in their genetic (‘racial’) make-up, or their culture, or their religion, or all three’ (Runnymede Commission on Antisemitism 1994: para 6). Anti-Semitism initially took the form of opposition to the provision of equal civil and political rights for Jews that had been granted in 1871 on the grounds that Jews and Jewish influence threatened to undermine Germans and Germanness (Feldman 2017: 80).
The settlement of Jews into Britain dates from at least the eleventh century. Anti-Semitism was not a new development that arose in the 1930s but had long historical antecedents in Britain. Manifestations of such sentiments included ‘blood libel’ accusations (the spurious claim that Jews killed Christian children for ritualistic reasons, which originated in the mid-twelfth century), physical attacks on Jewish people (such as that in York in 1190 when around 150 Jews killed themselves after being besieged by a mob) and executions, often in relation to alleged plots or accusations of financial misdoings such as counterfeiting. The negative sentiments towards Jewish people that underpinned episodes of this nature culminated with the Edict of Expulsion issued by Edward I in 1290, following which Jews were excluded from the UK until readmitted by Oliver Cromwell in 1656.
The 360-year exile of the Jews from England did not halt expressions of anti-Semitism when they returned and this became a significant problem in the nineteenth century in areas where Jewish people settled. In Liverpool, for example, anti-Semitism arose in connection with Jewish immigration into the City during the nineteenth century (especially in connection with Pogroms in Russia) where it was underpinned by employment issues so that by the 1890s, Jewish immigrants were blamed for deteriorating economic conditions and rising unemployment (Law and Henfrey 1981: 23).
It has been suggested that anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim discrimination share common roots in terms of ‘a conception of Europe’ (Feldman 2017: 78), with scholars pointing to their historical relationship to a Europe perceive...