Hate crime constitutes one of the biggest global challenges of our time and blights the lives of millions of people across the world. The term âhate crimeâ has been used within the domains of policy and scholarship as a way of distinguishing those forms of violence and micro-aggressions which are directed towards people on the basis of their identity, âdifferenceâ or perceived vulnerability. The coining of a collective descriptor for these forms of victimisation has acted as a catalyst for improved awareness, understanding and responses amongst a range of different actors including lawmakers, non-governmental organisations, activists and professionals within and beyond the criminal justice sector. Importantly, it has facilitated increased prioritisation across disciplines, across communities and across borders.
The need for such prioritisation has become all the more urgent amidst a context of rising levels of hate and extremism. As stated by Commissioner VÄra JourovĂĄ at the Launch of the EU High Level Group on combating racism, xenophobia and other forms of intolerance in 2016:
Over recent years, racism, xenophobia and other forms of intolerance have been growing and spreading across Europe at very high speed ⊠there is also an exponential spread of hate speech on online fora, including social media and chats.
Within the United Kingdom (UK), 103,379 hate crimes were recorded by the police in England and Wales in 2018/19, which was not only an increase of 10 per cent compared to the previous year but it was also a continuation of an upward trend since 2012/13, with recorded hate crime having more than doubled in that time frame (Home Office 2019). While this rise is likely to be the result of a culmination of factorsâincluding increased reporting and improved recordingââtriggerâ events of local, national and international significance have influenced the prevalence and severity of hate-fuelled violence and micro-aggressions (Littler and Feldman 2015; Hanes and Machin 2014; King and Sutton 2014). For instance, the EU referendum result of June 2016 led to an upsurge in reports of hate crime with more than 14,000 recorded by police forces in England and Wales between July and September 2016, which amounted to record levels of hate crime for three-quarters of police forces (Home Office 2018). âTriggerâ events such as the EU referendum also lead to a proliferation of hate online (Awan and Zempi 2017; Burch 2017; Williams and Burnap 2015), with social media âacting as a force-amplifier for cyberhate as it can open up a potential space for the rapid galvanising and spread of hostile beliefs, via the spread of rumours through online contagionâ (Williams and Pearson 2016: 7).
Equally worrying spikes in hate crime have been observed further afield, including escalating tensions during and after the 2016 presidential campaign within the United States of America (USA) (Human Rights Watch 2019; Southern Poverty Law Centre 2016). In the ten days following the election of Donald Trump, 867 hate crimes were reported to the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC), many of which were targeted towards ethnic and religious minority groups, thereby emulating the hostile and degrading discourse espoused by Trump during the election campaign (ibid., 2016). Populist parties have also experienced success across Europe, with othering, xenophobia and scapegoating permeating the political landscape in countries such as Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Norway, Poland, Slovenia and Sweden (Human Rights Watch 2019; Dearden 2017; Lazaridis et al. 2016). Similar to the presidential election in the USA and the EU Referendum in the UK, these narratives have fermented a fertile environment for the commission of hate crime, as exemplified by substantial increases in anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim hate crime in France, a rise in targeted violence towards refugees and refugee shelters in Germany and Greece, and a sharp increase in racist hate crime towards immigrants, minority ethnic and Roma communities in Italy and Hungary (Human Rights Watch 2019).
The growth of hate and extremism in online and offline environments paints a worrying picture, not least because of the considerable damage they are known to cause. On an individual level, hate crime has been found to have a more harmful effect upon a victimâs emotional and physical well-being when compared to non-hate motivated crimes (Paterson et al. 2019; Vedeler et al. 2019; Iganski and Lagou 2015). According to the 2015/16 and 2017/18 Crime Survey for England and Wales, hate crime victims are more likely than victims of crime overall to cite being emotionally affected by the incident (89 per cent and 77 per cent respectively) and more likely to be âvery muchâ affected (36 per cent and 13 per cent, respectively) (Home Office 2018). Additionally, hate crime victims are more than twice as likely to have experienced a loss of confidence, difficulty sleeping, anxiety, panic attacks and depression when compared with victims of crime overall (Home Office 2018). The implications of suffering mental ill-health are far-reaching, often resulting in a decline in physical health, educational achievement and work productivity.
It is also now widely acknowledged that the impacts of hate crime extend well beyond the actual victim, transmitting a sense of apprehension and vulnerability amongst family and community members (Walters et al. 2019; Bell and Perry 2015; Perry and Alvi 2012). As found in research by Paterson et al. (2019), knowing someone whom you share an identity or lifestyle characteristic with and who has been subjected to hate crime can also lead to indirect impacts such as an escalation in feelings of fear, anger and shame, and changes to everyday practices. Both directly and indirectly, hate-fuelled violence and micro-aggressions have the propensity to reinforce long-standing social divisions, a situation which is compounded further by those who seek to exploit these fractures to advance a particular ideology or to legitimise hateful and extremist views (Greater Manchester Preventing Hateful Extremism and Promoting Social Cohesion Commission 2018; Casey 2016).
The originality, significance and need for this book become all the more evident at a time when scepticism towards the concept of hate crime and ignorance of the harms associated with it are becoming ever more palpable. As illustrated by the quotation below, attempts to devalue, disparage and deny the pervasiveness of hate crime not only reinforce the sense of isolation and marginalisation felt by many hate crime victims but also seek to silence their voices and to invalidate their experiences.
Britain is in the grip of an epidemic, apparently. An epidemic of hate. Barely a day passes without some policeman or journalist telling us about the wave of criminal bigotry that is sweeping through the country ⊠what the BBC calls an âepidemicâ is a product of the authorities redefining racism and prejudice to such an extent that almost any unpleasant encounter between people of different backgrounds can now be recorded as âhatredâ ⊠According to one leftie online magazine, Britain now evokes ânightmares of 1930s Germanyâ. But this doesnât square with the reality of our country today, and you shouldnât believe it. The hate-crime epidemic is a self-sustaining myth â a libel against the nation.(OâNeill 2016)
To be honest the term âhate crimeâ was cooked up by the extreme Left as a whip to crack over white British heterosexual Christians, and itâs just another way of gagging free speech. If you call someone a twat, a bastard or a wanker itâs no big deal, people can brush it off, so why is it different if you call someone a nigger, a poof or a whore?Message received by the authors via Facebook
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