Impact of hate crime "deep and widespread"

14 Sep 09

Important new research by criminologists at the University of Leicester challenges existing stereotypes about the nature and impact of hate crime offending.

By Brian Sims

While the term ‘hate crime’ conjures up images of violent acts committed by hate-fuelled extremists, the research suggests that many hate crimes are in fact lower-level forms of harassment committed by so-called ‘normal’ people who may not necessarily ‘hate’ their victim.

While the more violent examples of hate crime hit the media and receive widespread attention, the low-level, everyday harassment goes unpublicised and, often, unreported despite it having damaging and long-term consequences for victims, their families and broader communities.

Research conducted by Dr Neil Chakraborti and Jon Garland of the University of Leicester’s Department of Criminology offers the most comprehensive examination to date of hate crime in a British rather than American context. The results, along with recommendations for future criminal justice policy, are available in the publication ‘Hate Crime: Impact, Causes and Responses’, a study that sheds significant new light on the subject.

'Message crimes' designed to intimidate

Dr Chakraborti told SMT Online: "We would argue that hate crimes are acts of prejudice towards an individual’s perceived identity. They are often believed to be ‘message crimes’ designed to intimidate the victim’s wider minority community. However, contrary to popular opinion, these crimes are not always carried out by right-wing political extremists. In truth, it's common for these crimes to be committed by ‘ordinary’ members of the public whose prejudices may have been reinforced by the mainstreaming of far-right ideology, such as the ‘British jobs for British workers’ slogan."

The respected academic also pointed out that it's important to realise it's not just minority ethnic or faith communities who are targeted – victims include gay and transgender communities as well as the disabled.

Through case studies, Neil and Jon’s work goes on to explore why it’s wrong to associate hate crime solely with violent racism, whether these crimes are motivated exclusively by hate, what types of people are responsible for committing hate crime and the merits of increased sentence tariffs for perpetrators.

Garland commented: "What the research suggests is that we need a deeper understanding of what hate crimes actually are, their impact on the victim, who carried them out and, crucially, how they are dealt with by the criminal justice system. There is some evidence to suggest that the policing of hate crimes has improved, with the police now prioritising the investigation of such crimes."

Relations still at problematic stage

According to Garland: "Relations between the police and minority communities are still problematic, though, and this is one of the main reasons that the majority of hate crimes are not reported to the police. This lack of reporting makes it difficult to accurately ascertain the exact level of these crimes. What we can say is that, from our research, it appears that current levels of hate crime are having devastating effects upon victims.”

The research concludes by arguing that ‘hate’ is a complex and sometimes inaccurate label used to describe the offences with which it is commonly associated. Nevertheless, despite these problems, there are a number of notable developments that have arisen via the hate crime agenda. For example, it can work as a ‘collective banner’ around which marginalised groups in society may rally.

Linked to this, the hate crime concept draws attention to the shared vulnerabilities of all minority communities, and not just minority ethnic communities. Moreover, the practical and symbolic value of hate crime legislation as a way of reaffirming society’s condemnation of prejudice should not be underestimated.

Hate crime victims receive more support

The Government’s new Action Plan on hate crime was launched today. It seeks to reduce hate crime, support hate crime victims and bring more perpetrators to justice.

The Hate Crime Action Plan also aims to increase victims’ confidence in the justice system, and to encourage more people to report these crimes. According to an official statement released by the Home Office, this will be done by:

giving local partnerships more advice on how to deal with hate crime, and set up their own Action Plan to tackle hate crime in their area
making sure the measures to help support vulnerable and intimidated witnesses give evidence in Court are more widely used
providing more help for probation staff to improve the management of hate crime offenders
setting new investigating and recording standards for the police

'Hate crime ruins lives'

Speaking earlier today, Home Office minister Alan Campbell said: "Hate crime ruins peoples' lives and the Government is determined to tackle it in all its forms. Individuals should be free to express their identities without fear of harassment and crime simply because of who they are."

The minister concluded: "The Hate Crime Action Plan will help ensure our response to these intolerable crimes is as effective as possible and create an environment that will give victims more confidence to report these crimes knowing they will be taken seriously and acted on."

Drew Harris - the ACPO lead on hate crime - added: "We know that many hate crimes still go un-reported. It is essential that victims have both the confidence and the opportunity to report such crimes, either directly to the police or through a third party. A full understanding of the nature and extent of the problem will allow us and our partners to help protect people from the harm caused by hate crime."

Action Plan welcomed by Stop Hate UK

Rose Simkins, the chief executive of Stop Hate UK, also welcomed the Action Plan. She said: "A good deal has been achieved in recent years, but this development acknowledges there is still work to be done to help victims to report hate crime and receive support, and to bring more offenders to justice.‘

Meanwhile, eight years on from the 9/11 terrorist attacks, new research from the University of Leicester’s Centre for American Studies has examined the impact of the atrocity on language, sense of realism and how it has led to America’s ‘current state of fear’.

The research, undertaken by Dr Catherine Morley (a lecturer in the School of English at the University of Leicester), reveals that 9/11 not only influenced society’s sense of realism and its ability to express this realism, but also let to the manipulation of language and a rhetoric – ‘Infected with Fear’.

Morley examined different literary responses to the culture of fear and the so-called 'War on Terror’, looking at how they explore Government surveillance, infringement of civil liberties and the role of the media in the new global environment of distrust.

As Dr Morley puts it: “In light of this attack on American soil, the first foreign attack since the Second World War, it is not surprising that American writers became more subjective and less dispassionate in their immediate responses, presenting raw personal grief and their perceived sense of the futility of their literary endeavours. There was a general feeling among writers that words would inevitably fail in the face of the extremely visual nature of the attacks."

The academic added: "The events of September 11 engendered a new reality, so close and so familiar it was ‘unreal’. When reality becomes a nightmare, realism itself falls apart. And in this context the textual combination of the literary and the visual might come closest to capturing the terrible trauma of 11 September 2001.”

Surreal nature of the terrorist attacks

As writers were called upon to make sense of what the world had witnessed, many commented on the surreal nature of the attacks.

Dr Morley explained: “What was immediately striking about a great number of these writers’ responses was the emphasis on the visual or on the actual spectacle of the attacks. Many writers described themselves as impotent, as though they were frozen in front of the television screen or, in the case of the New York writers, watching from some city vantage point. Indeed, for many writers in the weeks and months after the attacks, the heightened visibility seemed to render the acts of terror ‘too real’. So the problem for the writer was how to write about events which seemed to defy the logic of traditional narrative realism, and which presented a story that the whole world was already familiar with through an unending televisual loop.”

Dr Morley’s analysis of US Government documents finds an ‘extraordinarily pervasive rhetoric of fear.’ Her research reveals how US military rhetoric and Government-fuelled paranoia are conflated within the fiction of the post-9/11 era. The effect, stated Morley, is to make a rather deliberate, if subtle, points which acknowledges the complicity of the West in the propagation of the current state of fear.

“It has done so to such an extent that the raised terror alerts which are regularly announced by the global media seem to have engendered a heightened sense of reality, bordering on the surreal in its capacity for inspiring terror.”

9/11: still to the fore on academic schedules

9/11 fiction continues to be integrated into Dr Morley’s courses. "It still feels very relevant and of course all the students remember the atrocity well. They are very interested in it and the effect it has had on society.”

Literary artists continue to add to the body of comment on what was a terrible historical event. Their reactions, embodied in the fictions produced after 9/11, continue to challenge perceptions and provoke new discussion eight years on.