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It is tempting to assume that liberal democracies have always targeted racial discrimination and hate crimes for specific punishment. But meaningful laws only materialized starting in the 1960s and 1980s respectively. This chapter focuses first on the development of American anti-discrimination laws in the 1960s and hate crime laws in the 1980s and 1990s. Looking closely at this history shows how the country most committed to freedom in some domains was the quickest to forego it in others, and just how extensive its laws against racist opinion-as-motive have become. It then turns to developments in Europe. Many European governments have followed in the United States’ footsteps by establishing laws against racial discrimination and hate crimes, although seldom with similar vigor. Looking in depth at the United States, Britain, and Germany demonstrates the origins, spread, and limits of penalizing racist opinion-as-motive in liberal democracies. Ultimately, this chapter also reveals the internal tensions and transnational differences among countries that attempt to balance upholding freedom and fighting racism in a variety of domains.

This chapter provides a review of the data regarding the prevalence and correlates of violent victimization among gay and bisexual men in the United States. It specifically focuses on the well-recognized problem of anti-gay violence (hate crimes) and the much less studied and discussed problem of intimate partner violence in male same-sex couples. It shows that gay and bisexual men are at increased risk for violent victimization due to their sexual orientation and of intimate partner violence, compared to heterosexual men. The strengths and limitations of the available data are considered and future directions for research are suggested. The chapter also describes governmental and community-based efforts that have been taken to reduce anti-gay violence (hate crimes) and intimate partner violence in male same-sex couples.

This chapter examines the violent maintenance of citizenship through the police state, and the uses of hate crime legislation to both name and disallow any recognition of this violence. The intervention into how we understand citizenship to be violently organized functions at two interconnected levels, that is, at the structural level of state violence, and at the social level of identity categories. At the level of the state, hate crime legislation offers us important information on how the violence of citizenship is managed, controlled, and directed. At the structural level of the state, the chapter adds to left critiques of hate crime legislation by unpacking how these laws are used to create a dangerous discontinuum, in which hate crimes are marked as individualized errors, while police brutality is systemically assuaged. By examining the machinations of hate crime legislation at these two levels, it is argued that hate crime legislation works, simultaneously, to recognize and deny: (1) the violence of citizenship; and (2) the fear that the oppressed will seek revenge and retaliate for this experience by using violence themselves.

This chapter examines ‘race hate crime’ policy as an expression of the decline of the emancipatory dynamic of the anti-racism of the 1960s and 1970s. The author makes the case for treating hate crimes as an example of authoritarian multicultural anti-racism that is concerned with social control, rather than human emancipation. The chapter highlights ways in which hate crime policy treats racialised minorities as victims who need state protection. The author argues that hate crime policy is part of the broader erosion of civil liberties that has seen the rise of the prison population in the USA and the creation of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) and other forms of preventative policing in the UK.

Even though the term ‘hate crime’ has caught on in some quarters, it is a rather slippery concept. Varying interpretations have been provided in the scholarly and policy literature, but they do have one thing in common: curiously the word ‘hate’ appears infrequently. Instead, terms such as ‘bias’, ‘prejudice’, ‘difference’ and ‘hostility’ feature prominently. This chapter explores the conceptual disarray of the notion of ‘hate crime’ and explains why and how the concept is to be utilised in the book. It makes a case for the victim's experience to be placed at the centre of the conceptualisation of ‘hate crime’. A victim-centred approach recognises the salience of the particular harms inflicted by ‘hate crimes’ compared with parallel crimes. The experiences of victims also show that, contrary to media depictions of the problem, many incidents of ‘hate crime’ are committed by ‘ordinary’ people in the context of their ‘everyday’ lives.

This chapter uses data from the British Crime Survey to examine the harms of ‘hate crime’ as experienced by victims. It offers new perspectives on the longstanding debate about the desirability of ‘hate crime’ laws in the United Kingdom. The punitive sanctions introduced by such laws might be viewed in some quarters as being an unwelcome case of the decline of ‘penal welfarism’ and correctionalism and the rise of punitive and expressive justice. However, the provision of equal concern and respect for all people, and respect for difference — principles that provide the motivating impetus for advocates of ‘hate crime’ laws — constitute a central plank of political liberalism. And against those who have argued that ‘hate crime’ laws use illiberal means to achieve liberal ends, the chapter argues that the harsher punishment of ‘hate crime’ offenders compared with offenders in parallel crimes seems to be justified by the liberal principle of proportionate sentencing and provides offenders with their just deserts, given the strength of the evidence that ‘hate crimes’ inflict greater harms than parallel crimes.

The issue of racism and sectarianism is increasingly understood through the prism of ‘hate crime’. This way of conceptualising racism and sectarianism is usually accompanied by the claim that society should be intolerant towards intolerance. This chapter argues that this involves a particular interpretation of tolerance and intolerance – one which deviates significantly from the traditional liberal conception of toleration. The chapter outlines public attitudes towards additional penalties for racial aggravation in race hate crimes. It then explores the rationales for these views by the public and points out that the main principle which is articulated by the majority of those who oppose hate crime laws, and a significant proportion who support the law, is one of equality in the eyes of the law. The chapter then judges hate crime laws against John Stuart Mill's defence of tolerance, argue that they are antithetical to Mill's defence of tolerance. It concludes by arguing, firstly, that hate crime laws undermine the principle of equality – which has been, and continues to be, fundamental to anti-racism. And secondly, that they undermine tolerance, which is fundamental to personal liberty.

This book has focused squarely on the foreground of ‘hate crime’ — informed largely by victims' accounts and reports of incidents to the police and in victimisation surveys. This chapter draws out the synergies as well as the divergences between some key themes in the book and elements of the ‘criminologies of everyday life’. It argues that ‘hate crime’ laws are an explicit attack on the background structure that provides the context for the motivating impulses in acts of ‘hate crime’. Such laws are intended ultimately to reweave the structural fabric by legislating morality. However, given that the problem of ‘hate crime’ has been framed as a human rights problem, state intervention, when it legislates against ‘hate’, involves the state either as the guarantor or alternatively the violater of the human rights of its citizens, depending upon which perspective is taken. In this vein, the chapter concludes by exploring the clash of rights involved in the troubling nexus between ‘hate crime’ and ‘hate speech’.

‘Hate crime’ is a relatively new concept in the international criminal justice policy arena. Diverse social, political and historical contexts produce inconsistent terminology, data collection methods and responses at the national level, with significant implications for the feasibility of ‘hate crime’ as a concept with global application. This chapter critically re-explores the case for the hate crime model as a way of understanding and responding to violence, and evaluates the role of policy makers, the academy, IGOs and NGOs in supporting its full implementation at the international and national levels. Current work to provide guidance to OSCE member states on setting up hate crime data collection systems is described and offered as a way forward to support efforts to achieve a common approach to evidencing and responding to hate crime at the international level.

Given the centrality of the victim to the conceptualisation of ‘hate crime’, this chapter explores the significance of including the victim in the ‘hate crime’ policy process. It analyses findings from research carried out on the London-wide Race Hate Crime Forum in 2006 and 2007 to illuminate and evaluate efforts to include victims of racist crime in multi-agency working at the London-wide level. The chapter draws out the tensions involved in confronting criminal justice agents with the experiences of victims and also the problem of competing claims by different groups of victims for inclusion in the policy process. First, it discusses ‘race-hate’ crime and multi-agency working in the European Union, and then considers multi-agency working and victims of ‘race-hate crime’ in the United Kingdom, ‘race-hate crime’ and multi-agency cooperation city-wide in London, the ‘silo-approach’ to ‘hate crime’, and lessons from the London-wide Race Hate Crime Forum.

This chapter suggests that problems over the perception of the nature of hate crime mean that often victims of disablist hate crime are overlooked. Developed partly through campaign group activism and high profile cases, hate crime has become a solid part of criminal justice policy and practice. The legal framework recognises different forms of crime motivated by prejudice or hostility towards victims based on their race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or disability. However, this chapter demonstrates that there are particular problems with the implementation of provisions related to disablist hate crime which can be understood by utilising Christie’s ‘ideal victim’ typology. Born out of an identity politics which sought recognition for the specific harms of hate crime, the development of policy has been shaped by sometimes simplistic perceptions of what it is to be victimised, often framed around issues of stranger danger and attributing recognition to ‘deserving victims’. This reliance on identity politics often means that victims of disablist hate crime are portrayed as weak and vulnerable, which can contribute to anxiety. This chapter shows the relevance of Christie’s ideal victim thesis due to an increasing emphasis on identity politics being used to determine ‘deserving’ and ‘legitimate’ victims.

This chapter shows that the geography of space and place clearly plays a role in generating encounters between offenders and victims. It therefore mediates between the background structural context of ‘hate crime’ and the foreground of offending and victimisation. The chapter presents a number of hypotheses concerning the spatial dynamics of ‘hate crime’ and explores their salience for understanding ‘hate crime’ in the city. It uses previously unpublished police data from London on ‘race-hate’ incidents to examine the geography of ‘hate crime’. In particular, it considers the spatial dynamics of victims' experiences of ‘hate crime’ using previously unpublished statistical data on incidents provided by London's Metropolitan Police Service. The chapter also discusses inter-group friction and ‘race-hate crime’, power differentials and ‘race-hate crime’, the ‘defended neighbourhoods hypothesis’, and the political economy of ‘hate crime’.

This chapter explores the category of gender as a potential victim group within hate crime policy and research. Instead of arguing for or against its inclusion as a new “strand” in the hate crime approach, the chapter argues that is important to understanding the lived – sometimes gendered - experiences of hate crime victims. However, the exclusion of gender from hate crime research and practice has meant that the gendered experiences of many hate crimes victims are often overlooked. This is because the examination of arguments surrounding gender-motivated violence necessarily follows a policy domain which is defined by adding victim groups. Fundamentally, this chapter argues that academics and practitioners might want to consider the complex harms caused to victims of hate crime rather than focusing on their membership of a particular identity group.

This chapter focuses on the government's response to anti-integrationist violence. This response may involve a variety of actors, ranging from police officers investigating the crime to judges involved in sentencing. In cases of neighborhood hate crime, the very first governmental actor that the individual targeted by the harassment encounters is the police. In the best-case scenario, the responding officer gathers evidence, arrests any perpetrators at the scene of the crime, gets the names of witnesses, and writes a summary report. The Justice Department then may sentence the perpetrators for violating the general criminal law, the civil rights law, and the local hate crime law.

Female sex worker victim characteristics and their social, situational and interactive contexts have not substantially changed. Yet, the manner in which female sex worker victimisation is currently understood has changed in some quarters. This chapter documents the unusual inclusion of female sex workers into Merseyside police hate crime policy and practice. Given that female sex workers embody a ‘non-ideal’ victim identity the focus here is to consider what this development may mean for Christie’s (1986) ‘ideal victim’ thesis. In so doing the role (or lack of) emotion and compassion will be discussed. The chapter concludes that victims and victimisation have been reimagined and new victimisations have arisen. However, with regard to hate crime, and the social construction of, and criminal justice responses to the victimisation of female sex workers Christie’s ‘ideal victim’ thesis remains contemporarily relevant and predominantly intact.

In 2006 Merseyside Police were the first UK force to treat crimes against sex workers as hate crime. This chapter overviews the factors that led to that approach and its key constituent elements, drawing on the authors experience of managing the sex work project in Liverpool and her PhD research. It describes how the inclusion of sex workers in hate crime policy has advantages for a group who have been relatively unprotected by law and policy from victimisation, including successful prosecutions of offenders who have committed crimes against sex workers. It argues that locating crimes against sex workers as hate crime links conceptualisation of hate with established analyses in the sex work literature associating high levels of victimisation of sex workers to processes of ‘othering’. It suggests that sex workers experiences of targeted victimisation illustrate the complexities of hate crime and the need for an inclusive hate crime framework.

Hate crime legislation is established in many countries across the world, and the term ‘hate crime’ is widely applied in political and scholarly settings. While there seem to be widespread international agreement that hate crime requires particular legal responses, important questions remain. From a philosophical point of view, there are two basic questions. The first is conceptual: What exactly counts as a hate crime? The second is normative: What makes hate crimes particularly serious? This chapter distinguishes a number of answers to both of these questions and explores how they connect. The aim is to promote greater clarity, in order to avoid confusion, increase comparability, and better understand disagreements about hate crime globally.