It is recognised in the research literature that reporting to an official agency, for example, the police, does happen but not necessarily immediately after the first hate incident. Hate crime is reported largely if there has been property damage or serious physical injury. By and large, verbal abuse, threats and harassment go unreported and the coping mechanism is often to ignore and avoid such experiences (Chahal and Julienne, 1999).

Some hate crime victims cope with little assistance after suffering victimisation (Craig-Henderson and Sloan, 2003), and some may not require any support, wanting to forget about it or seeing it as too trivial to report. Recent compelling research has identified that the hurts of hate crime are not uniformly experienced (Iganski and Lagou, 2015). People have different levels of resilience, coping mechanisms, support structures, familiarity with rights and reporting agencies, and, of course, identified needs. This chapter draws on three models of hate crime support that caseworkers are able to use with clients.

Crisis intervention

When an official complaint of hate crime is made it is often at the point of crisis:

This turning point is the moment that a caseworker may first meet a client. The client may be in crisis and require an immediate response, for example, medical treatment or repairs to damaged property. The client's coping abilities may be lowered and they may be in emotional turmoil, fearful of further violence and concerned about their and their family's safety and security. These crisis points will generate reactions of immediacy in the client and a caseworker will have to untangle what can be achieved with the client. The client may have an expectation that the reporting agency or caseworker can respond to these crises straightaway. Crisis intervention in this context is to help the client in crisis to ‘review or renegotiate certain aspects of their thoughts, feelings or intentions’ (Thompson, 2011b: 18) because: