Signs of progress

Hate crime – the umbrella concept used in its broadest sense to describe acts motivated by prejudice towards an individual's identity or ‘difference’ – is a term many of us will have become increasingly familiar with in recent years. With problems of bigotry continuing to pose complex challenges for societies across the world, hate crime has become an internationally used term; one that has the capacity to transcend differences in interpretation in order to promote a collective awareness of the harms of hate among a range of different actors, be they law-makers, law-enforcers, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), scholars, students, activists or ‘ordinary’ citizens.

Hate crime has also become a contentious term with its conceptual, moral and legal basis being a perennial source of conjecture. However, most readers would agree that hate crimes have a particular set of consequences that distinguish them from other types of crime. These are summarised by the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (2009) who describe the multiple layers of damage caused by hate crimes in terms of their violation of human rights and equality between members of society; the harms inflicted on the individual victim, particular in relation to greater psychological injury and increased feelings of vulnerability; the sense of fear and intimidation transmitted to the wider community or group to whom the victim ‘belongs’; and the security and public order problems that ensue from the creation or widening of potentially explosive social tensions.

These problems have been recognised through what at face value appears to be a greater prioritisation and improved understanding of the issues at an academic and policy level. For instance, to avoid becoming side-tracked by the now familiar conceptual ambiguities of hate crime (see, inter alia, Jacobs and Potter, 1998; Hall, 2005; Chakraborti and Garland, 2009), Iganski (2008) refers to the merits of thinking of hate crime as both a policy and a scholarly domain: the first domain where elements of the political and criminal justice systems have converged as a result of progressive social movements and campaigns over time to combat bigotry in its various guises; and the second where scholars – ostensibly from diverse fields of study and disciplines but united in their focus on the synergies and intersections between different forms of marginalisation and discriminatory violence – seek to use their empirical knowledge to inform effective interventions.