Hate crime politics
| Author | Rob White |
| DOI | 10.1177/136248060200600409 |
| Date | 01 November 2002 |
| Published date | 01 November 2002 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Hate crime politics
ROB WHITE
University of Tasmania, Australia
Does ‘hate crime’ exist, and to what extent? How should society respond?
Answers vary greatly. For advocates of hate crime legislation, the spectre of
hate crime looms as a real menace, especially affecting ethnic minority
groups, indigenous people, gay men and lesbians. According to this per-
spective, culled from a variety of official and unofficial sources, hate crimes
are presumed to be pervasive. Because usually committed by strangers,
attacks are seen as unpredictably ‘random’, wreaking high levels of violence
and emotional harm. By way of response, many groups and individuals
have demanded greater legal and police protection, leading in some places
to the imposition of specific hate crime laws and elsewhere to racial
vilification and anti-discrimination legislation.
Thus, responding to hate crimes is first and foremost a political process,
one which evolves and mutates as circumstances dictate, transforming the
social landscape and bringing intended as well as unintended consequences.
And it is precisely the fluid, yet intensely political character of hate crime
research and activism that makes the arguments put forward by Jacobs and
Potter less than convincing, or constructive, in the long run.
Jacobs and Potter wish to challenge the notion that there is a major hate
crime ‘epidemic’, and they criticize the use of specific laws to fight it. In
their dissenting view, the main problem is one of exaggeration flowing from
well-intentioned efforts to deal with prejudice.
Jacobs and Potter’s argument can be restated as follows. First, they claim,
it is extremely difficult to define a species of crime based on prejudice or
bigotry. This is because hate crime is inherently ambiguous conceptually,
and hard to demonstrate empirically. Second, the size of the hate crime
problem depends entirely on how the definition is manipulated, calling into
question the concept’s very utility. For example, Jacobs and Potter contend
that there would be few hate crimes if defined as acts completely, or even
predominantly, caused by prejudice. On the other hand, hate crimes would
Theoretical Criminology
© 2002 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi.
1362–4806(200211)6:4
Vol. 6(4): 499–502; 028589
499
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