Responding to hate crime: Escalating problems, continued failings
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895817736096 |
| Published date | 01 September 2018 |
| Date | 01 September 2018 |
| Author | Neil Chakraborti |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1748895817736096
Criminology & Criminal Justice
2018, Vol. 18(4) 387 –404
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1748895817736096
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Responding to hate crime:
Escalating problems,
continued failings
Neil Chakraborti
University of Leicester, UK
Abstract
The need for fresh responses to hate crime has become all the more apparent at a time when
numbers of incidents have risen to record levels, both within the UK and beyond. Despite
progress within the domains of scholarship and policy, these escalating levels of hate crime – and
the associated increase in tensions, scapegoating and targeted hostility that accompanies such
spikes – casts doubt over the effectiveness of existing measures and their capacity to address
the needs of hate crime victims. This article draws from extensive fieldwork conducted with
more than 2000 victims of hate crime to illustrate failings in relation to dismantling barriers to
reporting, prioritizing meaningful engagement with diverse communities and delivering effective
criminal justice interventions. It highlights how these failings can exacerbate the sense of distress
felt by victims from a diverse range of backgrounds and communities, and calls for urgent action
to plug the ever-widening chasm between state-level narratives and victims’ lived realities.
Keywords
Criminal justice policy, diversity, hate crime, under-reporting, victims
Introduction
Hate crime has become increasingly relevant to criminology in recent times. The term
has been used within the domains of policy and scholarship as a way of distinguishing
forms of violence and micro-aggressions directed towards people on the basis of their
identity, ‘difference’ or perceived vulnerability. It has been used to promote awareness,
action and shared understanding among a range of different actors including law-makers,
Corresponding author:
Neil Chakraborti, Department of Criminology, University of Leicester, 154 Upper New Walk, Leicester,
LE1 7QA, UK.
Email: nac5@le.ac.uk
736096CRJ0010.1177/1748895817736096Criminology & Criminal JusticeChakraborti
research-article2017
Article
388 Criminology & Criminal Justice 18(4)
non-governmental organizations, activists and professionals within and beyond the crim-
inal justice sector. And it has been used to facilitate increased prioritization across disci-
plines, across communities and across borders.
The need for prioritization has become all the more urgent in the context of rising
levels of hate incidents across many parts of the world. Within the UK, the EU referen-
dum result of June 2016 was a catalyst for an upsurge in reports of targeted violence.
More than 14,000 hate crimes were recorded by police forces in England and Wales
between July and September 2016, with three-quarters of forces reporting record levels
of hate crime during that period (BBC News, 2017a). Those figures revealed an increase
in incidents across almost every police force within England and Wales, both year on
year and when comparing the three months either side of the referendum, with 10 force
areas recording a rise of more than 50 per cent. Equally worrying spikes were seen within
the USA following a build-up of tensions during and after the 2016 presidential cam-
paign (Southern Poverty Law Centre, 2016) and across Europe with populist political
parties in countries such as France, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Hungary and the
Netherlands exploiting anti-immigrant sentiment, fuelling the scapegoating of particular
minority groups and stoking up widely held anxieties (BBC News, 2017b; Dearden,
2017).
This growth of hate incidents paints a worrying picture, not least because it is rooted
within a wider, structural process whereby expressions of hate, prejudice and hostility
are used to marginalize ‘difference’ and to sustain hegemonic boundaries. An increas-
ingly extensive body of literature has shown that attacks against the ‘other’ can feed off
economic instability, political scaremongering and media stereotyping to the point where
violence becomes a mechanism used to reinforce power dynamics between dominant
and subordinate groups and to create cultures of fear within alien communities (see, inter
alia, Chakraborti and Garland, 2012; Perry, 2001). Research has also shown how ‘trig-
ger’ events of local, national and international significance can influence the prevalence
and severity of hate incidents within cyberspace and the physical world, thereby height-
ening the vulnerability of many groups and communities at a time when ‘other’ identities
are under greater scrutiny than perhaps ever before (Awan and Zempi, 2017; Chakraborti
and Garland, 2015).
Without question, some significant progress has been made in relation to improving
levels of support for victims1 of hate crime, and this will be considered in due course.
However, this article will show that these developments have been only partially effec-
tive in addressing victims’ needs and lived experiences, and that the damage caused by
hate crime can often be reinforced – and not alleviated – by the continued failures of
policy-makers, practitioners and scholars to respond and engage effectively. Drawing
from a series of recent studies led by the author which elicited the views of more than
2000 victims of hate crime, this article identifies three areas of failure – namely, in rela-
tion to dismantling barriers to reporting, prioritizing meaningful engagement with
diverse communities and delivering meaningful criminal justice interventions – and the
ways in which they can exacerbate the sense of distress felt by victims from a diverse
range of backgrounds and communities. Before turning to these points, the article first
considers the value and limitations of recent developments in policy and scholarship
with regard to addressing the problems associated with hate crime.
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