Another reason for the underreporting of hate crimes is the difficulty of identifying an incident as having been provoked by bias.

Racial hatred

By far the largest determinant of hate crimes is racial bias, with African Americans the group at greatest risk. In 1996, 4,831 out of the 7,947 such crimes reported to the FBI, or 60%, were promulgated because of race, with close to two-thirds (62%) targeting African Americans. Furthermore, the type of crime committed against this group has not changed much since the 19th century; it still includes bombing and vandalizing churches, burning crosses on home lawns, and murder.

Among the other racially motivated crimes, about 25% were committed against white people, 7% against Asian Pacific Americans, slightly less than 5% against multiracial groups, and 1% against Native Americans and Alaskan Natives.

Ethnic minorities in the United States often become targets of hate crimes because they are perceived to be new to the country even if their families have been here for generations, or simply because they are seen as different from the mainstream population. In the first case, ethnic minorities can fall victim to anti-immigrant bias that includes a recurrent preoccupation with "nativism" (i.e., policies favoring people born in the United States), resentment when so-called "immigrants" succeed (often related to a fear of losing jobs to newcomers), and disdain or anger when they act against the established norm. In the second case, negative stereotypes of certain ethnic groups or people of a certain nationality can fuel antagonism.

Hispanics. People from Latin America are increasingly targets of bias-motivated crimes. Of 814 hate crimes in 1995 motivated by bias based on ethnicity or national origin, the FBI found that 63.3% (or 516) were directed against Hispanics, often because of their immigration status.

Attacks on Hispanics have a particularly long history in California and throughout the Southwest where, during recurring periods of strong anti-immigrant sentiment, both new immigrants and long-time U.S. citizens of Mexican descent were blamed for social and economic problems and harassed or deported en masse.

Asian Pacific Americans. Bias against Asian Pacific Americans, which is increasing today, is long-standing. The Chinese Exclusion Act passed in 1882 barred Chinese laborers from entering this country. Along with trepidation that these workers would take jobs away was the feeling expressed by one Senator during the Congressional debate and reported in Chronicles of the 20th Century, that members of this group "do not harmonize with us." The act was not repealed until 1943. Moreover, although the act specifically referred to the Chinese, Japanese people were also affected because most people could not tell the two groups apart. To this day, according to the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, hostility against one Asian Pacific American group can spill over onto another.

In May 1997, a 62-year-old Korean American woman, in the United States since 1939, was attacked on a San Francisco street and her hip was broken. The man who assailed her thought she was Chinese.

According to the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium, 461 anti-Asian incidents were reported in 1995, 2% more than in 1994 and 38% more than in 1993. Moreover, the violence of the incidents increased dramatically; aggravated assaults rose by 14%, and two murders and one firebombing took place. The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and other experts in the field find that present-day resentment is frequently fueled by the stereotype that Asian Pacific Americans are harder-working, more successful academically, and more affluent than most other Americans.

Arab Americans. Another growing immigrant group experiencing an upsurge in hate crime, largely as a result of Middle East crises and the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, are people of Arab descent. Often they are blamed for incidents to which they have no connection. The hate crimes following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which included murder and beatings, were directed at Arabs solely because they shared or were perceived as sharing the national background of the hijackers responsible for attacking the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Most religiously motivated hate crimes are acts of vandalism, although personal attacks are not uncommon. The overwhelming majority (82% in 1996) are directed against Jews, states the FBI. The 781 acts of vandalism that year represent a 7% increase from 1995. However, acts of harassment, threat, or assault went down by 15%, to 941, from a total of 1,116, a decline that the Anti-Defamation League attributes to stronger enforcement of the law and heightened educational outreach.

Most of the property crimes involve vandalism. In 1997, for example, SS lightning bolts and swastikas were among the anti-Semitic graffiti discovered in Hebrew and Yiddish books in the University of Chicago library, and an explosive device was detonated at the door of a Jewish center in New York City. But personal assaults against Jews are not uncommon. That same year, two men with a BB gun entered a Wisconsin synagogue and started shooting during morning prayers. In 1995 in Cincinnati, a gang member revealed that one of the victims of his group's initiation ceremony was chosen just because he was Jewish.

People of other religions in the United States also experience hate crimes. The FBI reported a seventeen-fold increase in anti-Muslim crimes nationwide during 2001, largely due to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Muslims were also victims of harassment in the period immediately following the bombing of the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City; an Iraqi refugee in her mid-20's miscarried her near-term baby after an attack on her home in which unknown assailants screaming anti-Islamic epithets broke the window and pounded on her door, reports the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.

Gender-based violence is a significant social and historical problem, with women the predominant victims. Only recently, however, have these acts of violence been characterized as hate crimes. The Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 1998 would make gender a category of bias-motivated crime.

Except for crimes against homosexuals, the federal Hate Crimes Statistics Act does not collect data on gender. However, a recent national survey found that 7.2 of every 1,000 women each year are victims of rape. In testimony for a Congressional hearing on domestic violence, University of Maryland psychology professor Dr. Lisa Goodman reported that two decades of research indicates that at least two million women in the United States may be the victims of severe assaults by their male partners in an average 12-month period. At least 21% of all women are physically assaulted by an intimate male at least once during adulthood. More than half of all women (52%) murdered in the United States in the first half of the 1980s were killed by their partners.

The more violence a woman experiences, the more she suffers from psychological distress that spills over into many areas of life. Most violence against women is not committed during random encounters but by a current or former male partner. Exposed to attacks and threats over and over again, victims often live with increasing levels of isolation and terror. Typical long-term effects of male violence in an intimate adult relationship are low self-esteem, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder. These problems are compounded by psychophysiological complaints such as gastrointestinal problems, severe headaches, and insomnia.

The most socially acceptable, and probably the most widespread, form of hate crime among teenagers and young adults are those targeting sexual minorities, says Dr. Franklin. She has identified four categories of assaulters involved in such crimes, as follows:

• Ideology assailants report that their crimes stem from their negative beliefs and attitudes about homosexuality that they perceive other people in the community share. They see themselves as enforcing social morals.
• Thrill seekers are typically adolescents who commit assaults to alleviate boredom, to have fun and excitement, and to feel strong.
• Peer-dynamics assailants also tend to be adolescents; they commit assaults in an effort to prove their toughness and heterosexuality to friends.
• Self-defense assailants typically believe that homosexuals are sexual predators and say they were responding to aggressive sexual propositions.

Lesbian and gay victims suffer more serious psychological effects from hate crimes than they do from other kinds of criminal injury. In their case, the association between vulnerability and sexual orientation is particularly harmful. This is because sexual identity is such an important part of one's self-concept.

Of nearly 2,000 gay and lesbian people surveyed in Sacramento, California, by Dr. Herek, roughly one-fifth of the women and one-fourth of the men reported being the victim of a hate crime since age 16. One woman in eight and one man in six had been victimized within the last 5 years. More than half the respondents reported antigay verbal threats and harassment in the year before the survey.

Congress amended the Hate Crimes Statistics Act in 1994 to add disabilities as a category for which hate crimes data are to be collected. Because the FBI only began collecting statistics on disability bias in 1997, results are not yet available. However, we know from social science research that the pervasive stigma that people apply to both mental and physical disability is expressed in many forms of discriminatory behaviors and practices, including increased risk for sexual and physical abuse.

The Judge David L. Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, a national organization representing low-income adults and children with mental disabilities, holds that such hate crimes are motivated by the perception that people with disabilities are not equal, deserving, contributing members of society, and, therefore, it is okay to attack them.