Hate Crimes Today:
An Age-Old Foe
In Modern Dress
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Links
How much hate crime is out there?
What is the emotional damage?
Why do people commit hate crimes?
Racial hatred
Resentment of ethnic minorities
Religious discrimination
Gender-based bias
Disdain of gay men and lesbians
Scorn of people with disabilities
Does the economy play a part?
Is there anything we can do?
Bibliography |
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Hate crimes--violent acts against people, property, or
organizations because of the group to which they belong or identify with--are a tragic
part of American history. However, it wasn't until early in this decade that the federal
government began to collect data on how many and what kind of hate crimes are being
committed, and by whom. Thus, the statistical history on hate crimes is meager.
Psychological studies are also fairly new. Nevertheless, scientific research is beginning
to yield some good perspectives on the general nature of crimes committed because of real
or perceived differences in race, religion, ethnicity or national origin, sexual
orientation, disability, or gender. According to the FBI, about 30% of hate crimes in
1996, the most recent year for which figures are available, were crimes against property.
They involved robbing, vandalizing, destroying, stealing, or setting fire to vehicles,
homes, stores, or places of worship.
About 70% involve an attach against a person. The offense can range from simple assault
(i.e., no weapon is involved) to aggravated assault, rape, and murder. This kind of attack
takes place on two levels; not only is it an attack on one's physical self, but it is also
an attack on one's very identity. |
Who commits hate crimes?
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Many people perceive hate crime perpetrators as crazed,
hate-filled neo-Nazis or "skinheads". But research by Dr. Edward Dunbar, a
clinical psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, reveals that of 1,459
hate crimes committed in the Los Angeles area in the period 1994 to 1995, fewer than 5% of
the offenders were members of organized hate groups. Most hate crimes are carried out
by otherwise law-abiding young people who see little wrong with their actions. Alcohol and
drugs sometimes help fuel these crimes, but the main determinant appears to be personal
prejudice, a situation that colors people's judgment, blinding the aggressors to the
immorality of what they are doing. Such prejudice is most likely rooted in an environment
that disdains someone who is "different" or sees that difference as threatening.
One expression of this prejudice is the perception that society sanctions attacks on
certain groups. For example, Dr. Karen Franklin, a forensic psychology fellow at the
Washington Institute for Mental Illness Research and Training, has found that, in some
settings, offenders perceive that they have societal permission to engage in violence
against homosexuals.
Extreme hate crimes tend to be committed by
people with a history of antisocial behavior. One of the most heinous examples took place
in June 1998 in Jasper, Texas. Three men with jail records offered a ride to a black man
who walked with a limp. After beating the victim to death, they dragged him behind their
truck until his body was partially dismembered.
Researchers have concluded that hate crimes are not necessarily random, uncontrollable,
or inevitable occurrences. There is overwhelming evidence that society can intervene to
reduce or prevent many forms of violence, especially among young people, including the
hate-induced violence that threatens and intimidates entire categories of people. |
How much hate crime is
out there? Back to top |
Educated "guesstimates" of the prevalence of hate crimes are
difficult because of state-by-state differences in the way such crimes are defined and
reported. Federal law enforcement officials have only been compiling nationwide hate crime
statistics since 1991, the year after the Hate Crimes Statistics Act was enacted. Before
passage of the act, hate crimes were lumped together with such offenses as homicide,
assault, rape, robbery, and arson. In 1996, law enforcement agencies in 49 states and
the District of Columbia reported 8,759 bias-motivated criminal offenses to the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, the federal government agency mandated by Congress to gather the
statistics. However, points out the FBI, these data must be approached with caution.
Typically, data on hate crimes collected by social scientists and such groups as the
Anti-Defamation League, the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium, and the
National Gay and Lesbian Task Force show a higher prevalence of hate crime than do federal
statistics.
The Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 1998,
introduced in both the House (H.R. 3081) and Senate (S. 1529), seeks to expand federal
jurisdiction over hate crimes by (1) allowing federal authorities to investigate all
possible hate crimes, not only those where the victim was engaged in a federally protected
activity such as voting, going to school, or crossing state lines; and (2) expanding the
categories that are currently covered by hate crimes legislation to include gender, sexual
orientation, and disability.
As with most other offenses, reporting hate crimes is voluntary on the part of the
local jurisdictions. Some states started submitting data only recently, and not all
jurisdictions within states are represented in their reports.
In addition, time frames for reporting are uneven, ranging from one month to an entire
year, depending on the jurisdiction. In 1996, only 16% of law enforcement agencies
reported any hate crimes in their regions. Eighty-four percent of participating
jurisdictions-including states with well-documented histories of racial prejudice-reported
zero hate crimes.
Another obstacle to gaining an accurate count of hate crimes is the reluctance of many
victims to report such attacks. In fact, they are much less likely than other victims to
report crimes to the police, despite-or perhaps because of-the fact that they can
frequently identify the perpetrators. This reluctance often derives from the trauma the
victim experiences, as well as a fear of retaliation.
In a study of gay men and lesbians by Dr. Gregory M. Herek, a psychologist at the
University of California, Davis, and his colleagues, Drs. Jeanine Cogan and Roy Gillis,
about one-third of the hate crime victims reported the incident to law enforcement
authorities, compared with two-thirds of gay and lesbian victims of nonbias crimes. Dr.
Dunbar, who studies hate crime in Los Angeles County, has found that victims of severe
hate acts (e.g., aggravated and sexual assaults) are the least likely of all hate-crime
victims to notify law enforcement agencies, often out of fear of future contact with the
perpetrators.
It also appears that some people do not report hate crimes because of fear that the
criminal justice system is biased against the group to which the victim belongs and,
consequently, that law enforcement authorities will not be responsive. The National
Council of La Raza holds that Hispanics often do not report hate crimes because of
mistrust of the police.
Another reason for the underreporting of hate crimes is the difficulty of identifying
an incident as having been provoked by bias. |
What is the emotional damage?
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Intense feelings of vulnerability, anger, and depression, physical
ailments and learning problems, and difficult interpersonal relations-all symptoms of
posttraumatic stress disorder-can be brought on by a hate crime. Dr. Herek and his
colleagues found that some hate crime victims have needed as much as 5 years to overcome
their ordeal. By contrast, victims of nonbias crimes experienced a decrease in
crime-related psychological problems within 2 years of the crime. Like other victims of
posttraumatic stress, hate crime victims may heal more quickly when appropriate support
and resources are made available soon after the incident occurs. |
Why do people commit hate crimes?
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Hate crimes are message crimes, according to Dr. Jack McDevitt, a
criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston. They are different from other crimes
in that the offender is sending a message to members of a certain group that they are
unwelcome in a particular neighborhood, community, school, or workplace. 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.
Resentment
of ethnic minorities
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.
Religious
discrimination
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
bias
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.
Disdain of
gay men and lesbians
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.
Scorn of
people with disabilities
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. |
Does the economy
play a part? Back to top |
Although racial and ethnic tensions are thought to increase during
economic downswings, Dr. Donald P. Green, a political scientist at Yale University, has
found that a weak economy does not necessarily result in an increase in hate crimes. His
analysis of past incidents shows scant evidence that lynchings of black people in the
pre-Depression South increased "in response to downturns in cotton prices or general
economic conditions." Monthly hate crime statistics gathered by the Bias Crime Unit of
the New York City Police Department show similar results: High unemployment does not give
rise to hate crimes "regardless of whether we speak of black, Latino, Jewish, Asian,
gay and lesbian, or white victims," according to Green. However, one form of
economic change that may set the stage for racist hate crimes occurs when minorities first
move into an ethnically homogeneous area. According to Dr. Green, the resulting violent
reaction seems to be based on a visceral aversion to social change. The offenders
frequently justify the use of force to preserve what they see as their disappearing,
traditional way of life. The more rapid the change, holds Dr. Green, the more likely
violence will occur.
The 1980s, for example, witnessed the rapid disappearance of homogeneous white enclaves
within large cities, with an attendant surge in urban hate crimes. A classic example is
the Canarsie neighborhood in Brooklyn, which was primarily white until large numbers of
nonwhites arrived. The influx led to a rash of hate crimes.
Conversely, says Dr. Green, integrated neighborhoods, sometimes characterized as
cauldrons of racial hostility, tend to have lower rates of hate crime than neighborhoods
on the verge of integration. |
Is there anything we can
do? Back to top |
Because of insufficient information on the extent of hate crimes, it is
likely that many law enforcement agencies and communities are not taking the necessary
steps to stamp out these violations of law and order. It is also likely that only a small
percentage of hate crime victims receive the medical and mental health services that
public and nonprofit agencies make available to victims of violent crime; thus, their pain
and suffering is more likely to become a heavy burden and last many years longer than is
typical for other crime victims. The American Psychological Association, therefore, has
urged that Congress undertake the following actions:
- Support federal antidiscrimination laws, statutes, and regulations that ensure full
legal protection against discrimination and hate-motivated violence. Most important, enact
the Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 1998.
- Increase support of the Community Relations Service (CRS), an arm of the Department of
Justice that works with local officials to resolve racial and ethnic conflicts and is
often seen as the federal government's peacemaker.
Law enforcement officials, community leaders,
educators, researchers, and policymakers must work together to halt hate crimes. Failure
to enforce the law against these crimes leaves entire groups of people feeling isolated
and vulnerable.
- Support programs that offer training for police and victim-assistance professionals on
early intervention techniques that help hate crime victims better cope with trauma. The
curriculum could be similar to one developed by the CRS.
- Encourage communities to launch educational efforts aimed at dispelling minority
stereotypes, reducing hostility between groups, and encouraging broader intercultural
understanding and appreciation. Specifically, according to Dr. Franklin, it is important
that school administrators, school boards, and classroom teachers constantly confront
harassment and denigration of those who are different. Antibias teaching should start in
early childhood and continue through high school. Teachers must also know that they have
the backing of administrators and school board members to intervene against incidents of
bias whether inside the school or on the playground.
For more information, contact the following organizations.
The Community Relations Service, Department of Justice, is the only federal agency
whose primary task is to help communities respond appropriately to organized hate groups.
It was created by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. CRS helps prevent and resolve
communitywide conflict stemming from race, color, and national origin. Its staff provides
mediation and conciliation, technical assistance, training for law enforcement personnel,
public education and awareness, and contingency planning for potentially provocative
events. In 1996, the agency helped resolve 800 cases of conflict in all 50 states.
Community Relations Service (CRS)
U.S. Department of Justice
Second and Chestnut Street, #208
Philadelphia, PA 19106
215/597-2344
The Office for Victims of Crime, Department of Justice, gives grants to states to
provide victim assistance and victim compensation in the event of a hate crime. Upon the
request of a state, the Office will also send out a response team from one of its eight
regional offices to help.
Office for Victims of Crime
U.S. Department of Justice
810 Seventh St., NW
Washington DC 20531
202/307-5983 |
|
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Read other APA Position Papers |