NCJ Number
142387
Date Published
1993
Length
25 pages
Annotation
This review of the dynamics of hate crimes and responses to them discusses law enforcement bias, legislative responses to hate crime, the history of hate crimes legislation, motivation in bias incidents, the targets of bias, and the emotional aftermath of bias incidents.
Abstract
The different kinds of brutalization prompted by race, religion, or sexual orientation have much in common historically and psychologically. What they seem to share is their relationship to dominant contemporary concepts of social normalcy and moral acceptability. Bias incidents and hate crimes must be viewed within the context of the kinds of imagery they mobilize within groups of people who are the victims and the victimizers. Bias crimes also reflect individuals' sense of involvement, however twisted, in specific events. The inner state of rage, despair, collapse, or recovery retains its importance in connection with, and not in isolation from, social, communal contexts. In this sense, the historical record of events has considerable importance for the individual's continuing life processes. This importance is magnified by individuals' need to formulate and render significant their victimization as they victimize others. The current interest in addressing hate crimes is not so much because of the number of such crimes but because of the harmony between the rhetoric of militant civil rights activist groups and the ways in which public problems are now conceived. There is a clearer relationship between the focus on the prejudicial motives of the offender and the political rhetoric of racism, primarily because victim groups are committed to document this phenomena. Also, hate crimes cannot be solely defined as a law enforcement problem. They engage larger social, economic, and political forces that go beyond the resources and capabilities of the law enforcement community. 26 references and a chart of the contents of State hate-crime legislation