Hate and hate crimes in society
James E.Hawdon, Matthew Costello · Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2024
This is not an isolated phenomenon or the loud voices of a few people on the fringe of society.Hate is moving into the mainstream-in liberal democracies and authoritarian systems alike.And with each broken norm, the pillars of our common humanity are weakened.Thus, reading newspaper headlines, scouring the data, and listening to experts and governmental officials all lead to a disturbing conclusion: the major trend in hate crimes is that they appear to be increasing, and this increase is especially pronounced in liberal democracies.How did we get here?After years of dominating the world system and unprecedented periods of prosperity, why are Western democracies dealing with increasing levels of hatred toward historically marginalized groups?The answers to such questions are undoubtedly complex and the causes of these trends are many; however, we have gathered 40 scholars to help provide insights to issues surrounding hate and hate crimes in society.Our major objective was to place the study of hate and hate crimes into historic and cross-national perspective.To do so, we offer chapters that address a variety of types of hate-from race-based hate to anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+ hate.In addition, we offer chapters that consider hate and hate crimes in a variety of nations-from France and Finland to Pakistan.We also tackle the complexities of studying and combating hate that emerge from definitional issues as well as issues that hinder intervention strategies.Finally, we include chapters that confront the complex relationship between the state and hate crimes in terms of how these are defined, how they differ from terrorism, and how they differ from harms committed by privileged actors such as corporations and the state itself.The chapters in this book address these issues, but before we turn to these we need to step back and view the current situation with a wider lens.When we take a historic and cross-national view, we notice four features: (1) the hate and extremism of today is predominantly from the right; (2) there are similarities across nations in the types of hate and the groups it targets; (3) hate is reaching vast audiences and doing so faster than ever before; and (4) authorities struggle to combat it.Let us briefly consider each of these features of modern hate. HATE MOVES TO THE RIGHTFirst, the hate and extremism of the early 2020s is dominated by rightwing, hyper-nationalistic rhetoric more than in the past (Hawdon, 2017).This is not to imply the hate of the past was not deeply racist, nativist, misogynistic, anti-Semitic, and anti-LGBTQ, because it was (see, for example, Perry, 2000).There is no doubt that rightwing groups have been a problem throughout much of the nation's history, and this has not changed.However, what has changed is the relative decline of leftwing, anti-systemic extremism in the United States and throughout western Europe (see Miller, 2014;Hawdon, 2017).Looking at data since the early 1990s, Jones, Doxsee, and Harrington (2020) note that the majority of all attacks and plots in the US since 1994 have been from rightwing groups and these attacks and plots have grown substantially in number since 2016 (Jones et al., 2020; Anti-Defamation League, 2023).Much of the recent increase in hate crimes in the United States was due to a dramatic spike in anti-Asian hate (Gover, Harper, & Langton, 2020); however, other forms of rightwing hate that target victims because of their religion, national origin, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, or sex are also common.For example, anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim hate US Department of Justice (2021).Hate crime statistics.www .justice.gov/hatecrimes/ hate -crime -statistics.US Department of Justice (2023).Fact sheet: Justice Department efforts to combat hate crimes.Bureau of Justice Statistics.www .justice.gov/hatecrimes/ spotlight/ combating -hate -crimes.Vergani, M., Navarro, C., Freilich, J. D., & Chermak, S. M. (2021).Comparing different sources of data to examine trends of hate crime in absence of official registers.American Journal of Criminal Justice, 46(3), 445-460.Williams, M. L., Burnap, P., Javed, A., Liu, H., & Ozalp, S. (2020).Hate in the machine: Anti-Black and anti-Muslim social media posts as predictors of offline racially and religiously aggravated crime.