Overview of Understanding the Harm of Hate Crime

Carolyn Turpin-Petrosino

Greetings/Appreciation:

Good Afternoon. My name is Carolyn Turpin-Petrosino and I am part of the faculty of Bridgewater State College, in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. I am also the co-editor of the JSI issue: Understanding the Harm of Hate Crime. Before I get to my remarks, I just want to thank Representatives Diane Watson and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, and their staff, as well as Shari Miles and SPSSI, for the opportunity to come here and participate in this panel.

How I came to be interested in hate crimes:

Members of minority groups often develop a sixth sense about changes in race relations-particularly those that affect them personally. Therefore, you can understand why, as an African-American, hate crime would get my immediate attention. However, I am not only concerned as a citizen, but also as a social scientist.

I view this behavior as a category of crime that warrants close examination because of its sociological and political significance.

How the Issue Came about:

Because of the receptiveness of the editorial staff at the Journal of Social Issues, my co-editor, Robert Boeckman and myself were given the opportunity to develop an issue dedicated to hate crime research. We elected to focus on the harm aspect of hate crimes. There was and continues to be dialogue concerning the nature of hate crimes and whether such crimes are qualitatively different from non bias motivated crimes particularly in their impact on victims. We had the opportunity to invite researchers from different disciplines who were nevertheless involved in investigating some aspect of the harm of hate crimes.

· The uniqueness of this special issue lies in the application of empirical research-most of the contributors collected original data or reanalyzed secondary data sources in their analyses to examine the nature and impact of hate crime acts upon victims.

· This issue provides a comprehensive legal analysis of the evolution of hate crime legislation which distinguishes it from other published research on hate crimes that fail to set the problem within a broader context.

· The issue contains several innovative studies that measure the magnitude of hate crime victimization upon racial and sexual orientation minorities and women.

· In addition, the issue includes studies on youth susceptibility to hate group recruitment and the identification of motives of hate crime perpetrators. Both represent relatively new areas in hate crime research.

· Moreover, because the issue is multidisciplinary, it provides a variety of different perspectives on this social, legal, and crime problem adding to the veracity of the collective findings.

We chose to identify three broad categories for viewing hate crime harm, including harm as interpreted and responded to by society, perpetrator's perspectives on the origins and motives for their involvement in hate crime, and victim perspectives on their experience of hate crime harm and response to it.

Societal Perspectives discusses the complexity of societal responses to hate crime and other bias motivated acts. It is complex due to our country's evolving social and cultural frameworks that include histories of intolerance, bigotry, and discrimination. In addition there are also many dynamics related to inter-group relations. There is also a lack of congruence between informal and formal social control mechanisms aimed at suppressing and sanctioning expressions of hatred and bigotry.

Perpetrator Perspectives looks at what distinguishes the hate crime perpetrator from other bigots? What characterizes the decision-making processes that lead them to commit hate crime as opposed to being a mere spectator or sympathizer? What are the motives of hate crime perpetrators and how can determining motive help the efforts of law enforcement in prevention and control initiatives? Why are some youth drawn to hate groups? And why does affiliation not occur despite the presence of similar belief systems among some youth?

Lastly Victim Perspectives examines the impact of hate crime and/or hate speech on its targets. Research in this area seeks to inform us on whether hate crime is qualitatively different from other crimes thereby justifying enhanced punishments.

Each of the included studies made policy recommendations that are evidence-based, for example:

A. Studies under Societal Perspectives recommend

(1) The Establishment of community-based public forums - the public must engage in dialogue concerning social values and beliefs. Cowan found support for the idea that values determine attitudes toward public policy. Therefore society must be better informed of how it facilitates hate speech, the consequences of hate speech, and its harmful effects on measures of social equality.

(2) A new emphasis on school-based curricula and value training - beginning in early education, students must be taught the importance of the First & Fourteenth Amendments in the context of protecting the rights of minorities and ensuring a pluralistic society.

And that

(3) Legislatures must strengthen hate crime statutes - there are as many as eight states with no hate crime laws and several others that do not include sexual orientation in their protected categories. Hate crime statutes should be comprehensive and relatively uniform to ensure that civil rights are protected.

B. Studies submitted under Perpetrator Perspectives recommend:

(1) The Establishment of partnerships between local government, local schools, and community-based advocacy groups in order to create initiatives aimed at mitigating or preventing youth attraction to hate groups. Such coalitions should disseminate information to the community regarding the potential threat of hate groups to neighborhood youth; provide input to local law enforcement, prosecutors, and the judiciary on community attitudes regarding options for the disposition of hate crime cases and correctional responses; develop community based programs that advocate tolerance and multiculturalism, and provide periodic reports to the public on the activities of hate groups in the area, noting the frequency of hate crime and bias incidents committed in local schools as well as the community.

(2) The Development, testing, and use of diagnostic tools, such as the typology created by Jack McDevitt and his colleagues, so that law enforcement could become more efficient in identifying hate crime occurrence and the level of culpability of hate crime perpetrators. Hate crime prevention could be more effectively achieved if law enforcement received periodic training on the types of hate crime, noting that retaliatory hate crime must be particularly thwarted.

C. Studies submitted under Victim Perspectives

(1) Confirm that Hate crime statutes and enhanced punishments appear to be justified due to the unique victimization experiences of hate crime victims. Therefore, because these crimes incite terror impacting the victim's sense of security, law enforcement and other officials need to be educated about this quality of the hate crime victims' experience.

(2) Confirm that sexual orientation minorities underreport their hate crime victimization due to fear of insensitive or hostile responses by police or the public. Therefore, law enforcement practitioners need better training in sensitivity toward this victim group.

(3) Recommend that Interview protocols for law enforcement and other officials should involve privacy assurances for hate crime victims.

There are many policy recommendations within the issue that deal with law enforcement, control and prevention initiatives. I would like to add two more that focus on improving the body of knowledge on hate crime phenomena.

First: The neo-Nazi movement is older and more mature in European nations, as a result, European social scientists have a longer history of studying hate crimes. Unfortunately, there are many published works by such scientists that American university libraries and other repositories of studies fail to cite or obtain and thus they remain unknown to American hate crimes researchers. It is recommended that the federal government consider providing funds to create a center for hate crime research to house both studies and raw data from international and domestic research.

Second: The Department of Justice should provide a special solicitation each year to facilitate and support hate crime research.

Thank you.