Hate Crimes

[First paragraph] Hate crime’ is a politically and socially significant term that cuts across disciplines, across communities and across borders. With problems of bigotry continuing to pose challenges for societies across the world, a growth in hate crime scholarship and policy has promoted collective awareness of extreme and ‘everyday’ acts of hate alongside collective action amongst a range of different actors including law-makers, law-enforcers, nongovernmental organisations and activists. The need for such action is clear in the context of a now substantial body of empirical evidence that demonstrates the multiple layers of harm associated with hate crimes (Iganski, 2001; Perry, 2001; Walters, 2011). These harms cause both physical and emotional damage, and have been described by the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR; 2009) as harms which violate human rights between members of society; intensify the level of psychological hurt experienced by the individual victim; transmit an increased sense of fear and intimidation to the wider community to whom the victim ‘belongs’; and which create security and public order problems as a result of escalating social tensions.