Why do we know every gory crime scene detail about such victims as Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. and yet almost nothing about the vast majority of other hate crime victims? Now that federal anti-hate-crimes laws have been passed, why has the number of these crimes not declined significantly? To answer such questions, Clara S. Lewis challenges us to reconsider our understanding of hate crimes. In doing so, she raises startling issues about the trajectory of civil and minority rights. Tough on Hate is the first book to examine the cultural politics of hate crimes both within and beyond the law. Drawing on a wide range of sources—including personal interviews, unarchived documents, television news broadcasts, legislative debates, and presidential speeches—the book calls attention to a disturbing irony: the sympathetic attention paid to certain shocking hate crime murders further legitimizes an already pervasive unwillingness to act on the urgent civil rights issues of our time. Worse still, it reveals the widespread acceptance of ideas about difference, tolerance, and crime that work against future progress on behalf of historically marginalized communities.

This edited collection brings together many of the world's leading experts, both academic and practitioner, in a single volume handbook that examines key international issues in the field of hate crime. Collectively it examines a range of pertinent areas with the ultimate aim of providing a detailed picture of the hate crime 'problem' in different parts of the world. The book is divided into four parts: An examination, covering theories and concepts, of issues relating to definitions of hate crime, the individual and community impacts of hate crime, the controversies of hate crime legislation, and theoretical approaches to understanding offending. An exploration of the international geography of hate, in which each chapter examines a range of hate crime issues in different parts of the world, including the UK, wider Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand. Reflections on a number of different perspectives across a range of key issues in hate crime, examining areas including particular issues affecting different victim groups, the increasingly important influence of the Internet, and hate crimes in sport. A discussion of a range of international efforts being utilised to combat hate and hate crime. Offering a strong international focus and comprehensive coverage of a wide range of hate crime issues, this book is an important contribution to hate crime studies and will be essential reading for academics, students and practitioners interested in this field.

​​​​​​This Brief provides a clearly outlined and accessible overview of the challenges in creating and enforcing hate crime legislation in the United States. As the author explains, while it is generally not controversial that hate crime behavior should be stopped, the question of how to do so effectively is complex. This volume begins with an introduction about defining hate crimes, and the history of hate crimes and hate crime legislation in the United States. The author shows arguments in favor of hate crime statutes, for example: hate crimes reach beyond their victims to members of the victims’ protected group and cohesion of society at large, and should therefore carry higher penalties.The author also shows arguments against hate crime statutes, for example that they sometimes contain enhanced penalties for certain specially protected groups and not others, and have a high potential for ambiguity and uneven enforcement. From a law enforcement perspective, the author explores the practical challenges in enforcing these statutes, and solutions to address them. Investigative techniques and resources vary significantly across police departments, as does training to identify and distinguish hate crimes from ordinary crimes. There is high potential for law enforcement and prosecutors’ personal biases to effect the classification of crimes as hate crimes. Law enforcement organizations are constantly faced with the dilemma of what and how to enforce legislation. This brief will be relevant for researchers in criminology and criminal justice, policy makers involved in hate crime legislation, social justice, and police-community relations, as well as related fields such as sociology, public policy and demography.​

The policy makers that govern responses to hate crimes and the institutions that research those crimes have up to this point been separate: policy makers have not taken research into consideration, and researchers have conducted their studies with little reference to policies. This book bridges the gap between the two by bringing together internationally renowned hate crime experts from the domains of academia, policy making, and activism. The contributors provide new perspectives on the nature of hate crimes, their victims, and their perpetrators, exploring a range of themes, challenges, and solutions that have otherwise received little attention. The result is a collection of innovative ways of combating hate crime that combines cutting-edge research with the latest in professional innovations, while remaining accessible to a wide audience.

In addressing a timely set of questions about the politics and dynamics of inter-group violence manifest as discrimination, this volume explores such issues as why injuries against some groups of people (Jews, people of color, gays and lesbians, and, sometimes, women, and those with disabilities) capture notice, while similar acts of bias-motivated violence against others continue to go unnoticed. Throughout, the authors develop a compelling argument about the social processes through which new social problems emerge, social policy is developed and diffused, and new cultural forms are institutionalized.

Although victimization of lesbians and gay men is not a new problem, its severity appears to be increasing. After several decades of denial and neglect, the problem of anti-gay violence has begun to receive some measure of societal recognition and response. Not only the lesbian and gay male communit.

In the early 1980s, a new category of crime appeared in the criminal law lexicon. In response to concerted advocacy-group lobbying, Congress and many state legislatures passed a wave of "hate crime" laws requiring the collection of statistics on, and enhancing the punishment for, crimes motivated by certain prejudices. This book places the evolution of the hate crime concept in socio-legal perspective. James B. Jacobs and Kimberly Potter adopt a skeptical if not critical stance, maintaining that legal definitions of hate crime are riddled with ambiguity and subjectivity. No matter how hate crime is defined, and despite an apparent media consensus to the contrary, the authors find no evidence to support the claim that the United States is experiencing a hate crime epidemic--instead, they cast doubt on whether the number of hate crimes is even increasing. The authors further assert that, while the federal effort to establish a reliable hate crime accounting system has failed, data collected for this purpose have led to widespread misinterpretation of the state of intergroup relations in this country. The book contends that hate crime as a socio-legal category represents the elaboration of an identity politics now manifesting itself in many areas of the law. But the attempt to apply the anti-discrimination paradigm to criminal law generates problems and anomalies. For one thing, members of minority groups are frequently hate crime perpetrators. Moreover, the underlying conduct prohibited by hate crime law is already subject to criminal punishment. Jacobs and Potter question whether hate crimes are worse or more serious than similar crimes attributable to other anti-social motivations. They also argue that the effort to single out hate crime for greater punishment is, in effect, an effort to punish some offenders more seriously simply because of their beliefs, opinions, or values, thus implicating the First Amendment. Advancing a provocative argument in clear and persuasive terms, Jacobs and Potter show how the recriminalization of hate crime has little (if any) value with respect to law enforcement or criminal justice. Indeed, enforcement of such laws may exacerbate intergroup tensions rather than eradicate prejudice.

“Amid the ugly realities of contemporary America, American Hate affirms our courage and inspiration, opening a roadmap to reconciliation by means of the victims' own words.” —NPR Books “The collection offers possible solutions for how people, on their own or working with others, can confront hate.” —San Francisco Chronicle An NPR Best Book of 2018 A San Francisco Chronicle Books Pick One of Bitch Media's “13 Books Feminists Should Read in August” One of Paste Magazine's “The 10 Best Books of August 2018” A moving and timely collection of testimonials from people impacted by hate before and after the 2016 presidential election In American Hate: Survivors Speak Out, Arjun Singh Sethi, a community activist and civil rights lawyer, chronicles the stories of individuals affected by hate. In a series of powerful, unfiltered testimonials, survivors tell their stories in their own words and describe how the bigoted rhetoric and policies of the Trump administration have intensified bullying, discrimination, and even violence toward them and their communities. We hear from the family of Khalid Jabara, who was murdered in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in August 2016 by a man who had previously harassed and threatened them because they were Arab American. Sethi brings us the story of Jeanette Vizguerra, an undocumented mother of four who took sanctuary in a Denver church in February 2017 because she feared deportation under Trump's cruel immigration enforcement regime. Sethi interviews Taylor Dumpson, a young black woman who was elected student body president at American University only to find nooses hanging across campus on her first day in office. We hear from many more people impacted by the Trump administration, including Native, black, Arab, Latinx, South Asian, Southeast Asian, Muslim, Jewish, Sikh, undocumented, refugee, transgender, queer, and people with disabilities. A necessary book for these times, American Hate explores this tragic moment in U.S. history by empowering survivors whose voices white supremacists and right-wing populist movements have tried to silence. It also provides ideas and practices for resistance that all of us can take to combat hate both now and in the future.

The author examines the controversies surrounding cyber-harassment, arguing that it should be considered a matter for civil rights law and that social norms of decency and civility must be leveraged to stop it. --Publisher information.

Violent and sometimes fatal acts of racial hatred are drawing increasing attention around the nation. Asian American and Asian Canadian authors discuss the impacts of racial crime, exploring the relationship between the physical or verbal acts to issues of ethnic identity, civil rights of immigrants, Internet racism, sexual violence, language and violence, economic scapegoating, and police brutality. They offer suggestions for combating hate crime with coalition building and community resisatnce, as well as legal prosecution and police training. The compelling narratives are a valuable resource for courses in Asian American studies, race and ethnic studies, sociology, criminology, and for anyone who wants to understand racial violence in North America. Visit our website for sample chapters!