Hate Crimes

Full props go to More Inches for the thought-provoking blog An Army of Lovers Cannot Loose, an account of trans- and homophobic hate violence in Scandinavia. It astonishes me, because I always thought those Scandinavian countries were more liberal, more tolerant. I suppose not.

But it did make me wonder, what are the various statistics for the UK and the US?

Hate Crime in the UK:

Hatred is a strong term that goes beyond simply causing offence or hostility. Hate crime is any criminal offence committed against a person or property that is motivated by an offender's hatred of someone because of their:

-disability
-race
-religion or belief
-sexual orientation
-transgender.

Hate crime can take many forms including:

-physical attacks – such as physical assault, damage to property, offensive graffiti, neighbour disputes and arson
-threat of attack – including offensive letters, abusive or obscene telephone calls, groups hanging around to intimidate and unfounded, malicious complaints
-verbal abuse or insults - offensive leaflets and posters, abusive gestures, dumping of rubbish outside homes or through letterboxes, and bullying at school or in the workplace.

Our definition of a hate crime:

any incident, which constitutes a criminal offence, which is perceived by the victim or any other person as being motivated by prejudice or hate.

Hate Crime in the US:

A hate crime, also known as a bias crime, is a criminal offense committed against a person, property, or society that is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin.

Major differences include that the UK includes "transgender" (is this different than sexual orientation?) and the US includes ethicity/national origin (which covers more than just race).

Various statistics are available from the US' FBI publication Hate Crime Statistics. The 2004 report breaks down the hate crimes by motivation: 1197 out of 7649 incidents (15.6%)were motivated by sexual orientation. They further break down those incidents by specific type.

Transgender is not included, perhaps justifying the British addition of the term.

While the UK Home Office does count hate crimes, in their statistics, they only reveal "racially or religiously aggravated" crimes (in their England and Wales statistics). I do not know how many sexual orientation hate crimes are carried out per year in the UK. They claim that "most homophobic offenders are aged 16-20", but information backing this data up is difficult to locate. Even Galop, a group working to stop homophobic hate crime in London, does not readily have available statistics on incidents. The entire point of groups such as Galop is to point out the difference between the crimes that happen (what Galop studies) and the crimes that are reported/convicted (what the Home Office reports). If the Home Office does not provide the statistics necessary for comparison, then Galop is basically making things up. Which doesn't do a lot of good. More work needs to be done to get these statistics out into the open in the UK.