ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by looking at how criminologists writing from a range of different perspectives have tried to answer the “why” question. Criminological writing about perpetrators has largely shied away from attempting to answer the “why” question. The most cited works tend to be typological, or otherwise largely descriptive, profiles derived from secondary analyses of police incident data. In failing to grapple with how offenders’ motives resonate with the contradictory mixture of popular prejudices, historically ingrained ideas about race and belonging, and contemporary concerns about nationality, entitlement and migration, typological approaches tend to oversimplify the distinctions between perpetrators and non-perpetrators. In exposing the feelings of inadequacy contemporary racism so often conceals, some UK based researchers have offered a more humanizing perspective on the aetiology of hate crime. Local racist incident data for Stoke-on-Trent suggested that, by 2003, refugees and asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iraqi Kurdistan were experiencing even higher rates of victimization than the Pakistani and Bangladeshi populations.
