ABSTRACT
As we noted in chapter two, Bowling (1999) suggests that academic and professional interest in issues of race and racism in relation to crime (and therefore, by analogy, the emergence of ‘pre-Lawrence’ interest in hate crime) can be traced back to the early 1980s in the UK through two key events. The first was the urban riots of 1981, most notably in Brixton, south London, that saw the emergence of race, prejudice and discrimination as significant social issues. The second was the re-emergence of victimology in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a significant social science in its own right, and the subsequent development of social surveys that for the first time began to provide a wealth of data relating to the plight of the victim, and in particular the disproportionate victimisation of certain minority groups. Together, these two events served to ensure that the victim was placed at
the centre of the criminal justice, criminological and political focus – a situation that largely remains to date. Whilst this is of course absolutely right and the victim of any crime should be of central concern to all parties in the criminal justice system, this focus on the victim has meant that the perpetrator as an actor in the equation has hitherto been largely ignored. This is particularly true for perpetrators of hate crime and poses something of a problem for our understanding of this form of offending behaviour. The following two quotes from Ben Bowling, which as we shall see still resonate today, adequately outline the consequent challenges facing those seeking to explain hate motivated offending as a result of the predominantly victimoriented focus. First:
There has been almost no research on perpetrators. Whilst the most basic of descriptions have been formulated, they remain something of an effigy in the criminological literature … The perpetrator is unknown and, consequently, the possibility for any understanding or interpretation of his or her behaviour becomes impossible.
