Challenging hate and hate crime

In chapter six we considered a range of explanatory frameworks from across the social sciences that each offered useful, but rather disparate, insights into the possible causes of hate offending. Together with the psychological literature that we explored in chapter five, this collectively provides us with a wealth of information upon which to ponder, and you may well have in your mind a leaning towards a particular explanatory framework that you consider to hold the best hope of finding answers to the problem (assuming, of course, that you believe that a problem indeed exists, but we’ll come back to that particular debate in chapter nine). The issue, though, as we have alluded to elsewhere, is that it is precisely this disparate nature of our existing knowledge that causes us difficulties when we come to formulate practical responses to hate and hate crime. As Stern (2005) points out, our responses to hate and hate crime have

thus far been undertaken across a number of disparate planes simultaneously. To paraphrase his illustration of our use of the various frameworks, our responses are influenced thus; if we think of hate as a mental disorder, then analysis and treatment is considered the cure; if it is economics, then economic recovery is the answer; if political events are the cause, then we need to effect social change; if it is a criminal matter, then we need criminology and an effective criminal justice system; if a lack of education is the underpinning factor, then we should educate; if hate is a product of the individual or the individual in a group context, then we need psychology or social psychology; if it is a product of the social world, the answer is in sociology; if it is caused by culture, then anthropology may come to our rescue; if politics is a causal factor, then let’s turn to political science, and so on. But, as we have already seen, none of these provide comprehensive

explanations by themselves. As a consequence, we have a range of formal responses to hate crime that have different theoretical perspectives underpinning them. The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to explore some of these responses from around the world, and to see what is being done to combat both ‘hate’ and ‘hate crime’.