Racial Harassment and the Process of Victimization

THIS PAPER AROSE FROM reflection upon the value and shortcomings of a local survey of racial violence commissioned by the Home Office in 1989 as part of the North Plaistow Racial Harassment Project (Bowling and Saulsbury 1992; Saulsbury and Bowling 1991). ¹ The project aimed to develop joint police, community, and local authority strategics to combat racial violence. It employed a problem-solving approach consisting of problem description, initiative development, implementation, and evaluation. Two components of the problem description phase were agency-based: an analysis of official records and interviews with local officers. A third component was a victimization survey based on the methodology of earlier surveys such as the Newham Crime Survey (London Borough of Newham 1987) and the 1988 British Crime Survey (see Mayhew et al. 1989). Rather than researching crime in general, it focused solely on racially motivated attacks and harassment.