The latest hate crime statistics are a sharp reminder of the enduring and worsening discrimination and violence experienced by many people from minority communities. Current policies to tackle hate are not working. A new approach is urgently needed.
The most recent hate crime data for England and Wales released in October 2022 by the Home Office showed a 26 per cent overall rise in police-recorded hate crimes compared to 2021 across all ‘protected characteristics’ groups, that is against people in relation to their ‘race’, religious belief, sexuality, transgender identity or disability.
While partly due to people feeling more confident to report and police improvements in recording hate crimes, the rise also reflects a profound malaise in the UK of discriminatory and bigoted attitudes, and the influence of extremist rhetoric. The rise of anonymous online platforms has created new spaces for these views.
After the England men’s football team’s defeat in the European Championship Final in July 2021, Bukayo Saka, a player who had missed a penalty, posted on social media that he ‘knew instantly the kind of hate I was about to receive’. In response, Saka and his teammates received political and public support for a rejection of racist attitudes and behaviour, and some individuals who had posted racist messages were arrested. Yet the hate crime data shows that despite public support for anti-discrimination legislation and policies for equality and inclusion, hate remains prominent in the lives of many communities in the UK.
A radically different understanding of hate is needed to break this impasse, one that can help us to devise responses beyond those offered by the criminal justice system. The starting point is to broaden the perspective of hate incidents to include the contexts, social relations and attitudes within which the incident and response took place. We should be asking questions such as: What happened and where did it take place? How did the victim feel? Why did the perpetrator act in this way? How did others – bystanders and the police – respond? What are the social, political and cultural contexts within which the incident happened?
In our new book, we call these broad contextual perspectives landscapes of hate, as we seek new ways to uncover how discriminatory attitudes and behaviours are embedded in the fabric of our everyday lives and the places in which we live.
The racist social media posts Bukayo Saka received were a personal experience of hate. However, examining the incident within the immediate and broader contextual landscapes is revealing – the ‘high stakes’ of the match, the intense penalty shoot-out, the racialised burdens placed on young Black England footballers, the ‘ordinariness’ of the online perpetrators, and the enduring commonplace racism and dominant ‘populist’ rhetoric around race and immigration. From this, we can begin to better understand the complexity of hate. Beyond a statement from the England manager that such racist abuse is ‘unforgivable’, and the arrest of a small number of offenders, there was little reflection by politicians, media and wider society on the racist attitudes expressed in the posts, and what may lie behind them, nor any real expectation that online abuse of football players would end.
‘Hate’ is a powerful word, conveying direct visceral negative meaning towards individuals, and to a wider social group of which they are assumed to be a part. An incident of hate is always about the situation beyond the individuals affected.
Recognising hate as a social rather than simply an individual problem opens up the possibility of new approaches to tackling and even preventing hate. Landscapes are not fixed. They can be reshaped and reformed by those who occupy them. Some of the most powerful responses to hate have been from those who have been victims or feel they could become victims.
In Landscapes of Hate, several chapters show such resistance, for example, Rick Bowler and Amina Razak’s study of a group of young Black and Global Majority people in north-east England, who experienced commonplace everyday racism. The young people’s responses included ‘speaking back’ to perpetrators, both ‘reactively’ and perhaps even aggressively; ‘proactively’ seeking to educate and challenge racist attitudes and behaviour; and using sport and community social events to ‘see beyond’ dominant racist attitudes. But this is not easy; individuals and communities can only do so much.
Community Safety Partnerships, with the police working with local authorities and other agencies, are a common way of organising responses to hate in local areas. They are potentially well positioned to recognise and respond to the many and complex factors that can lead to the emergence of hate beyond issues of criminal justice. However, their ability to intervene is often constrained by lack of resources and the tendency for the police to drive the agenda of the partnerships.
It is important to recognise the central role of government rhetoric and policy – often amplified by the media – in generating the atmosphere within which hateful attitudes can emerge and be legitimised. For example, hate-crime statistics show spikes in reporting around the 2016 Brexit referendum, austerity-driven restrictions to disabled people’s access to welfare benefits, the creation of a ‘hostile environment’ for migrants and toxic debates about legal protections for transgender people.
The rise in reported hate crimes suggests that legislative and policy responses to hate are not working. In Landscapes of Hate, we call for a shift from a narrow criminal justice response to hate, to addressing the social and political factors that generate hate. Laws and the actions of the police are crucial, but to really tackle hate in our society, we must create conditions within which hate is unable to thrive.
Edward Hall is Reader in Human Geography at the University of Dundee. @DrEdHall1 @Geog_UoD
John Clayton is Assistant Professor of Human Geography at Northumbria University. @JohnClayton78 @NUGeog
Catherine Donovan is Professor of Sociology at Durham University. @DurhamSociology
Landscapes of Hate: Tracing Spaces, Relations and Responses edited by Edward Hall, John Clayton and Catherine Donovan is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £80.00.
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