Hatred of Youth: Determinants of Far-Right Incidents Perpetrated by Minors

• In Event: Poster Session: Race, Ethnicity, and Politics II

Abstract

Recent studies show that hate crimes are on the rise across the United States, and that many perpetrators are committing them spontaneously without being associated with active hate groups or having criminal records. This problem is even more concerning in regards to juvenile offenders. The 2020 NCVS survey found that youths age 12 to 17 account for seventeen percent of hate crime victims, even though they only made up nine percent of the population. The 2020 UCR found that over half of reported hate crimes committed by juveniles are committed on basis of race/ethnicity. And a 2021 report from the Government Accountability Office found that hate crimes in school doubled between 2015-2018.
Criminologists have long considered that geographical conditions may drive hate crimes. We follow that tradition with use of social disorganization theory and situational action theory, which argue that residential instability, ethnic diversity, family disruption, economic status, population density, and proximity to urban areas all influence criminal behavior. We argue that areas that are rapidly diversifying create a significant culture shift that affects residential stability, ethnic diversity, economic status and population density and that residents can react to this shift violently by committing hate crimes. We further previous work of Perliger & Sweeny who found that many hate crime perpetrators act spontaneously as a result of community changes by narrowing the focus to consider how community changes specifically affect juveniles. As most juveniles find their community at school, we focus on changing demographics in school districts and test the correlation between diversification of public schools and far right terror attacks committed by juveniles.
We study this by utilizing the University of Massachusetts Lowell far-right incident and perpetrator databases to identify incidents of hate violence perpetrated by minors in the United States. The database collects information on the location of the far-right incident, the tactic used, the intended target, and number of victims as well as perpetrator characteristics such as age. The database has more than 9,000 incidents recorded from the United States from 1990 - 2021. Counts of incidents perpetrated by minors are measured at the county level using Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) codes and then merged into a county-level dataset of socioeconomic variables provided by the Bureau of the Census American Community Survey (ACS), the Uniform Crime Report (UCR), political variables from the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, and school demographic data from the Civil Rights Data Collection from the Department of Education. Multilevel negative binomial regression analysis using Bayesian inference is conducted on the count of far-right incidents perpetrated by minors using variables for school demographic changes stratified by race as the independent variable, along with overall population changes stratified by race, median income, unemployment, poverty, percentage of Republican votes cast, the count of incidents perpetrated by adults, educational achievement demographics, and index crime controls nested at the county- and state-level for every year. This analysis seeks to identify how changes in social, political, and economic conditions at the county-level may contribute to far-right violence perpetrated by minors.

Authors

• Hope D LaFreniere

• Melissa Elizabeth Swauncy-Coleman, University of Massachusetts Lowell