From Individual Victimization to Collective Threat: The Intergenerational Impacts of Community Hate Crimes

• In Event: Morbidity and Mortality: Open Call Paper Session

Abstract

Recent years have seen a rise in hate crimes in the United States. Prior research has treated hate crimes mainly as harms to direct victims, obscuring their broader function as acts that signal social exclusion and target identity-defined communities. We theorize hate crimes as collective threats that operate vicariously, shifting analysis from individual victimization to community processes and enabling a fuller account of intergenerational consequences. Linking over 650,000 Los Angeles County birth records (2014–2020) to a novel hate-crime database, we evaluate effects of prenatal exposure using ZIP code fixed-effects models. Hate crimes increase preterm birth risk, with effects concentrated among mothers whose racial group was targeted: among Black and Asian births, race-specific incidents elevate risk, whereas incidents targeting other groups do not. Black infants are disproportionately exposed to anti-Black hate crimes and more strongly impacted. Bounding analyses addressing incomplete awareness indicate larger treatment-on-the-treated effects among mothers aware of local incidents.

Authors

• Tiffany Liu, Princeton University

• Florencia Torche, Stanford University