Adapting Minority Group Threat to Explain the Reporting of Sexual Orientation Bias Crimes

• In Event: Sexuality, Policy, and Intersectionality in Criminology and Criminal Justice

Abstract

In 1990 Congress passed the Hate Crime Statistics Act (HCSA) requiring the collection of hate crime statistics by the federal government. King, Messner, and Baller (2009) posited that minority group composition has a significant impact on compliance with the HCSA when examining racially biased incidents. However, Blalock’s theory of minority group threat has been proposed to apply beyond the Black vs. White dichotomy and prior studies have shown it can be extended to other racial, ethnic, and religious minority groups. This study proposes to extend the minority group threat propositions to examine compliance with the HCSA in the reporting of sexual orientation bias motivated crime by counties using data from the Uniform Crime Reporting program. With the increasing attention given the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender (GLBT) community over the course of the past decade, combined with the increasing prevalence of pro and anti-GLBT policies, it is expected that the presence of a growing and increasingly visible homosexual and bisexual population will effect whether policing agencies are willing to report these types of crimes.

Author

• Michele Stacey, East Carolina University