Feeling others’ pain: analyzing the indirect impacts of anti-LGBT and Islamophobic hate crimes

• In Event: LGBTQ Victimization

Abstract

Hate crimes are considered to be a special category of crime, partly because it is assumed that incidents have negative emotional and social impacts on other members of the victim’s “ingroup”. Using four studies that incorporate both correlational and experimental designs we provide the first comprehensive quantitative examination of the indirect impacts of hate crimes on Muslim communities and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Trans communities. The results provide cogent evidence that hate crimes have considerable negative impacts on other “ingroup” community members. In particular, hate crimes were consistently found to increase other group member’s perceptions of threat. This threat, in turn, impacted on group members’ emotional and behavioural responses in specific ways. Increased anger predicted less avoidance and more direct engagement with their community, while anxiety predicted more avoidance and an increase in security measures. Our experiments also examined whether emotional responses to hate crimes differed from the responses to non-hate crimes. Our study found that hate crimes tended to have greater impacts on other group members because the ingroup victims received more empathy for their victimisation. Together, these results suggest that hate crimes not only traumatise direct victims, but have substantial impacts on other community members.

Author

• Mark Walters, University of Sussex