Exploring hate motived offending among young people in Europe and beyond

• In Event: Testing Theory and Exploring Crimes of High Public Concern through Cross-National Research (ISRD)

Abstract

Hate motivated crime is perceived as a particularly serious type of offending as it targets whole communities in addition to the individual victim. Hate and bias crimes inflict symbolic harm to complete identities, not only individual persons. Because of this, the questionnaire of the International Self-Report Delinquency Study (ISRD3) was modified to include new questions on crimes knowingly targeted at the identity of the victim as a representative of a social category. These new questions probed the domain of hate/bias motivation from both victim and offender perspectives. The hate crime victimization question indicated that annually, from 2 to 7 per cent of youths in the age category of 13 to 16 become victims of hate crime (Marshall et al 2015), while the lifetime figures range from 3 to 12 per cent. However, we cannot deduce hate/bias crime offending prevalence or correlates based on victim reports. Therefore, we complement the victim paradigm by probing, in an explorative manner, the offender side of the equation. In the online version of the questionnaire, offenders were asked if they chose the victim of the offence because of his/her ethnicity, language, religion, social views, or other bias causes. This question was asked for four offences: property destruction, weapon carrying, taking part in a fight, and assault. Based on these follow-up questions, we present comparative findings from the countries of the expanding ISRD3 dataset, and report exploratory analyses of the correlates of hate crime offending. The feasibility and problems of offender-based hate crime questions are discussed.

Authors

• Janne Kivivuori, University of Helsinki

• Mike Hough, Birkbeck, University of London

• Matti Nasi, University of Helsinki