‘I may be left with no choice but to end my torment’: disability and intersectionalities of hate crime

Abstract

This article contributes to the growing literature concerning Disability Hate Studies. The study employs the concept of intersectionality and examines experiences of hate crimes recorded as racist or homophobic but where the victims/survivors also have a disability or mental health condition. The data was derived from 33 case-studies. Although very few hate incidents/crimes were conceptualised as disablist, disability played a significant role in the experiences of victims/survivors. The article proposes that criminal justice agencies should move away from understanding hate crime as a singular interaction to conceptualising the possibility that this can become a harmful hate relationship that progresses overtime. Points of Interest• The study examines cases of hate incidents/crimes that affect disabled people within the North-East of England.• The research suggests that hate incidents/crimes are not always motivated by prejudices towards disability, but are often due to racist or homophobic bigotries.• The findings demonstrate that the process of defining a particular type of hate as either racist-, homophobic-or transphobic-motivated crime often masks the fact that many of these victims are also disabled people.• The study indicates that hate crimes are often not a one-off event, but can be the accumulation of many hate incidents that result in cumulative negative impacts and can escalate into more severe offences over a prolonged period.• The article concludes by suggesting that to develop an effective hate crime intervention, social services and criminal justice agencies must consider the possibility of a power relationship, i.e. a hate relationship, between the perpetrator(s) and the victim(s).

Re-Conceptualising Repeat Reports of Hate Crime/Incidents as Hate Relationships Based on Coercive Control and Space for Action

“…The impacts of being structurally positioned as unequal, inferior, subordinate to the perpetrators are akin to those experienced by women experiencing coercive control (Stark, Identifying clients' identities in verbal that apportion cause and blame to the client for the hate they receive has impacts that can severely undermine their self-esteem, sense of self and their humanity. Living in constant fear about what might happen and how long the hate relationship will have to be endured results in deterioration in mental and physical health and wellbeing, isolation, feelings of entrapment and despair (Macdonald et al, 2021). Hate relationships providea way of conceptualizing and responding to particular conditions of hate that require a very different response to the traditional incident-based approach of help providers; and presents different opportunities to better enable help providers to keep those victimised and their families safe.…”

“…We too argue that 'the problem' is not those stigmatised historically and routinely in, through and by societies' economic, political, social and cultural institutions, but those very institutions and the tropes they produce and/or reinforce. Thus, we argue that perpetrators of hate, in parallel with coercively controlling partners in DA relationships, have been enabled by the society in which they live to believe they are entitled to enact their hate and, indeed, are often mirroring at an individual level what they perceive as widely condoned at a societal level (Clayton et al, 2018;Clayton et al under review;Macdonald et al 2021).…”

“…However, Donovan et al (2018: 3) consider the history of state supported legally sanctioned victimisation of the currently protected characteristics and suggest that the legislation can be seen as attempts by the state ‘to atone for, as well as address, institutionalised discriminatory behaviours against these groups’. Nevertheless, a criminal justice system approach to hate remains contested (see Chakraborti and Garland, 2015), for example, because of its focus on one protected characteristic at a time to the detriment of understanding an intersectional approach (Macdonald et al, 2021) and for its narrow framing that precludes a community-based response (Browne et al, 2011).…”

Defining and identifying hate motives: bias indicators for the Australian context

“…Our research suggests that an unrecognised hate element is most likely to be the case when hate crimes target people living with a disability, women, or gender diverse people, and when there is a relationship between the parties involved. Some of these cases have been defined as 'mate crimes' (Thomas 2011) or 'hate relationships' (Macdonald et al 2021), and they elude many mainstream approaches used to identify a hate motivation.…”

“…› The existence of a pattern of victimisation or a 'hate relationship' (e.g., when a person living with a disability is repeatedly harassed and abused over time) (Macdonald et al, 2021).…”