The challenge of working with racially motivated offenders: An exercise in ambivalence?

Abstract

A Probation Circular published in 2005 announced that accredited one-to-one programmes should be developed for Racially Motivated Offenders (RMOs). This article reviews a number of existing literatures written by both practitioners and academics which have focused on the problems and opportunities that arise during interventions with RMOs. At the same time, in this article, insights derived from the latter literatures are contextualized within poststructuralist and discursive psychological literatures. The outcome of this is an attempt to forge common ground between practitioner-derived insights on racism, racists, identity, locality and shared 'communities of prejudice' with poststructuralist approaches to identity and the advancement of specific therapeutic/correctionalist techniques (especially the motivational interviewing technique pioneered by Miller and Rollnick, 1991) for facilitating change processes in RMOs.

Reconceptualizing hate crime victimization through the lens of vulnerability and ‘difference’

“…While this stance accounts for many expressions of hate crime, it does not cover them all. Missing from this picture are those more spontaneous actions which result not from any entrenched prejudice on the part of the perpetrator, but which occur in the context of a highly individualized 'trigger' situation (McGhee, 2007). Not all perpetrators of hate crime are prejudiced all or even most of the time, but instead may express prejudice as the outcome of a particular trigger incident or event in a departure from their standard norms of behaviour.…”

Re-Thinking Hate Crime

“…A related shortcoming of conventional policy frameworks has been a failure to recognize the “ordinariness” of much hate crime: ordinary, not in relation to its impact on the victim but in the sense of how it is conceived of by the perpetrator, and sometimes by the victim too as discussed shortly (Iganski, 2008; McDevitt, Levin, Nolan, & Bennett, 2010; McGhee, 2007). A consistent theme running through much of the hate crime literature is the association of hate with the prevailing power dynamics that reinforce the dominant position of the powerful and the marginal position of the “other,” the idea that hate crimes prop up the perceived superiority of the perpetrators while simultaneously keeping victims in their “proper” subordinate place.…”

Promoting Human Dignity: An evaluation of a programme for racially motivated offenders

“…Merseyside was one of only two areas -the other being South East London -in which the probation service took the initiative in developing a programme specifically for racially motivated offenders (for the London programme see Court, 2003;Dixon, 2002;Dixon and Court, 2003). The HMIP ( 2005) noted that the confidence of the case managers responsible for Against Human Dignity was exceptional in the seven areas covered by the inspection, but officials in the Home Office and later the Ministry of Justice tended to favour an adaptation of the well established Priestley one-to-one general offending behaviour programme, rather than the development of a new programme for racially motivated offenders (HMIP, 2005;McGhee, 2007). From a local management perspective, Hankinson (2008) also advocated the use of an adapted version of the one-to-one programme, while lamenting that the programme was available in only 15 of the 42 probation areas.…”

“…This was more often the general cognitive-behavioural element than the specifically race-related topics, which were seen as relevant to 'real' racists but not to them. The difficulty of presenting material on race and racism in a way that is not liable to provoke resistance (Court, 2003;Dixon, 2002;McGhee, 2007;Smith, 2006a;2006b) Despite this unease, and some complaints about the inconvenience it entailed, most views of the programme in the 'starter' interviews were positive: people felt they were learning from it, and becoming sensitized to the effects their language and behaviour had on others.…”

“…They suggest that interventions should provide a supportive environment in which offenders can express their apprehensions, fears and uncertainties, and explore the ways in which they project unacceptable feelings onto stigmatized groups (Steinberg et al, 2003). This approach rests on the principle of 'acceptance'; this does not entail approval (Lindsay and Danner, 2008;McGhee, 2007), but there is extensive evidence that approaches which blame, punish and judge each offender as the worst offender are unlikely to succeed. In the terms of Maruna et al (2004), the aim should be to promote primary desistance (managing to stay out of trouble), but also to begin to encourage secondary desistance -in which people come to see themselves differently, as the kind of people who would not commit racially motivated offences.…”