Hate Crimes

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Hate Crimes taining that law’s existence is, ultimately, a matter of social fact and hence susceptible of empirical inquiry. Second, therefore, in elucidating the nature of law as a social institution, Hart arguably provides precisely the sort of legal theory which social scientists need in incorporating law into broader social analyses. In his insistence on the structural continuity between legal and other social rules yet on law’s distinctive mode of institutionalization, Hart provides a vision that is at once analytically well delineated yet relatively modest in terms of its substantive assumptions. Hence, the feature of his theory which might at first sight seem least sympathetic from a social science point of view—its pretension to provide a universal theory of law—may in fact be argued to be one of its strengths. For it provides a clear model for the purposes of testing hypotheses about, for example, the relationship between legal and other forms of social authority. This idea of his concept of law as, at root, a social science model is backed up by his own insistence, in terms reminiscent of Weber (though, in a significant ambiguity, also of Aristotle), that he is delineating a ‘central case’ with reference to which other, ‘penumbral’ cases can be identified and analyzed rather than ‘banished to another discipline.’ Third, in his insistence on the internal aspect of rules, and hence on the idea that the social phenomenon of law can only be understood by reference to the attitudes and understandings of the agents who are its subjects, Hart’s thinking meshed with a cluster of theoretical developments in disciplines such as sociology and anthropology. In this respect, his theory is a vast step forward from the cruder empiricism of the nineteenth-century positivists. Although it is not something with which Hart himself was centrally concerned, this feature of his method undoubtedly opens up the possibility of an analysis of the symbolic aspects of legal power and authority such as would be central to any adequate social science account of legal practices. In his emphasis on the importance of linguistic usage, moreover, his ideas relate, albeit obliquely, to the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ in much social theory of the late twentieth century. Finally, in his revival of the utilitarian tradition of systematic critique of law and argument for its reform, Hart provided an example of the way in which conceptual analysis can be marshaled in aid of social policy. Clear thinking and reason—Hart’s deepest intellectual commitments—are used, in an apparently modest and sometimes painstaking way, to clear the confusion in social and political debate, opening up in often unexpected ways paths forward in the development of policy and the construction of social consensus. Though Hart’s own work is surprisingly little concerned with empirical—social, psychological, economic—evidence, his arguments often serve to clarify the relevance of just this sort of social science data. Though the fulcrum of his work lay firmly at the analytical–philosophic rather than the descriptive–

sociological end of the spectrum, he can, therefore, justly claim a place among those whose thinking has made a significant contribution to the social and behavioral sciences.

Bibliography Bayles M D 1992 Hart’s Legal Philosophy. Kluwer, Dordrecht, The Netherlands Gavison R (ed.) 1987 Issues in Contemporary Legal Philosophy: The Influence of H. L. A. Hart. Clarendon Press, Oxford, UK Hacker P M S, Raz J (eds.) 1997 Law, Morality and Society: Essays in Honour of H. L. A. Hart. Clarendon Press, Oxford, UK Hart H L A 1955 Are there any natural rights? The Philosophical Reiew 64: 175–91 Hart H L A 1961\1994 The Concept of Law, 2nd edn. Clarendon Press, Oxford, UK Hart H L A 1963 Law, Liberty and Morality. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA Hart H L A 1965 The Morality of the Criminal Law. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK Hart H L A 1968 Punishment and Responsibility. Clarendon Press, Oxford, UK Hart H L A 1982 Essays on Bentham. Clarendon Press, Oxford, UK Hart H L A 1983 Essays in Jurisprudence and Philosophy. Clarendon Press, Oxford, UK Hart H L A, Honore! A M 1959\1985 Causation in the Law, 2nd edn. Clarendon Press, Oxford, UK MacCormick N 1981 H. L. A. Hart. Edward Arnold, London Martin M 1987 The Legal Philosophy of H. L. A. Hart. Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA Mill J S 1859\1974 On Liberty. Penguin, Harmondsworth, UK

N. Lacey

Hate Crimes 1. What is a Hate Crime? There is no universally accepted definition of what precisely constitutes a hate crime, nor agreement as to the precise conceptual boundaries that delimit hate crimes from mundane crimes. The sole factor stressed uniformly is the motivation of the perpetrator. In hate crimes the principal motivation is one of negative affect (animus) toward the victim because of his or her skin color, ethnicity, religion, sex, national origin, or sexual orientation, for example. It is this animus that drives the criminal behavior rather than more common motives of pecuniary gain, retribution, jealousy, or status seeking. Thus, any crime may become a hate crime if the perpetrator’s motivation is animus toward the victim based on some socially constructed category. 6479

Hate Crimes Some care must be taken to differentiate two seemingly related circumstances: (a) situations where the fundamental cause of the behavior is hatred; and (b) situations where hatred is coincident, with the primary motivation being something other than hatred. Presumably, it is only a true hate crime if the former condition exists. In other words, having extreme negative affect founded on skin color, ethnicity, religion, sex, national origin, or sexual orientation is both a necessary and sufficient condition for a hate crime. In terms of behavior, hate crimes range from spraypaint vandalism and verbal harassment to physical assault and murder. The perpetrators may be single individuals, organized or unorganized groups, or entire nation-states. Similarly, the victims may be solitary individuals, small groups, or large aggregates of human population. In fact, a hate-crime universe can be conceptualized in terms of a three dimensional space: along one dimension is the degree of aggregation or organization of the perpetrator (ranging from single persons to nation-states), along another dimension is the degree of aggregation of victims (from single persons to nation-states), and the third dimension is the degree of severity (extending from vandalism to lethal sanctioning). Within this heuristic model, behavior can be located as diverse as a sole actor desecrating a synagogue with swastikas, to nation-states with genocidal policies aimed at despised populations. Yet underlying each is the assumption that the primary motive is negative affect based on a socially constructed status such as race or religion. While the term hate crime, and the public notoriety it has received, has been particularly discernible during the 1980s and 1990s, the phenomenon is far from recent and has long been a frequent factor in human societies across the globe. This century alone has witnessed the genocide of Christian Armenians at the hands of Muslim Turks (1915–18), the Nazi attempt to exterminate European Jewry and the Roma, the mass murder of Vietnamese and Cham Muslims by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s, the 1994 Hutus inspired genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda, and the Serbian ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Muslims from Bosnia. These are but a few examples of mass-hate crimes involving large numbers of perpetuators and with their victims experiencing the most severe levels of sanctioning. Often, however, public attention has been drawn to smaller-scale events involving fewer victims: for example, in 1991 skinheads in Hoyerswerda, Germany attacked several Asians and fire-bombed a hostel used by asylum-seekers (similar attacks were made on immigrants and refugees in many, if not most, Western European countries during the 1980s and 1990s)—the burning of some African-American churches in the American South during the early 1990s—or the 1998 lynching of James Byrd Jr, a 49year old African-American in Texas by three white supremacists. 6480

In sum, hate crimes can range from killing of genocidal proportions perpetrated by a nation state to verbal harassment by a single actor. They are frequent in human societies globally.

2. Why Hate Crime? Most theories of hate crime involve, implicitly or explicitly, the notion of ‘threat’: that hate crime perpetrators perceive members of the target group as representing danger or peril to their life chances, lifestyles, social status, or belief systems. This threat does not have to be ‘real’ in any demonstratively physical sense—it only needs to be thought to be real to motivate some persons to commit crimes of hate. Macropolitico-economic theories emphasize the importance of large-scale changes in the economic, political, or demographic arenas in generating apparent threats to the status quo. Typically these theories postulate that social change brings uncertainty, disruption, and competition between dominant and emergent groups for economic standing or political power. That contested terrain breeds fear and motivates some to strike out against members of the perceived threatening group. The effect of intergroup competition (threat) seems to be especially pronounced when the target group is culturally dissimilar from the dominant one. This is a point emphasized by cultural explanations of hate crime. Cultural theories stress threats to traditional or dominant belief-systems. Differences between the dominant culture and the target group subculture are seen as incompatible, if not totally hostile—the culture and belief systems of the victim group may be viewed as contaminating the dominant culture and in that sense, representing a threat to the cultural status quo. It is quite likely, for example, that the hate crime directed at guest workers, asylum seekers, and refugees in many counties was rooted in both the fear that new immigrants would take jobs away or lower wages of the native labor force and in the fear that a ‘foreign’ culture would fundamentally challenge traditional values and beliefs.

3. Hate Crime and Hate Speech Laws Hate crime laws often take the form of sentence enhancements to penalties for crimes motivated by animus. For illustration, in the United Kingdom the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act provides that the maximum sentence for common assault increase from 6 months to two years if the assault was racially motivated. In the USA, the vast majority of states have enacted legislation providing for sentence enhancements for some hate crimes (but not others). At the federal level, the Hate Crimes Sentencing Enhancement Act of 1994 increased sentencing by about one-third when a crime is proven to have been hate motivated and occurred on federal property.

Hate Crimes In many countries, hate speech, as well as hate crime, is criminalized. In the UK, speech or writings that may provoke racial animosity are prohibited by the Public Order Act. Similarly, Section 319 of the Criminal Code of Canada prohibits deliberately inciting or promoting ‘hatred against any identifiable group.’ There are comparable provisions in the criminal codes of Austria, Poland, Sweden, France, and Ireland. The Indian penal code not only criminalizes racial and religious-hate speech but caste-hate speech as well. In Germany it is illegal to incite violence or racial hatred against groups or minorities, and it is a crime to deny the Holocaust. Likewise, 1995 laws in both Switzerland and Belgium prohibit denying or defending genocide. There are no comparable laws against hate speech in the USA, however.

4. Trends in Hate Crimes There is considerable rhetoric by advocacy groups that many countries are undergoing an unprecedented wave of hate crime, yet there is little undisputed empirical evidence supporting that claim. All authorities acknowledge that existing data on hate crime are fraught with errors, so any apparent rise in frequency of hate crimes may be due to: (a) a more sensitized public willing to report incidents of hate that had gone previously unreported; (b) the media and advocacy groups more frequently publicizing hate crimes; (c) an actual increase in the incidence of hate crimes; or (d) some combination of these. Where ‘official’ statistics are offered, it is suspected that they too may be seriously compromised because of under reporting of hate incidents by victims, the reliance upon local authorities to recognize and define an incident as a hate crime, and changes and ambiguities in the definition of what constitutes a hate crime. Given the shortcomings of official hate crime data and the unknown reliability and validity of anecdotal data from advocacy groups, it would seem impossible to state definitively whether hate crimes are actually increasing in frequency, decreasing, or remaining the same. Given that caveat, what meager empirical data exists suggests that in the USA the frequency of hate crime incidents increased from the early 1990s until 1996, and has been declining since. In most of Western Europe, the trend appears that hate crimes may have become somewhat less frequent toward the end of the 1990s than they were earlier in the decade, with the possible exception of the UK.

victims. In many European countries during the time 1970–2000, reported hate crime has targeted immigrants, refugees, asylum-seekers, and guest workers. Additionally, there have been many attacks on Jewish cemeteries and synagogues. In the USA, the situation is somewhat different. Based on hate crimes reported in 1998 by 10,730 local law-enforcement agencies covering a population of 216,235 million, the US federal government cites 7,755 incidents of hate crime involving 9,722 victims. Of these incidents, 56 percent involved race hatred, and of those over two-thirds were anti-black. While race-hatred incidents were the most common, incidents of religious hatred were frequent, and 78 percent of these incidents involved anti-Jewish activity. Reports of sexual orientation bias were also common, with 67 percent of these incidents targeted at male homosexuals. Of all the hate crimes reported in 1998, 62 percent (4,832 incidents) were incidents that were anti-black, anti-Jewish, or anti-gay male. Of those offenses where the suspected offender’s race was known, whites committed 76 percent of the hate crime offenses.

6. Consequences of Hate Crimes Being a victim of virtually any crime extracts a definite psychological toll, but there is some evidence that the emotional mark of hate crimes may be more severe and longer lasting than the impact of normal (nonhate motivated) crime. Furthermore, some argue that when one member of the targeted group is victimized by hate crime, then all members of the group are adversely affected—that is, the negative effect of hate crime permeates the victim community more thoroughly than other forms of victimization. Because of the very nature of hate-motivated crime, a poignant and unmistakable message is delivered to both the victim and his or her community. See also: Disgust, Psychology of; Genocide: Anthropological Aspects; Genocide: Historical Aspects; Heterosexism and Homophobia; Mass Killings and Genocide, Psychology of; Personality and Crime; Racism, History of; Racism, Sociology of; Religion: Morality and Social Control; Religion: Peace, War, and Violence; Religious Fundamentalism: Cultural Concerns; Social Trauma; Violence and Media; Violence: Public; Xenophobia

5. Victims of Hate Crimes

Bibliography

While time trend data on hate crimes are especially problematic, a cross-sectional inspection of official reports of hate crime can illuminate who were the

Berk R A 1994 What is a hate crime? In: Hamm M S (ed.) Hate Crime: International Perspecties on Causes and Control. Anderson, Cincinnati, OH, pp. v–ix

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Hate Crimes Grimshaw A D 1999 Genocide and democide. In: Kurtz L, Turpin J (eds.) Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, and Conflict. Academic Press, San Diego, Vol. 2, pp. 53–74 Hamm M S 1994 Conceptualizing hate crime in a global context. In: Hamm M S (ed.) Hate Crime: International Perspecties on Causes and Control. Anderson, Cincinnati, OH, pp. 173–94 Jones T D 1998 Human Rights: Group Defamation, Freedom of Expression and the Law of Nations. Martinus Nijhoff, The Netherlands Myra H I (ed.) 2000 Ethnic Violence. Greenhaven, San Diego Jacobs J B, Potter K 1998 Hate Crimes: Criminal Law and Identity Politics. Oxford University Press, New York Kelly R J, Maghan J 1998 Introduction. In: J Maghan R J, Maghan J (eds.) Hate Crime: The Global Politics of Polarization. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, IL, pp. 1–21 Lawrence F M 1999 Punishing Hate: Bias Crimes under American Law. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Witte R 1995 Racist violence in Western Europe. New Community 21: 489–500

E. M. Beck Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Hayek, Friedrich A von (1899–1996) Friedrich von Hayek is regarded generally as the most influential intellectual figure in the twentieth-century revival of classical liberalism (Kukathas 1990) and as the most articulate critic of socialist doctrines (Caldwell 1997). He also deserves recognition as one of the preeminent social philosophers of that century. In an age of increasing specialization within the social sciences and the humanities, he developed an approach to social analysis and social reform that integrates insights from economics, law, politics, philosophy, psychology, and evolutionary theory into an impressively coherent outlook at the foundations and the evolution of social order. Hayek’s scholarly writings span more than six decades and include numerous books and articles, republished in a 19-volume edition of his collected works (Hayek 1988).

1. Biography Hayek was born in Vienna on 8 May, 1899. He earned doctorates in law (1921) and in political economy (1923) at the University of Vienna, where he became Priatdozent for Political Economy in 1929. Interrupted by a year of study in New York (1923–4) he worked from 1921–6 as a legal consultant in a government office in Vienna, directed by his mentor Ludwig von Mises, in whose famous Priatseminar he participated and with whom he founded, in 1927, the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research, of which he was director until 1931. A series of invited lectures that Hayek gave at the London School of

Economics (LSE) in 1931 led to his appointment to the Tooke Chair of Economic Science and Statistics at the LSE, a position Hayek held from 1932 to 1950, the year he was appointed Professor of Social and Moral Sciences at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. After retiring from Chicago in 1962 he taught as Professor of Economic Policy at the University of Freiburg, Germany, until 1967. An honorary professorship at the University of Salzburg from 1969 to 1974 brought Hayek back to his native Austria. In 1977 he returned as professor emeritus to Freiburg where he died on 23 March, 1992. In 1974 Hayek was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics.

2. Hayek’s Social Philosophy About his personal development Hayek (1967, p. 91) has said that he was led ‘from technical economics into all kinds of questions usually regarded as philosophical.’ It was his early work on monetary theory, capital theory, and business cycle theory that earned him his appointment at the LSE, and it was about these themes that he engaged in controversies with John Maynard Keynes, Piero Sraffa and Frank H. Knight in the early 1930s. An important turning point in his scholarly interests is marked by his work, in the mid-1930s, on an English edition of selected contributions to the ‘socialist calculation debate,’ including Mises’ early (1920) article on the subject (Hayek 1935). As Hayek has noted in retrospect, in preparing this edition he began to develop his growing interest in questions of the nature and unavoidable limitations of our knowledge, and in the issue of what these limitations imply for our theoretical efforts at understanding the social world as well as for our practical efforts at organizing our social life. The concern with these questions, often referred to as the ‘knowledge problem,’ was to become the core theme of Hayek’s life work. In Hayek’s own assessment, the critical step in his move towards social philosophy was his 1937 article on ‘Economics and Knowledge’ (1948, Chap. 2), an article in which Hayek addressed what he describes as the ‘central question of all social sciences,’ the question of how the fragments of imperfect knowledge that exist dispersed in individual minds are coordinated in the social process to allow for productive cooperation among multitudes of persons. With his 1945 article on ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’ (1948, Chap. 4), his most often cited publication, Hayek restated and extended his earlier argument, stressing that the ‘problem of what is the best way of utilizing knowledge initially dispersed among all the people is at least one of the main problems of economic policy—or of designing an efficient economic system’ (1948, p. 78). In these two articles, which he considered his most

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International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences

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