Abstract
Although the hate crime literature has grown in volume during the past decade, research in the area is still in its infancy and grappling with many unresolved theoretical and methodological challenges. The Routledge International Handbook on Hate Crime takes on the ambitious task of examining and reviewing key international issues in this developing and heterogeneous field. The volume is organized around four topical areas. Part One, ‘Theories and concepts’, is devoted to conceptual and definitional issues, but also to the causes of hate crime, the social identities of perpetrators, and the political and scholarly debate on the boundaries of hate crime. The most successful discussion in Part One is that on issues of hate crime victimization. It is often said that hate crimes ‘hurt more’ than similar crimes not motivated by hate. Analysing the best available data, a large crime survey covering England and Wales, Paul Igarski and Spiridoula Lagou provide convincing empirical support for this previously more or less empirically unfounded notion. Igarski and Lagou’s chapter on the personal injuries of hate crime is undoubtedly the most interesting and innovative of the volume’s introductory chapters (and, arguably, the most interesting chapter in the entire Handbook). Part Two, ‘The international geography of hate’, consists of eight chapters covering issues related to hate crime from different parts of the world. Some of the chapters deal with policy and legislative responses to hate crime in the European Union, the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, while other chapters address broader international trends, for example global anti-Semitism, and the European extreme right and its search for respectability and attempts to free itself from its fascist past. Part Three, ‘Key issues in hate crime’, the largest section, addresses issues related to the internet as an arena for hatred and extremist activity, but focuses primarily on hate crimes against negatively stereotyped minority groups, for example people with disabilities, LGBT individuals, Travellers and Roma. The last section, Part Four, ‘Combating hate and crime’, covers a wide array of issues related to the policing of hate crimes and working with offenders. In the concluding chapter, Daniel Köhler, provides a well-researched and thoughtful overview of de-radicalization as a field of research and as a practical programme for combatting extremist threats.
The Handbook offers clearly written and broad interdisciplinary coverage of a wide range of hate crime issues. However, the Handbook also has some important problems. Most chapters offer valuable contributions to the field, but, as is typical of handbooks, there is considerable variability in the quality and depth of the chapters. More disturbing is that this reference work claims to be an international handbook on hate crime. It is doubtful whether the Handbook actually lives up to such an assertion. Of the total 35 contributing authors, 27 are British, and a not insignificant proportion of the accounts given are more or less closely tied to the UK. This bias, which is probably related to the fact that the editors’ original intention was to write a UK handbook on hate crime, is problematic in several respects. The relatively strong concentration on British conditions is not balanced by a comprehensive account of the international, primarily sociological research that is adding new theoretical perspectives on the dynamics and causes of hate crime. The largely American research on the interaction between hate crimes legislation and social movements is not well represented, that is, research showing that social movements (e.g. the African American civil rights movement) have not only played a key role in the introduction of hate crime legislation but also in its enforcement. Another issue concerns the absence of a temporal perspective on hate crimes. Emerging and promising American and European sociological studies of Islamophobia and Islamophobic hate crimes have drawn attention to the function of unexpected, dramatic events that may trigger hate crimes, providing new insights into the interaction of perceived security threats and perceived economic and cultural threats. Surprisingly, Islamophobia and Islamophobic hate crimes are not the subject of a standalone chapter and, overall, the handbook is not particularly successful in accounting for the recent theoretical discussion on causes of hate crimes.
Having said this, no book, not even a handbook, should be expected to do everything. This volume on hate crime is hardly the international handbook the editors aimed for, but it is nevertheless a welcome reference work in a multidisciplinary research field in great need of systematic research reviews and critical syntheses.