Scholarly writing on social problems spans a continuum from highly abstracted works to careful descriptions of empirical phenomena. The aim of this book has been to sit somewhere in between and apply empirically grounded analysis to further the conceptual understanding of ‘hate crime’. It is often the case, however, that more questions than answers are raised when an analysis digs deeper into a social problem. This concluding chapter draws out the key themes of the analysis that has unfolded across the previous chapters and raises some questions that the analysis generates.

At the outset it was noted that even though the police and other criminal justice agents in the UK have enthusiastically embraced the term ‘hate crime’, it remains a somewhat slippery concept. The main problem is that when the motivating impulses for so-called ‘hate crime’ are examined, it is evident that the emotion of ‘hate’ often has little to do with it. But rather than arguing for scholars to abandon the concept, this book has argued that advantage is taken of its utility in providing an emotive banner under which is now rallied a once disparate field of concerns with oppression and bigotry in various guises. This is captured in Jenness and Grattet's (2001) notion of ‘hate crime’ as a ‘policy domain’, an arena in which elements of the political system and criminal justice process have converged and focused on the substantive issue of offences and incidents where some bigotry against the victim plays a part. In taking the lead from this way of thinking, and given the ambiguous nexus between ‘hate’ and ‘crime’ in the case of so-called ‘hate crime’, rather than referring to this or that type of crime this book has argued that it is perhaps more useful to think of ‘hate crime’ as a ‘scholarly domain’ in which there is an analytical coalition between scholars in once disparate fields of study. As was emphasised in Chapter One, this is not to propose that previous analyses of racist violence, anti-gay violence and male heterosexual violence against women, for instance, should now be re-labelled as ‘hate crime’ studies. Nor is it to propose that future studies in those fields should be unquestioningly considered as ‘hate crime’ studies. Instead, conceptualising ‘hate crime’ as a scholarly domain implies an analytic conversation between scholars rooted in different fields of study and disciplines.