While it might seem unwise to open a book by picking apart its title, it is a necessary step in unfolding the argument in the following pages. The term ‘hate crime’ has no legal status in the UK. No law uses the term. Yet the police and other criminal justice agents have enthusiastically embraced it. This has occurred in the decade since the then ‘New’ Labour government introduced penalty enhancement for racially aggravated offences under section 28 of the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act, the equivalent of the so-called ‘hate crime’ laws in the US. Such laws provide extra penalties in cases of ‘hate crime’ compared with similar, but otherwise motivated, crimes (or ‘parallel’ crimes, as legal scholar Fred Lawrence calls them [1999, p 4]). Even though the term ‘hate crime’ has caught on in some quarters it is a rather slippery concept. Varying interpretations have been provided in the scholarly and policy literature, but they do have one thing in common: curiously the word ‘hate’ appears infrequently. Instead, terms such as ‘bias’, ‘prejudice’, ‘difference’ and ‘hostility’ feature prominently. Furthermore, when the motivating impetus behind so-called ‘hate crime’ is examined, the emotion of ‘hate’ often has little to do with the crime in question. In this book the words ‘hate crime’ are surrounded with single quotation marks to signify that although ‘hate’ might not often figure in the crimes so-labelled and therefore can be disregarded as an accurate notion of crime, the concept of ‘hate crime’ is not entirely devoid of utility. Given that this book employs the concept of ‘hate crime’, this opening chapter explores the conceptual disarray of the notion of ‘hate crime’ and explains why and how the concept is to be utilised in the book. This chapter makes a case for the victim's experience to be placed at the centre of the conceptualisation of ‘hate crime’. A victim-centred approach recognises the salience of the particular harms inflicted by ‘hate crimes’ compared with parallel crimes, and the chapter introduces evidence of those harms.

Conceptual disarray of the notion of ‘hate crime’

‘Hate crime’ is a misnomer, given the events that the term is used to represent. Over five decades ago Gordon Allport (1954/1979) arguably provided a very clear conceptualisation of ‘hate’ in his influential book, The nature of prejudice, by drawing a distinction between ‘hate’ and ‘anger’.