Blood, Threats and Fears: The Hidden Worlds of Hate Crime Victims

About this event

The need for improved support for victims of hate crime has become all the more apparent at a time when numbers of incidents have risen to record levels, both within the UK and beyond. This sharp increase – and the associated rise in tensions, scapegoating and hostility towards ‘difference’ that has accompanied such an increase – casts doubt over the effectiveness of existing measures and their capacity to protect victims from the harms associated with hate crime. Drawing from extensive engagement with more than 2,000 victims of hate crime across a range of recent research projects, Professor Chakraborti identifies a series of failings in relation to dismantling barriers to reporting, prioritising meaningful engagement with diverse communities and delivering effective criminal justice interventions. In doing so, he illustrates how those failings exacerbate the sense of alienation felt by victims from a diverse range of backgrounds and communities, and compound the physical and emotional harms that victims will already have to contend with as part of the process of experiencing hate crime. Within this context he identifies ways in which academics, policy-makers, practitioners and activists can reach beyond their own echo chambers to connect with ‘real-world’ hate crime experiences, and calls for urgent action to plug the ever-widening chasm between state-level narratives and victims’ lived realities.

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