Psychological causes and effects of hate crimes

• TYPE OF PSYCHOLOGY: Learning; psychopathology; social psychology
• Hate crimes are criminal offenses, such as murder, assault, arson, or vandalism, that are motivated by the offender's bias against the race, nationality, religion, ethnicity, disability, or sexual orientation of the targeted person. The motives for these crimes are rooted in learned behaviors and discrimination that may have been present for generations.

Introduction

The term hate crime is a relatively new term, though bias-motivated crime has a much longer history. Advocates who were addressing violent crime in the United States that targeted African Americans, Asian Americans, and Jewish Americans in the 1980s are believed to have coined the term. Since the coining of the term, federal and state governments, as well as social scientists, have made efforts to formally define hate crimes for the purposes of collecting statistics and improving law enforcement and prevention efforts.

For accurate data collection, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) defines a hate crime as a “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.” However, the nuances of what constitutes a hate crime are more broad than a definition can capture, and definitions vary between governmental and private entities.

In the past, although these criminal acts could be prosecuted, the punishment did not include a consideration of the bias motivating the crime. Thus, painting a swastika on the door of a Jewish person’s home was considered a crime because the graffiti defaced property and a law existed against vandalism, but not because the act was done to intimidate the resident. Hate crime laws allow the psychological harm done to a victim to be factored into the determination of whether any special sanctions should occur. Research has suggested that the victim of a hate crime experiences more harm than the victim of a similar crime not motivated by bias or hate. In 2009, the United States Congress passed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which provides federal funding and assistance to state, local, and tribal jurisdictions to investigate and prosecute hate crimes. The law also created a new federal criminal law that criminalizes causing bodily injury when the crime was committed because of the actual or perceived race, color, religion, or national origin of any person or when the crime was committed because of the actual or perceived religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability of any person and the crime affected interstate or foreign commerce or occurred with federal special maritime and territorial jurisdictions. The law removed the requirement that the victim be engaged in a federally protected activity, such as voting or attending a public school, at the time of the crime. The law is named after Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr., who were both victims of violent hate crimes in 1998 in US states that had no hate crime laws at the time.

Causes

The central cause of these crimes is hate, which most often is the result of fear, anger, and ignorance. Hate crimes are acts of bias, bigotry, and intolerance toward an identified group. Though individuals and small groups may be the actual victims, the ultimate target of the perpetrators is the group to which the victims belong. For example, a hate crime offender may target and beat a Black man to intimidate all African Americans in the community. Perpetrators of hate crimes seek to terrorize the larger group by criminal acts against its members. The beliefs and prejudices held by hate crime offenders are learned and can go back for generations.

Perpetrators develop an “us-versus-them” outlook, in which they hold that their own group is superior and correct in its view and that the other group is inferior. The other group’s members may be seen as interlopers. In addition, they may be made the scapegoats for what is perceived to be wrong in society. In this way, the other group is made responsible for economic problems, crime, and the other ills of society. Often, when an identifiable group migrates into an area (community, state, or country), the resident group sees the immigrants as a drain on—or competitor for—the available resources and views their removal as the only solution. Research indicates that some of the most extreme biased responses are sparked by a perceived threat to the cultural integrity of the perpetrators' ingroup by members of an outgroup.

Typically, a hate group or hate crime perpetrator knows little about the identified group. In fact, the less people know about an identified outgroup, the stronger their prejudices will be. Social psychology research has identified a phenomenon known as the "outgroup homogeneity effect," in which people tend to see members of groups that they are not part of as more homogenous than members of their own group, empowering stereotypes and leading to deindividuation of outgroup members.

Researchers Jack McDevitt, Jack Levin, and Susan Bennett, in a 2002 study published in the Journal of Social Issues, classified hate time offenders into four categories based on the psychological and situational factors that led to hate crimes: thrill-seeking perpetrators are motivated by a desire for excitement and power; defensive perpetrators are motivated by protecting their community from perceived outsiders; retaliatory perpetrators commit violence in response to a real or perceived hate crime against their own group by members of the target group; and missionary perpetrators are typically members of hate groups who are deeply motivated by bigotry and see it as their "mission" to intimidate or eliminate the other group. These categories are widely used by law enforcement officers in the investigation and identification of hate crimes. Thrill-seeking is thought to be the most common motivation for hate crime offenders, accounting for 66 percent of hate crimes.

Victims and Offenders

Potential hate crime victims are those who are or are thought to be members of an identifiable group. These victims differ from victims of random crimes in that hate crime victims are specifically selected as a crime target due to their race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability. They are not victimized for what they are doing or what they have in their possession, but for what and who they are. Consequently, these victims cannot alter their behaviors to protect themselves from possible future attacks.

While all violent crime puts victims at risk for psychological distress, victims of violent hate crimes are even more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, anger, and posttraumatic stress disorder than victims of comparable violent crimes that are not motivated by bias and hate. Furthermore, hate crimes send a message to all members of a given group that their neighborhood, school, workplace, or community is hostile and dangerous to them. Hate crimes victimize not only the targeted individuals but members of their group at large. Members of the targeted group may experience psychological distress, heightened anxiety, and lowered self-esteem.

In the United States, the most frequent profile of a hate crime offender is a young White man, usually one who has low self-esteem and is socially isolated. Research demonstrates that the perpetrators of hate crimes also demonstrate above-average levels of aggression and antisocial behavior. However, most offenders do not have a diagnosable psychopathology. Alcohol and drug use can contribute to their behavior. Other characteristics of offenders include a history of abuse and of witnessing violence used as a coping method.

These hate crime offenders hold stereotypical beliefs that cause them to view the entire identified group as a threat. Out of their need for belonging, they may be attracted to hate groups, where people share their beliefs. Though less than 10 percent of the reported hate crimes are committed by members of organized hate groups, these groups can produce splinter groups or influence individuals who come in contact with them. Areas where there are high levels of hate-group activity and membership typically report higher numbers of hate crimes.

Offenders may plan their crimes over a period of time or act spontaneously on finding a target. However, there is a strong premeditated component to hate crimes compared to other criminal offenses. People who commit hate crimes are more likely to deliberate on and plan their attacks than the perpetrators of nonbias-related crimes, and some may even travel long distances to seek out members of their targeted group. Though their crimes may appear irrational to most people, the perpetrators see them as logical and defensible, the natural result of the cultural climate that fostered the hate ideology.

Hate Crime Statistics

According to FBI statistics, there were 11,862 hate crime incidents resulting in 13,829 offenses in the United States in 2023, which was an increase from 2022. More than 52 percent of these hate crimes were racially motivated, with 51.3 percent of racially motivated hate crimes involving anti-Black bias, which was more than three times that of the next highest race category. The next most common types of hate crimes were motivated by bias against sexual orientation (18.4 percent), religion (22.5 percent), disability (1.6 percent), and gender identity (4.1 percent). The largest categories of the 2,699 religion-based bias were anti-Jewish (1,832), anti-Muslim (236), and anti-Sikh (156).

Of the hate crime offenses reported in 2023, in 415 cases, 559 victims were targeted because of at least two biases, for example, sexual orientation and race. Crimes against persons represented 66 percent of incidents, while 32 percent were crimes against property. Another 2 percent were classified as crimes against society. The FBI reported that over half of the known offenders were White while about one-fifth were Black individuals. Of the 2,077 incidents reported that were based on sexual orientation, around half were directed toward gay men, and of the 492 incidents committed against individuals because of their gender, 355 victims were transgender individuals.

Hate Crime versus Terrorism

When compared, hate crimes and terrorist acts share many of the same characteristics. They are acts of intimidation, acts against an identifiable group, and attempts to send a message of hostility and induce fear. However, terrorism tends to be national or international in scope and to be better organized and planned than most hate crimes. Terrorists tend to seek large gatherings with many potential victims, partly because of the greater expected media coverage. Terrorists also tend to have political motives and often seek the removal of the targeted group, particularly if it is a government group or occupying force. Some theorists have argued that terrorism is an "upward crime," in which a perpetrator of lower social standing targets members of the majority or the dominant group in society, whereas hate crimes are largely committed by members of the dominant group against members of minority groups.

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