Hate Crime Awareness Week - What Do You Need to Know?
This week is Hate Crime Awareness Week in the UK, encouraging people to work to be able to actively identify hate crimes and eliminate them. Hate crime can involve a person being a target based on their disability, gender identity, race, religion, or sexual orientation (or multiple of these factors). Police crime figures in 2021/22 recorded 155,841 offences where one or more of the hate crime strands were a motivating factor, a 26% increase on figures from 2020/21.
What do hate crime offences look like in 2023?
In the year ending March 2023, there were 145,214 hate crimes recorded by police in England and Wales – a 5% decrease compared with the previous year. As is the case most years, a majority of those recorded by police were racially motivated, having accounted for 7 out of 10 of offences.
According to the Home Office, ‘over half (51%) of the hate crimes recorded by the police were for public order offences, 41% were for violence against the person offences, and 5% were recorded as criminal damage and arson offences’.
Crimes with sexual orientation as the motivation fell by 6% to 24,102, whereas transgender hate crimes have risen by 11% to 4,732 offences, hitting a record high. For the first time, the Home Office reported that the rise in hate crime targeting transgender people may be linked to remarks made by MPs. It said: “Transgender issues have been heavily discussed by politicians, the media and on social media over the last year, which may have led to an increase in these offences, or more awareness in the police in the identification and recording of these crimes.”. Incidents in the previous year were stated to be linked to increased discussion on social media. As part of his speech at Conservative Party Conference two weeks ago, Rishi Sunak stated that ‘We shouldn’t be bullied into believing that people can be any sex they want to be – they can’t. A man is a man and a woman is a woman – That’s just common sense.’. Labour Party leader, Keir Starmer, has also faced backbench opposition within his own party after he said that “99.9 per cent of women” do not have a penis.
Religious hate crimes increased by 9% between the years ending March 2022 and March 2023, bringing it up to the highest number of religious hate crimes since the time series began in the year ending March 2012. Where the perceived religion of the victim was recorded, 2 in 5 (39%) of religious hate crime offences were targeted against Muslims (3,452), followed by Jewish people, who were targeted in around 1 in 6 (17%) of religious hate crimes (1,510).
A report by charity Hope Not Hate stated the link between anti-migrant rhetoric and increased engagement in far-right engagement on migration, naming the Government’s ‘Stop the Boats’ pledge as a major contributing factor, reporting that activity spikes around key Government announcements. The organisation found a 149% increase in messages on anti-migrant far-right social media channels from 2021 to early 2023. In another example from May 2022, an announcement that 50 asylum seekers had been told they would be sent to Rwanda led to a ‘72% increase in messages about migration in far-right groups on Telegram’.
How can we combat hate crime?
Should you experience or witness a hate crime, there are a number of routes for reporting it, including to the police, to your local council, or to one of the many third sector organisations that have set up systems to combat hate crime, all of which can be found here.
Reporting a crime may not always be enough for somebody who has experienced an attack on such a large part of their identity, such as their race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. True Vision have an extensive list of support services by area here.
By working to combat hate crime and reporting these incidents when you witness them, you may prevent them from happening to somebody else. Painting a clear picture of the level to which hate crime occurs in your area may help local authorities respond better to it.
Sources:
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8537/
https://hopenothate.org.uk/2023/05/21/stoking_the_flames/