Week 7: Anti-Muslim hate crime

Sam Tyler: I think we need to explore whether this attempted murder was a hate crime.
Gene Hunt: What, as opposed to one of those I really, really like you sort of murders?

The term 'hate crime' was coined in 1985; anyone talking about 'hate crime' in the Life on Mars era would have met with something like Gene Hunt's reaction. Of course, we know better these days.

But perhaps there's more to it than changing trends. Perhaps the fictional Gene Hunt has a point. We all know that there is such a thing as racist crime, for example, but does it really make sense to apply the label of hate crime to any crime which expresses hatred of a particular group? Many drivers have an entrenched hatred of anyone inconveniencing them by driving slowly; does this mean that road rage incidents should be classified as hate crime? When the IRA tried to kill Margaret Thatcher in 1984, was this an example of anti-British hate crime - or anti-Tory hate crime? To say that 'hate crime' can apply to any act of violence against members of a particular group isn't very far from saying it can apply to any act of violence - and that would effectively make it meaningless.

Barbara Perry suggested a way out of this dead end when she described hate crime as a way of 'doing difference'. According to this argument, we all have identities made up of our membership of social groups, which in turn are defined in terms of their differences from other groups: male/female, straight/gay/bi, White/Asian/Black, student/employed/unemployed, working class/middle class and so on. We 'do difference' every time we act 'as a' member of a particular group in distinction from other groups - 'as a man', 'as a student', 'as a working-class northerner' and so on. Power in society is differentially distributed - some groups have much more of it than others - and this also affects the ways that we 'do difference'. Hate crime in particular is a way of 'doing difference' from the perspective of a more powerful group: a violent attack on a gay man, a British Asian or somebody who is identifiably Muslim is a way of communicating hatred and contempt for that group, and a way of asserting the social superiority of the attacker's group.

The other major theme of today's lecture was the interaction between politics and hate crime, particularly Islamopobic hate crime. We saw that anti-Muslim attacks become more frequent in the aftermath of events which make the Muslim community seem threatening - and that includes the threat of social and cultural self-assertion. Events like the protests against The Satanic Verses or the 2001 riots are also ways of 'doing difference': the message they carried was that British Asians were refusing to be ghettoised and demanding the right to speak 'as an Asian' (and 'as a Muslim'), on equal terms with the White and non-Muslim majority. The reaction of the government, the mainstream media and the courts left something to be desired; despite an official commitment to opposing racism and Islamophobia, actual self-assertion by British Asian communities still seems to be widely feared and distrusted. The danger is that the interests of the majority community are implicitly defined in opposition to that of ethnic minorities. The underlying assumption is that security for the majority can be obtained at the cost of the liberties of the minority; we've seen how fallacious - and dangerous - an argument this is.