Fried Egg wrote: ↑November 18th, 2024, 4:37 pm
I have been pondering the concept for some time and I am becoming increasingly sceptical that the concept of hate crimes should have a place in law.
So what exactly is a hate crime? The legal definition might vary from place to place but here in the UK it is defined as:
Any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice based on a person's race or perceived race; religion or perceived religion; sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation; disability or perceived disability and any crime motivated by hostility or prejudice against a person who is transgender or perceived to be transgender.
And what is the effect of something being deemed a "hate crime"? It can lead to one of two outcomes:
1) A heavier sentence being awarded than would otherwise have been the case had the crime not been regarded as hateful. i.e. if you were convicted of assault, you might get a longer sentence if it is also judged that you targeted your victim because you hated their protected group identity.
2) Something that would not otherwise have been a crime may be treated as a crime if it is regarded as hateful. Such as verbal abuse or incitement to hatred.
Now, let me be clear. I am not condoning hateful behaviour or justifying it in any way. I think it is usually morally reprehensible. But I think it is problematic to incorporate it into law and the criminal justice system.
Firstly, I do not think the criminality of an action should in anyway rest on the perception of the victim (or even a random passer by). It should be an objectively measurable fact.
Secondly, why is the impact of a crime really greater on the victim if it happened to have been hateful? If someone murders me, it doesn't make me any more dead if they did it because of my race.
Thirdly, it is only certain characteristics that are "protected", certain group identities. Someone might attack me because they hate me on a personal level but that's not considered a hate crime. They might do it because they hate ginger people but still that's fine. But if it's the wrong kind of hate, such as for being gay, that makes it much worse?
Fourthly, if an action (or something that is said) is not considered a crime in the absence being considered hateful of a particular group, it should not be considered a crime at all. It becomes a multi-tiered justice system that treats people differently based on their group identities (or the group identity of their victims).
And of course there is the code of practice that police have (in England and Wales) to record and retain information pertaining to Non Crime Hate Incidents (NCHI's) whereby incidents are reported to the police of incidents that are perceived to be (by anyone other than the subject) as actions (or speech) that are considered to be motivated by prejudice or hostility towards persons with a particular characteristic. They do not themselves meet the criteria for being treated as a crime but the incidents may be recorded and retained for later use, perhaps as supporting evidence in a future prosecution of a hate crime of that individual. If such an incident is recorded and retained by the police, they must contact and notify the individual in question, but they will not tell them who made the complaint nor what the alleged incident was.
I agree with you and I think you have presented reasonable arguments. These laws appear to be contradictory and defy common sense, but of course, it is because that’s how it looks from the view of objective discourse, as it used to be when secular society embraced the ethos of modernity and its pretensions of universality, equality, progress, and so on. Postmodernity fragmented all of that and questioned it with a new narrative of systemic oppression and identity politics, taking distance from the old analysis of economic forces and class struggles and replacing it with symbolic, cultural struggles. A new categorization is employed, based on abstract and diffuse notions of community, an ambiguous and subjective term. “Community” used to be those who lived together, so it pointed to something concrete in space and time, but now community is any classification under selected criteria, based on biopolitics, such as race, ethnicity, sex, etc. In theory, one could invoke the rights of a community of “left-handed people”, even point to some sort of historical systemic oppression of left-handed people, but of course, that is of no interest for biopolitics, not until left-handed people manage to organize as a legitimate political group that fights for its perceived common interest. “Hate” in hate crime does not point to a concrete feeling and personal motivation (which is what used to matter in a system of objective, universal laws), but to “systemic hate”, that is, hate simply becomes the supposedly internalized rejection of the other tribe by one tribe, based on their cultural differences and the power hierarchies, a rejection that is said to operate even independently of the subject’s consciousness. If you fall within the criteria of classification that puts you in a given tribe, you are guilty as charged just by being part of that set. All it takes is that the other tribe (some selected group) calls for being offended or having being historically oppressed (no need for concrete individuales having being oppressed, but the class to which they belong to), that constitutes your “crime”, which then aggravates any other traditional transgression such as murder.