Ethnoviolence

Alternative Perspectives

The term hate crime was developed for legislative and political reasons. It refers to statutorily delimited acts [Page 471]that are conventionally recognized as serious crimes such as murder, manslaughter, rape, assault, robbery, burglary, arson, some forms of property damage, and some acts of intimidation. Hate crimes became part of the public and sociological lexicon with agitation for the passage of a federal hate crimes statute. In 1985 and 1986, as the lobbying began, the national media database, Nexis, recorded only 11 and 14 mentions. By the end of the 1990s, however, the term had achieved widespread acceptance by the media and by many social scientists.

The two concepts make different claims about the nature of group conflict and about social policy. Each claims that a pathological condition exists, that it is socially significant and widespread, and that policymakers can and should intervene. For those who see this as a criminological issue—and prefer to use “hate crimes”—the issues are crime and law and social control. For those who link the problem to race and ethnic relations—the ethnoviolence group—the issues are prejudice, discrimination, and the reduction of group tensions. Given the control function of the mass media, through which such claims are legitimated, and the more conservative orientation of criminology, hate crimes is more prevalent in the popular media, but ethnoviolence continues to be used in professional and scholarly discourse.

One of the standard phrases of today's White supremacists is that they are not motivated by hate for others but, rather, by their “love” for their own race (or sometimes put, “their own kind”). The calculated act of intimidation designed to achieve the specific ends of a perpetrator may well reflect psychopathology but not necessarily hate. Hate as a strong, intense, negative emotional response is not necessarily involved in so-called hate crimes or in all actions characterized by discrimination. Many ethnoviolent incidents are committed impulsively or as acts of peer group conformity.

Later, the terms bias crime and bias incidents were sometimes used instead of hate crimes. Social scientists continue to prefer ethnoviolence, asserting that the subject is intergroup relations rather than merely illegal or illicit behavior. Also, the concept of ethnoviolence is delimited by an underlying social psychology rather than by the articulation of law.

Incidence of Ethnoviolence

Counting ethnoviolent acts is not as difficult as might be expected. To begin with, perpetrators usually announce their motives verbally or by the use of easily recognized symbols of group prejudice. Identifying marks include (a) using recognized symbols, slogans, or words of group insult; (b) posting or circulating leaflets, including the literature of right-wing extremist groups, that contain insulting and intimidating statements; (c) defacing or destroying property that is publicly associated with a particular group; (d) acting on or around holidays or special events associated with a particular group. Acts of ethnoviolence may fit a pattern of past attacks on the target group; often, the general consensus of the community is that this act was motivated by prejudice.

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