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Hate Crimes (Bias Crimes), Anti-Gay

Identifying a crime that is motivated by hate is important because this type of violence sends a message to an entire group of people beyond the immediate victim of the crime. Such victims are targeted because of who they are, and the message is that their group is inferior, wrong, and unworthy. Still, there is much disagreement as to whether these crimes should be treated differently from other crimes and how to determine bias motivation on the part of the offenders.

The U.S. Congress defined a hate crime as a crime in which “the defendant's conduct was motivated by hatred, bias, or prejudice, based on the actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity of another individual or group of individuals” in HR 4797 in 1992, and added disability status in 1994. These hate crime categories are used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in collecting crime statistics, but they are not the categories used in the federal hate crime law passed in 1968. The federal law only protects those who were victims of hate crimes because of their religion, race, or national origin.

Types of Anti-Gay Hate Crimes Data Collection

Congress passed the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990 after rising anti-gay violence in the 1980s. This was the first federal civil rights law to include sexual orientation as a class. However, collecting accurate anti-gay hate crimes statistics is a challenge. The first impediment is that many lesbians and gay men will not take the risk to “out” themselves as gay to medical or legal personnel; hence, there is an incalculable underreporting factor. The second impediment is that there are three main sources of anti-gay hate crimes report sources, each of which has its own limitations.

One source of information on hate crimes is the FBI. In 2003, the FBI reported 1,239 hate crimes (17% of the total number) based on actual or perceived sexual orientation of the victims. However, such reporting is voluntary and over a third of law enforcement jurisdictions do not report to the FBI. Furthermore, some jurisdictions that do not report show up as having “0” hate crimes, which leads to faulty numbers. Due to lack of training, personnel may believe the FBI is not interested in minor hate crimes, such as hate graffiti or vandalism, and so do not report them. Differing local definitions of hate crimes and political pressure around reporting hate crimes may contribute to inconsistent numbers. In addition, some persons in law enforcement are reluctant to assess the motive of the offender and feel it is outside of their purview.

A second source, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), is based on interviews of 77,600 nationally representative persons interviewed biannu-ally about their experiences with crime. The NCVS reported an annual average of 210,000 hate crime victimizations between July 2000 and December 2003. Of these, 1 in 6 incidents were based on the sexual orientation of the victim. The NCVS requires corroborating evidence of derogatory language used by the offender, hate symbols left by the offender, or police confirmation that a hate crime occurred.

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