There is now evidence emerging from the Office for National Statistics of a link between violent crime and hate crimes (see link https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/hate-crime-england-and-wales-2022-to-2023/hate-crime-england-and-wales-2022-to-2023). A hate crime is defined as ‘any criminal offence which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards someone based on a personal characteristic.’
This is important because unlike crimes defined by property ownership or financial value, hate crimes are defined by their impact on identity capital: specifically the racial, religious, disabled, sexual and transgender identities that make up the human capital of our multi-dimensional communities. It may be a matter of debate for some, but for most social scientists these identities are assumed to be social and psychological (or bio-psycho-social) in their construction and maintenance. This means that hate crimes can be used to validate theories about the construction and maintenance of identities in our local communities.
To promote this as a method for further research, it is the proposal of this article that hate crimes are an externalisation of the same violent impulses that, when internalised, are expressed as mental health problems like suicide and deliberate self harm. Thus, in theory, the externalisation and internalisation of violent impulses might appear as seemingly random break-through temproal events, along well defined geo-cultural fault-lines. But like so many volcanic eruptions along fissures between underlying thechtonic plates, these events are expressions of deeper, perhaps unconscious, identity conflicts, that lay at the foundations of our western liberal democracies, and across which the identity politics of our age are populated, as stories within the national press.
In their report the ONS say:
"Figure 2.1 shows the indexed trend in overall violent and public order offences since the year ending March 2013 compared with all hate crime offences over the same period. As can be seen, there is a strong correlation between the increase in overall public order and violence against the person offences and hate crime. While hate crimes have fallen in the latest year, the overall number of violence against the person and public order offences was similar to the previous year."
There is always a question about the accuracy of recording any sort of crimes, but the ONS report accounts for this. Their report identifies a number of areas where improvements have taken place. However, these do not appear to represent a threat to the validity of the association between increases in interpersonal hostilities within communities, and the outcomes being violence against the person.
"92% of hate crimes in the year ending March 2023 were for either public order or violence against the person offences, continuing the pattern seen in previous years. These 2 offence groups were thought to have been previously subject to relatively high levels of under-recording and thus improvements in crime recording are likely to have had a larger impact on these groups than other offences."
They go on to say how the lagest majority of offences are racial or religiously aggravated, and detail how peaks and troughs over this time period are linked to newsworthy events:
"The data the Home Office receives in the main police recorded crime return for racially or religiously aggravated offences are available on a monthly basis whereas data for all hate crimes for all forces are only available annually. This allows analysis of in-year trends in these offences. An indexed chart of these offences and their non-aggravated equivalent offence are shown in (Figure 2.2).
There were 4 clear spikes in these aggravated offences which were not seen in the non-aggravated offences:
- July 2016, following the EU Referendum
- July 2017, following the terrorist attacks seen in this year
- Summer 2020, following the Black Lives Matter protests and far-right counter-protests following the death of George Floyd on 25th May in the United States of America
- the fourth spike in the summer of 2021 was largely due to an increase of racially or religiously aggravated public fear, alarm or distress offences; these offences have fallen in the latest year by 7% (from 55,470 to 51,331); the fall in these offences is discussed above"
Although they do not identify a source of the spike in summer 2021, it does actually coincide with a mass sporting event: when three black English footballers famously missed their penalties in the Euro 2020 final, handing a victory to Italy.
Conclusion:
Hate crimes can be defined because they violate certain rules of communication; moral rules that govern the social interactions of a culture. These are the same rules that govern what we can and cannot say in different social spaces. As social interactions they are economically equivalent to a production process, where emotional inputs pass through interconnected psychological structures to produce individual behavioural outcomes, that impact on the emotional capital of the community as a whole. It is the prediction of these behavioural outcomes that interest the behavioural scientist.
We already know from deprivation data that the incidence of violent crimes within a community is linked to population density. And increases in population density are linked to increases in rates of homicide, suicide and deliberate self harm. But it has never actually been possible to predict who will kill themselves, or someone else, when or how. But the link between hate crimes, violent crimes, and sociallly contructed identities, now allows us to predict the likelihood of an event based on the surveilance of narratives on social media, that produce hatred against a minority, within a local community.
However, in a similar way to the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics: knowing that an event is more likely does not help us predict exactly where, when or how that event will take place. All we can say is that it is becoming more likely to take place in a certain area or region within the broader social system. But for community mental health nurses this is enough information. This is the information we need to direct our limited resources to the areas where ther is greatest need. It increases the possibility that we will be able to intervene earlier in the production process, and possibly even start to prevent certain untwoard events from occurring.References:
Definition of Hate Crime: https://www.cps.gov.uk/crime-info/hate-crime
Definition of Violent Crime: https://www.cps.gov.uk/crime-info/violent-crime
