Re-defining hate crime
Throughout the University of Leicester, students are taught by thought leaders: people who have a direct input into the development of policy at local, national and international levels.
For example, Department of Criminology lecturers Dr Neil Chakraborti and Jon Garland are co-authors of Hate Crime: Impact, Causes and Responses – a book that sheds important new light on the subject by examining it for the first time in an explicitly British, rather than American, context.
Drawing upon findings from the authors’ own research and their collaborative work with criminal justice agencies, the book examines how crimes perpetuated against individuals on the basis of their identity - be it their ethnicity, faith, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability – have been grouped together under the hate ‘umbrella’ to establish more formalised protection for minority groups.
Commonly, however, hate crime is solely (and mistakenly) associated with violent racism, meaning that its other forms, such as homophobic or disablist harassment, have often been overlooked. Through case studies, Neil and Jon’s work goes on to explore why it’s wrong to associate hate crime solely with violent racism, whether these crimes are motivated exclusively by hate, what types of people are responsible for committing hate crime and the merits of increased sentence tariffs for perpetrators.
A hallmark of our work at the University of Leicester is that teaching is informed and brought to life by pioneering research. Neil and Jon’s students thus develop a profound understanding of the major challenges facing the police, the prison service and other criminal justice agencies in the 21st Century – all informed by their groundbreaking work.
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