Hate Crime Policy Analysis

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The origin of the hate crime policy could be traced back to the social movements during the 70s and 80s. The Civil Rights movement, the Women's movement, the LGBTQ movement, the victim's rights movement and many others, are significant in shaping the hate crime policies in the United States. The initial purpose of the statutes is to protect those that are victims of a bias crime, "a crime committed as an act of prejudice" (Lawrence, 2002). This condition also applies to individuals that are targeted due to individuals with "particular protected characteristics...shared by a group, such as 'race', language, religion, ethnicity, nationality, or any other similar common factor" (Chakraborti, 2014). However, as time progresses, many believe that…show more content…
I argue that the legislation should be expanded because underexposed victim groups are marginalized and the legislation does not equally protect the victim groups. One of the arguments regarding the hate crime policy is its evolution as a policy domain. According to Grattet and Jenness (2001), "These dimensions of a policy domain orient us to several considerations with respect to hate crime. Most generally, they suggest that the organization and culture of the hate crime policy domain have shaped the way the problem of hate crime has been defined and the kinds of policies that have been formulated and adopted". The authors suggest that the hate crime policy is socially constructed in which policies are formulated…show more content…
Furthermore, they argue that since most of the crimes such as rape are already protected, it is unnecessary to include it under the hate crime legislation. The exclusion of many other victim groups leads to the second argument regarding the evolution of the hate crime policy as a domain contributed to the criticism of hate crime statutes as 'identity politics'. As Mason-Bish (2014) indicates, "Scholars have noted that it creates a 'competition to be counted' whereby some victim groups are included and others are left out. The impact of excluding some categories of identity means that they are not only overlooked by policy, but they are also ignored as aspects of identity in other victim groups". According to the author, the primary concern of the contemporary hate crime policy is that it does not protect all of the victim groups equally as groups that have more opportunities to be advocated will be protected and recognized the more than those are less advocated. Therefore, it is against the idea of Equal Protection which states that no state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law. More importantly, 'identity politics' cause much danger to the victim and the perpetrator both do not recognize that the individual

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