Hate Crimes

Abstract

Hate crimes have always been committed and are a part of our history. The term “hate crime” did not enter the nation’s vocabulary until the 1980s. Hate crimes have an effect on not only the person the crime is committed against but on society as a whole.

Hate Crimes

Hate crimes are a sad part of our history. The FBI began investigating what we call hate crimes as far back as World War I, when the Ku Klux Klan got their attention.(FBI, 2014) The Department of Justice defines a hate crime as “the violence of intolerance and bigotry, intended to hurt and intimidate someone because of their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, or disability.” The laws have changed to make any crime that is hate crimes carry harsher punishments.

The most common hate crime in history was racial crimes but hate crimes happen due to religion, sexual orientation, and other reasons. “The FBI reported 7,722 incidents of hate crimes in 2006, of which about 52 percent were directed at people because of their race; 19 percent, because of the victims’ religion; 16 percent because of their sexual orientation; and 13 percent because of their ethnicity or national origin.”(NCPC, 2014) In 2012 law enforcement agencies reported 5,796 hate crime incidents down some from 2006. (FBI, 2014)

People who commit these crimes are not always part of an organized group such as the Klu Klux Klan, although those groups and others do exist in today’s world. Many times these crimes are the result of fear, such as what happened after the attacks on New York in 2011. Violence against Arab and Muslim Americans reached its height after the tragic events of September 11, 2001. There are other causes such as thrill seeking, to protect their neighborhood from perceived outsiders, acting in response to a hate crime either perceived or actual, and because they are so committed to bigotry. Many hate crimes occur with the younger generation because they try for acceptance from peers by taking on the attitudes of the group they are involved with. The perpetrators

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