Part Two - Researching key issues: emerging themes and challenges

Summary

The sheer breadth of issues relevant to hate crime scholarship and policy will invariably mean that numerous issues remain unexplored or underexplored. While much good work has been done across different domains and disciplines to develop our understanding, there is much yet to learn. We still live in societies characterised by disturbingly high levels of hate, prejudice and bigotry, and using research to identify practical ways of addressing these problems and supporting victims is central to the process of overcoming the disconnect between scholarship and policy.

Part Two draws from a selection of emerging themes and challenges to explore the relationship between hate crime research and hate crime policy. It begins with Chapter Six from Marian Duggan whose analysis of collaborative engagements between criminal justice agents, community voluntary workers, public servants and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities calls for greater reflection on the part of scholars with reference to the accessibility and applicability of their recommendations for hate crime policy. Similar themes are raised in the next chapter by Chih Hoong Sin who presents a ‘layers of influence’ model that illustrates ways that research, policy and practice interact within the context of disablist hate crime and that has the capacity to guide prevention strategies.

The following two chapters explore issues of Islamophobic hate from different perspectives. Irene Zempi examines links between academic research, policy and practice in relation to the support offered to victims of Islamophobic hate, and advocates a more flexible needs-based approach which facilitates greater communication between statutory and voluntary service providers and community-based Muslim organisations. This leads on to James Treadwell's chapter which draws from his ethnographic research with the English Defence League (EDL) to identify ways of controlling the threat posed by this street-based protest movement to Muslim communities and to community cohesion more generally. Related themes form the basis of Chapter Ten from Stevie-Jade Hardy. Using the concept of ‘everyday multiculturalism’ as a lens through which to explore underlying motivations behind the expression of hate, Hardy's research highlights that young White-British people's interactions with cultural diversity are contingent on their existing fears, prejudices and frustrations.