Disability hate crimes are a global problem. They are often violent and hyper-aggressive, with life-changing effects on victims, and they send consistent messages of intolerance and bigotry. This ground-breaking book shows that disability hate crimes do exist, that they have unique characteristics which distinguish them from other hate crimes, and that more effective policies and practices can and must be developed to respond and prevent them. With particular focus on the UK and USA's contrasting response to this issue, this book will help readers to define hate crimes as well as place them within their wider social context. It discusses the need for legislative recognition and essential improvements on the reporting of incidents and assistance for individual victims of these crimes, as well as the need to address the social exclusion of disabled people and the negative attitudes surrounding their condition.

Outlining the key developments of the Disability Hate Crime policy agenda, this book analyses the contributions of activists, politicians, policy makers and criminal justice system practitioners and recommends progressive policy changes.

This text provides a comprehensive and interdisciplinary examination of disability, hate crime and violence, exploring its emergence on the policy agenda. Engaging with debates in criminology, disability and violence studies, it looks at violences in their myriad forms as they are seen to impact upon disabled people's lives.

Bringing together perspectives from academics, practitioners, campaigners, and activists, this book explores the victimology of disability hate crime (DHC). For the first time, this book brings together recent academic thought, the stance of those working for the United Nations to further the rights of disabled people, and a helpful toolkit on how to advance the status of the disabled victim of hate crime. Campaigners, support workers, and legal scholars present a tangential approach to revealing the plight of disabled victims and their associates. The book will reveal the expertise required to understand experiences of victimisation and how to help reconstruct the lives of those affected by this type of violence. Never before has a book produced such a nuanced and multidisciplinary approach to discussing disability hate crime. This volume will be useful not only for those academically interested in how disability hate crime is perpetrated but also for scholars who wish to study how to raise awareness and lobby for change. It is essential reading for those engaged with hate studies, victimology, disability, and vulnerable communities, as well as practitioners and campaigners.

Disability hate crimes are a global problem. They are often violent and hyper-aggressive, with life-changing effects on victims, and they send consistent messages of intolerance and bigotry. This ground-breaking book shows that disability hate crimes do exist, that they have unique characteristics which distinguish them from other hate crimes, and that more effective policies and practices can and must be developed to respond and prevent them. With particular focus on the UK and USA's contrasting response to this issue, this book will help readers to define hate crimes as well as place them within their wider social context. It discusses the need for legislative recognition and essential improvements on the reporting of incidents and assistance for individual victims of these crimes, as well as the need to address the social exclusion of disabled people and the negative attitudes surrounding their condition.

Violence motivated by racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and homophobia weaves a tragic pattern throughout American history. Fueled by recent high-profile cases, hate crimes have achieved an unprecedented visibility. Only in the past twenty years, however, has this kind of violence—itself as old as humankind—been specifically categorized and labeled as hate crime. Making Hate a Crime is the first book to trace the emergence and development of hate crime as a concept, illustrating how it has become institutionalized as a social fact and analyzing its policy implications. In Making Hate a Crime Valerie Jenness and Ryken Grattet show how the concept of hate crime emerged and evolved over time, as it traversed the arenas of American politics, legislatures, courts, and law enforcement. In the process, violence against people of color, immigrants, Jews, gays and lesbians, women, and persons with disabilities has come to be understood as hate crime, while violence against other vulnerable victims-octogenarians, union members, the elderly, and police officers, for example-has not. The authors reveal the crucial role social movements played in the early formulation of hate crime policy, as well as the way state and federal politicians defined the content of hate crime statutes, how judges determined the constitutional validity of those statutes, and how law enforcement has begun to distinguish between hate crime and other crime. Hate crime took on different meanings as it moved from social movement concept to law enforcement practice. As a result, it not only acquired a deeper jurisprudential foundation but its scope of application has been restricted in some ways and broadened in others. Making Hate a Crime reveals how our current understanding of hate crime is a mix of political and legal interpretations at work in the American policymaking process. Jenness and Grattet provide an insightful examination of the birth of a new category in criminal justice: hate crime. Their findings have implications for emerging social problems such as school violence, television-induced violence, elder-abuse, as well as older ones like drunk driving, stalking, and sexual harassment. Making Hate a Crime presents a fresh perspective on how social problems and the policies devised in response develop over time. A Volume in the American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology

This book examines the experiences of disabled people on public transport to reveal the everyday abuses that many experience there, and the resilience that they need in order to conduct an ordinary life. This work represents an intertwining of personal journeys, with its author writing from first-hand experience, and now working as one of the leading researchers of disability hate crime (DHC) in the UK. DHC is an under-researched area and the findings in this book have implications beyond the public transport context. This book draws on a sample of 56 victim-participants and includes data drawn from public transport regulators, service operators and staff in the UK. Wilkin argues that established legislation needs to be recognised and implemented by regulatory and local authorities in order to reach equality objectives on public transport. Each chapter is clearly structured, accessibly written and includes key definitions which will speak to practitioners and academics with an interest in victimology, policing, social policy, gender studies, disability studies, migration studies, equality studies and religious studies. This book also examines how effectively authorities and service providers safeguard disabled people on UK public transport and reveals adaptive approaches to researching with disabled people.