NCJ Number
232737
Date Published
2010
Length
25 pages
Annotation
Based on an analysis of hate speech-text recorded by the British Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) in its hate crime files, this chapter examines approaches used in forensic linguistics in understanding the force and effects of speech as used in hate crimes.
Abstract
Before discussing the linguistic properties of the verbal-textual hostility recorded in hate crimes reported to the MPS, this chapter reviews the features of the context of such violence, which includes crime location (mostly public spaces); nature of hate crime offenses (most often against property, cars, and buildings/dwellings lived in or used by the victims); and hate-crime relationship between the victim and offender (whether the offender is a stranger to or knows the victim). Although there is a shared contextual pattern in hate crimes, the force and effects of the violence varies significantly. The next section of the chapter uses "Critical Discourse Analysis" (CDA) in analyzing the words used in hate crimes to reveal and give expression to the conscious or subconscious intentions of perpetrators. Issues addressed in this section are the reporting and recording of verbal-textual hostility for evidence in alleged hate crimes, victim/informant identity and the relationship to the expressed verbal-textual hostility and types of offender verbal-textual hostility associated with violent hate crimes. The chapter notes that understanding what is said in hate crimes assists in understanding when hate is a crime and in developing sophisticated instruments that can judge the possible harm, force, and effects of hate speech-text. This study involved the analysis of 99,727 hate crime case records of the MPS for cases dating from January 2003 to December 2007. 9 tables, 18 notes, and 31 references