Out-group hate in the UK: Insights from race and religious hate crime representations and attitudes towards immigrants

Hate crimes have become a common problem in the United Kingdom (UK), especially following the European Union (EU) referendum and the BREXIT vote in June 2016. Consequently, hate crimes have received a great deal of attention in the recent past, with increasing discussions tailored around the need to accurately record and investigate these crimes. However, the field of hate crimes is complicated by inaccuracies in reporting and recording of these crimes, in addition to there being no clear understanding of how hate crimes are constructed by the general public and the intersection between the public perceptions and hate crime scholarship. Hate crime policing has advocated the protection of five-strands of people that are most likely to be recipients of such victimisation, while statistics suggest that two of the strands, race and religion, account for 80% of hate crime in the UK. Due to the frequent occurrence of race and religious hate crimes in the UK, this research aimed to investigate the general public and cultural perceptions and understandings of race and religious hate crime, in particular. Using a mixed-method design, this thesis conducted three empirical studies to investigate the facets of race and religious hate crimes in the UK. Study 1 carried out a cultural analysis of hate crime by examining newspaper articles to extract the key attributes evident in the reporting of race and religious hate crimes. A total of 22 key variables were seen to present when reporting such crimes, so for the general public these maybe the trigger for, and ideas by which, they come to define and understand an event as possibly being a hate crime. Study 2 looked more specifically at this perception and understanding of race and religious hate crimes amongst the general public by using a ‘storycompletion task’. The results suggested a variety of themes by which people might understand and demarcate race and religious hate crime; these are key social-psychological factors that need to be considered in terms of hate crime practice and policy. Finally, Study 3 evaluated the underlying social-psychological factors that may contribute to negative attitudes towards out-groups, a well-established finding in previous literature and evident in study two, that ‘othering’ and being seen as an out-group can be the basis of hate crime. The results suggested that people who are high on ethnocentrism are significantly more likely to show prejudice towards immigrants. In conclusion, the thesis highlighted that ‘othering’ individuals based on prejudicial attitudes can lead to hate crimes, therefore it is proposed that education on ethnic differences and early interventions to reduce prejudice (e.g. incorporating discussions of ethnicity in school curriculums), may be beneficial in reducing overall prejudice amongst the general public, which in-turn would help reduce hate crimes.