The legal definition of hate crime is:
Any crime motivated wholly or partly by malice and ill-will (hostility or prejudice) based on one or more perceived characteristics.
These protected characteristics include age, race (colour, nationality including citizenship or ethnic or national origins), religion, sexual orientation, disability, or their transgender identity and variations in sex characteristics.
Hate crimes can have a significant impact on the targeted individual, particularly those who may already be vulnerable.
Hate crimes can be verbal or physical and include:
- Verbal abuse or insults including name-calling
- Threatening behaviour
- Assaults
- Robbery
- Damage to property
- Encouraging others to commit hate crimes
- Harassment
- Online abuse on sites such as TikTok or Twitter
Hate Incident
You might have also heard the term hate incident. A hate incident is anything that the victim, or any other person believes is motivated either entirely or partly by ill-will towards a person or group based on the victim’s actual or perceived characteristics. The difference is that hate incidents do not mean they are a criminal offence and these non-crime hate incidents are not recorded against the other party.
What Can I Do To Help?
There is a few things you can do to help prevent hate crimes from occurring, but you should always keep in mind that you never want to escalate a situation when standing up for others. This can result in the potential risk of putting yourself in danger or even getting in trouble with the law.
With that in mind you can always challenge other people viewpoints or stand up for someone if they are getting insulted, just be careful about the situation you put yourself in.
If you see a hate crime occur there is a number of ways to report it:
- Phone 999 for an ongoing emergency or a situation that looks like it could escalate.
- Phone 101 for a non-emergency, if the incident has already occurred and no one is in immediate danger.
- Complete a Hate Crime Reporting Form online.
- Contact your local Hate Crime Third Party Reporting Centre.
- Contact your local police station in person.
- If you are deaf, you can contact 999 BSL in an emergency.