Bridging communities: Exploring experiences of 'hate' within community, voluntary, and criminal justice sectors

Pickles, James (2018) Bridging communities: Exploring experiences of 'hate' within community, voluntary, and criminal justice sectors. Doctoral thesis, Northumbria University.

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Abstract

This thesis examines how hate is experienced, navigated, and negotiated within community, voluntary, and criminal justice services. It details the findings of a qualitatively driven, mixed methods research project including a survey of queer people (n=242) and 33 semi-structured qualitative interviews. The research found that LGBT+ people favour social justice pathways over criminal justice pathways to report, share, and reconcile their hate experiences. Thus I examine the role of criminal and social justice pertaining to hate experiences. I adopt a radical queer perspective, by arguing that the aetiology of hate stems from structural power imbalances and oppression of queer people. Drawing upon historical, sociological, victimological, and criminological perspectives I focus on identity as the conduit for hate victimisation and explore how identities, in particular age, gender, and sexuality, shape how hate is experienced, negotiated, and navigated. The research highlights that age is a major influencing factor as the spaces and places hate crime is perpetrated and experienced is usually correlated with age. Participants experienced more everyday background hate in the form of micro-aggressions, othering, and marginalisation than they did hate ‘crime’. Criminal justice workers advocated the need to protect LGBT+ people from hate crime, departing from the long history of the criminal justice system, previously, persecuting LGBT+ people. ‘Hate’ is both an adult-centric and binary concept, where only adults can experience hate ‘incidents’ or ‘crimes’. By exploring student groups, youth and community groups, and criminal justice workers this research has highlighted that community networks are key for LGBT+ people to organise their sociality and find support for their hate experiences. This research, with the exception of a survey, solely focuses on communities and individuals in the North East of England. It promotes the need for community layered hate crime research that is intersectional, in order to readily understand the social location of participants. This research provides examples of how experiences of hate can differ depending on age, gender, and sexuality.

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