What is hate? The dictionary meaning of hate is ‘intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury.’ or ‘extreme dislike or disgust.’
I hate cockroaches. Why do I hate them? I have an intense disliking of their appearance, the way they crawl or fly sometimes, and I fear that they might fall or crawl up on my body. That’s disgusting! They can also spoil food. So, I kill cockroaches with insecticide. I can buy insecticides freely and there are some specifically advertised as effective in killing cockroaches. There is no crime in it.
People hate people for their color, race, religion, culture, and so on. And that hatred often transcends mind to muscle. Fortunately, we don’t see guns advertised as say, ‘effective in killing both black and white people.’ And also, in our societies killing people out of hatred is a crime.
According to the United States Department of Justice hate crime means “assault, murder, arson, vandalism, or threats to commit such crimes. It may also cover conspiring or asking another person to commit such crimes, even if the crime was never carried out.” The US state and Federal hate crime laws include crimes committed based on the victim’s perceived or actual race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or disability.
According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program, law enforcement agencies in the USA reported 8,263 hate crime incidents in 2020.
It’s easy to get data from developed countries because of their advanced and efficient systems of reporting, recording, and law enforcement. Even then the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) stated in 2021 that nine out of ten hate crimes were not being reported to the police.
We can only imagine how many hate crimes are going unnoticed in the rest of the world.
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This article was published in the Daily Sun on September 11, 2022. Please read the full article here or here.