Ethnicity and Victimisation

RACIST VICTIMISATION:

  • Occurs when picking a victim based on their race, ethnicity or religion.

  • It has recently been brought back into focus by the racist murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993 and the subsequent handling of the police investigation.

  • Two sources provide information on racist victimisation:

    1. Victim surveys such as the CSEW.

    2. Police recorded statistics.

  • They generally cover:

    1. Racist incidents: any incident that’s perceived to be racist by the victim or another person.

    2. Racially or religiously aggravated offences where the offender is motivated by hostility towards members of a racial or religious group.

EXTENT AND RISK OF VICTIMISATION:

  • Police recorded 54,000 racist incidents in England and Wales in 2014/15 – mostly damage to property or verbal harassment.

  • However, most incidents go unreported. The CSEW estimates there were around 89,000 racially motivated incidents in 2014/15.

  • The police also recorded 38,000 racially or religiously aggravated offences in 2014/15, mostly harassment. 8,600 people were prosecuted or cautioned for racially aggravated offences in 2014.

  • The risk of being a victim of any sort of crime – not just racist crime – varies by ethnic group. The 2014/15 CSEW shows that people from mixed ethnic backgrounds had a higher risk (27.9%) of becoming a victim of crime than blacks (18%), Asians (15.8%) or whites (15.7%).

  • There are three reasons other than ethnicity for why these people are more likely to be victims:

    1. More control agencies in the areas that they live in/poorer area – unemployment/working class.

    2. Age

    3. Gender

  • Although unemployment may be a result of discrimination in itself.

  • The victim’s experience is not noted in the statistics.

  • Sampson and Phillips:

    • Say racist victimisation tends to be ongoing over time, with repeated ‘minor’ instances of abuse and harassment interwoven with periodic incidents of physical violence.

    • This results in a psychological impact needing to be added to the physical injury and damage to property caused by the offenders.

RESPONSES TO VICTIMISATION:

  • The responses of victims include:

    • Crime prevention measures like fireproof doors and letterboxes.

    • Organised self-defence campaigns aimed at physically defending neighbourhoods from racist attacks.

  • They do this because these communities feel the police have under-protected them and ignored racist dimensions of victimisation as well as failing to record or investigate incidents properly.

  • The finding of the MacPherson inquiry that brought this back up:

    • Concluded that the police investigation into the death of Stephen was ‘marred by a combination of professional incompetence, institutional racism and a failure of leadership by senior officers’.

    • Others have found deeply ingrained racist attitudes and beliefs among individual officers.