Blood, Threats and Fears

Book excerpt: This book offers unparalleled insight into the ways in which hate crime affects individuals and communities across the world. Drawing from the testimonies of more than 2,000 victims of hate crime, the book identifies the physical, emotional and community-level harms associated with hate crimes and key implications for justice in the context of punitive, restorative, rehabilitative and educative interventions. Hate crime constitutes one of the biggest global challenges of our time and blights the lives of millions of people across the world. Within this context the book generates important new knowledge on victims’ experiences and expectations, and uses its compelling evidence-base to identify fresh ways of understanding, researching and responding to hate crime. It also documents the sensitivities associated with undertaking complex fieldwork of this nature, and in doing so offers an authentic account of the very necessary – and sometimes unconventional – steps which are fundamental to the process of engaging with ‘hard-to-reach’ communities.