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Hate Crime

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Hate Crime: A Rising Problem Hate Crime can be defined as a perpetrator deliberately targeting a victim because of his or her believed membership in a certain social group, usually defined by race, religion, sexual orientation, disability, class, ethnicity, nationality, age, gender, gender identity, or political affiliation. In the US the Hate Crimes Statistics Act (1990) requires for the recording of an event as a ‘hate crime’ that there is ‘manifest evidence of prejudice based on race, religion, sexual orientation or ethnicity and requires recording officers to complete a 14-point checklist involving a great deal of subjectivity and requiring tacit knowledge of the offences by the recording officer’ (Jacobs, 2003). Some groups such as blacks, Jews, and homosexuals are the most targeted for biased based violent crime but are protected by certain state and federal laws while other groups such as transgendered people are not protected by any law. In the film Soldier’s Girl we meet a young man plagued by the ignorance of a society unwilling to accept a person with non-traditional sexual orientation into the bravado of the Army Infantry. This is an instance far too familiar for many people who make the choice to have a non-traditional way of life. The story of Barry Winchell and Capernia is a direct correlation as to how homosexuals as well as transgendered individuals are treated by society today. The debate on whether being homosexual is a choice or a trait a person is born with doesn’t seem to make any difference in the brutality of crime perpetrated against the individual. In the past decade, the problem of victimization based on an individuals perceived sexual orientation commonly referred to as antigay hate crimes or bias crimes has increasing attention from policy makers and social scientists ( Comstock,1991; Herek, 1989; Herek and Berril 1992; Jenness,1995)

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