Crime and Context

What would you do if your co-worker confided in you that last night, her son had screamed in her face, scratched his sharp nails across her cheek, and kicked her in the stomach?

Well, if your co-worker was somebody like me, with an eight-month old baby, you would probably not be alarmed. If, on the other hand, her son was eighteen, you might feel a little concerned. You'd want to know more about the situation. Does her son have mental health issues? Was this attack unprecedented and unwarranted? Or did the son lash out after his mom physically attacked him first?

What a difference context makes! By itself, the act of screaming, scratching, and kicking is not a crime. (If it were, all babies would be in jail!) When it's combined with malicious intent, it's definitely a criminal act. But when it's performed under duress or under the influence of mental illness, the circumstances of the act may exonerate the perpetrator.

The idea of context is central to our legal system. That's why we have different classes of crimes for the act of killing someone. At the end of the day, the victim is still dead, but an accidental death is charged as manslaughter and carries a light sentence, while a pre-meditated execution nets the perpetrator a murder conviction and a place on death row.

In 1969, the United States Congress passed 18 USC 245 (b)(2), which made it a federal crime to target someone for their race, color, religion, or national origin, and recent pending legislation seeks to expand the existing law to cover crimes targeting someone due to gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.

The problem with crimes targeting members of a particular group is that the repercussions spread widely to include anyone who is a member of that group or even looks like they could be a member of that group. If I kill my husband, it probably won't have much of an impact on society at large, because it's just a domestic dispute. It will hurt my family, and his family, and our friends and neighbors, but it won't make husbands cower in fear at the thought of going out. If, on the other hand, I set up a sniper rifle, look for men with something glinting on their left ring finger, and shoot, and people begin to make the link between these dead men and the fact that they were targeted precisely because they are husbands, then I have just changed the dynamics of the community. Men will start to remove their rings before they go out, assuming they brave the outdoors at all. And my goal of intimidation has been met.

And that's precisely why hate crimes belong in a class of their own. They cause members of a particular group of people to feel like being themselves is hazardous to their own health. In certain cases, such as being targeted for skin color, there's really nothing that they can do about it. The men in the example above might disguise their married state by hiding their rings, but I might still be able to tell that they're married by their behavior. But the thing is, even unmarried men wouldn't be safe. The only thing required for me to target a man is that I think he's married. I might mistakenly kill a man who's not married, just because he's wearing his class ring on his left ring finger, or he's wearing a metal finger brace, or he kisses his sister (whom I mistake for his wife) on the cheek before leaving for work. So my reign of terror would extend to more than just my original target group. Now it's all men who might appear to be married who are afraid to be themselves.

I used the phrase "reign of terror" on purpose, because hate crimes are really just terrorism. They're used to intimidate groups of people into behaving in a certain way. My purely hypothetical rampage against married men would cause men to start behaving in the way that I want them to. I have the power and they don't.

When my rampage against married men finally ends and I'm being tried in front of a jury of my peers, the hate crimes legislation will come into play. Assuming that it hasn't been vetoed, that is, the legislation will now cover crimes motivated by gender, and the rampage was definitely motivated by my purely hypothetical dislike of men. After all, the law covers crimes against any group, even white, Christian men targeted for being white, Christian men. There's no kind of special privilege being afforded to minorities by hate crimes legislation, unless you count "being able to walk around and be yourself without fear of danger or death" as a special privilege. In that case, then everyone is entitled to special privilege.


For more information, I recommend reading this page from religioustolerance.org; in addition, Greta Christina had a good entry about hate crimes legislation a few weeks ago, and I also liked this explanation by Pandagon.