HATE CRIME Stephen Tomsen University of Western Sydney, Australia Abstract In recent decades, activists and researchers have described harassment and violence targeted against minority groups as “hate crime”. They have also petitioned police, courts and state agencies to react against this form of crime. Nevertheless, the term remains conceptually awkward and is highly contested in debates about what incidents and victim groups it ought refer to, and what new laws and measures reconcile liberal freedom with minority protection. . . . . . Hate crime is a vexed though important term in contemporary descriptions of crime, prejudice and social conflict. Its origins date to the 1970s1980s North American social movement “framing” of an ostensibly new and urgent crime problem. It quickly spread to use in Western Europe, South Africa, Australasia, and then circulated globally. The common use refers to harassment and violence motivated by perpetrator hostility to the minority group status of the victim; most often their racial, ethnic, religious or sexual identity. Definitions of typical hate crimes refer to incidents where victims are selected on the basis of real or perceived minority identity and attacks are said to comprise a symbolic warning that serves to reinforce group subordination. In this way, hate crimes have been viewed as public incidents occurring between a victim and perpetrator who are strangers. This understanding of hate crime as a given set of criminal acts, targeting specific victim groups, and also characterized by an impersonal relation between victim and perpetrator, has become highly contested in over two decades of scholarship and activism. Yet instead of a disavowal of the term, many press instead for broader theorization and definitions to include the victimization of such further minority groups as transgendered, homeless, disabled, and aged people. Feminists have also argued for a description that includes general violence and harassment against women (Tomsen and Mason 2001). It is noted that different victims are targeted in both public attacks and in private scenarios with closer social relations to their assailants. Rather than being exceptional disruptions to social life, such attacks include direct physical violence as well as intimidation resulting in everyday social marginalization.