Editing Hate crime (section)

==Motivation==

Sociologists Jack McDevitt and [[Jack Levin (sociologist)|Jack Levin]]'s 2002 study into the motives for hate crimes found four motives, and reported that "thrill-seeking" accounted for 66 percent of all hate crimes overall in the United States:<ref>{{cite web |title=Hate Crimes Explained |url=https://www.splcenter.org/20180415/hate-crimes-explained#motivation |website=Southern Poverty Law Center}}</ref><ref name="Levin McDevitt Hate Crimes">{{cite book |last1=Levin |first1=Jack |last2=McDevitt |first2=Jack |title=Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, & Conflict |date=2008 |publisher=Elsevier |location=Amsterdam |isbn=9780123739858 |pages=915–922 |edition=2nd |url=https://jacklevinonviolence.com/articles/HateCrimesencyc92206FINAL.pdf |chapter=Hate Crimes}}</ref>

* ''Thrill-seeking'' – perpetrators engage in hate crimes for excitement and drama. Often, there is no greater purpose behind the crimes, with victims being vulnerable because they have an ethnic, religious, sexual or gender background that differs from their attackers. While the actual animosity present in such a crime can be quite low, thrill-seeking crimes were determined to often be dangerous, with 70 percent of thrill-seeking hate crimes studied involving physical attacks. Typically, these attacks are perpetrated by groups of young teenagers or adults seeking excitement.<ref name = "2020chapter">{{cite book |last1=Levin|first1=Jack |last2=McDevitt| first2=Jack |date=May 25, 2020 |editor-last=Sternberg |editor-first=Robert J. |title=Perspectives on Hate: How it Originates, Develops, Manifests, and Spreads|publisher=American Psychological Association|pages=179–201 |chapter=Hate Crimes in Transition |isbn=978-1433832819 }}</ref>
* ''Defensive'' – perpetrators engage in hate crimes out of a belief they are protecting their communities. Often, these are triggered by a certain background event. Perpetrators believe society supports their actions but is too afraid to act and thus they believe they have communal assent in their actions.
* ''Retaliatory'' – perpetrators engage in hate crimes out of a desire for revenge. This can be in response to perceived personal slights, other hate crimes or terrorism. The "avengers" target members of a group whom they believe committed the original crime, even if the victims had nothing to do with it. These kinds of hate crimes are a common occurrence after terrorist attacks.
* ''Mission offenders'' – perpetrators engage in hate crimes out of ideological reasons. They consider themselves to be crusaders, often for a religious or racial cause. They may write complex explanations for their views and target symbolically important sites, trying to maximize damage. They believe that there is no other way to accomplish their goals, which they consider to be justification for excessive violence against innocents. This kind of hate crime often overlaps with terrorism, and is considered by the FBI to be both the rarest and deadliest form of hate crime.

In a later article, Levin and fellow sociologist Ashley Reichelmann found that [[Post-9/11|following]] the September 11 attacks, thrill motivated hate crimes tended to decrease as the overall rate of violent crime decreased while defensive hate crimes increased substantially. Specifically, they found that 60% of all hate motivated assaults in 2001 were perpetrated against those the offenders perceived to be Middle Eastern and were motivated mainly by a desire for revenge.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Levin |first1=Jack |last2=Reichelmann |first2=Ashley |date=2015 |title=From Thrill to Defensive Motivation: The Role of Group Threat in the Changing Nature of Hate-Motivated Assaults |journal= American Behavioral Scientist | url = https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764215588812 |volume=59 |issue=12 |pages=1546–1561 |doi= 10.1177/0002764215588812|s2cid=147697229 |access-date=January 15, 2023}}</ref> Levin and McDevitt also argued that while thrill crimes made up the majority of hate crimes in the 1990s, after September 11, 2001, hate crimes in the United States shifted from thrill offenses by young groups to more defensive oriented and more often perpetrated by older [[Lone wolf attack|individuals]] respond to a precipitating event.<ref name = "2020chapter" />

The motivations of hate-crime offenders are complex. Therefore, there is no one theory that can completely account for hate-motived crimes.<ref name="Walters, 2010">Walters, 2010</ref> However, Mark Austin Walters previously attempted to synthesize three interdisciplinary theories to account for the behavior of hate-crime offenders:

1.	'''Strain Theory''': suggests that hate crimes are motivated by perceived economic and material inequality, which results in differential attitudes towards outsiders who may be viewed as “straining” already scarce resources. An example of this can be seen in the discourse surrounding some people's apprehension towards immigrants, who feel as though immigrants and/or refugees receive extra benefits from government and strain social systems.

2.	'''Doing Difference Theory''': suggests that some individuals fear groups other than their own and, as a result of this, seek to suppress different cultures.
 
3.	'''Self-Control Theory''': suggests that a person's upbringing determines their tolerance threshold towards others, here individuals with low self-esteem are often impulsive, have poor employment prospects, and have little academic success.

Walters argues that a synthesis of these theories provides a more well-rounded scope of the motivations behind hate crimes, where he explains that social, cultural, and individual factors interact to elicit the violence behavior of individuals with low self-control.<ref name="Walters, 2010"/>

Additionally, psychological perspectives within the realm of behaviorism have also contributed to theoretical explanations for the motivations of hate crimes particularly as it relates to conditioning and social learning. For instance, the seminal work of John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner illustrated that hate, a form of prejudice, was a conditioned emotional response.<ref>Watson & Rayner, 1920</ref> Later on, the work of Arthur Staats and Carolyn Staats illustrated that both hate and fear were learned behavioral responses.<ref name="Staats & Staats, 1958">Staats & Staats, 1958</ref> In their experiment, Staats and Staats paired positive and negative works with several different nationalities. The pairing of verbal stimuli was a form of conditioning, and it was found to influence attitude formation and attitude change.

These studies are of interest when considering modern forms of prejudice directed towards ethnic, religious, or racial groups.<ref name="Staats & Staats, 1958"/> For instance, there was a significant increase in Islamophobia and hate crimes following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States. Simultaneously, the news media was consistently pairing Islam with terrorism. Thus, the pairing of verbal stimuli in the media contributed to widespread prejudice towards all Arab individuals in a process that is known as semantic generalization, which refers to how a learned behavior can generalize across situations based on meaning or other abstract representations.<ref>Bhatia, 2017</ref> These occurrences continue today with the social and political discourse that contribute to the context in which people learn, come to form beliefs, and engage in behavioral actions. Although not all individuals with prejudicial attitudes go on to engage in hate-motived crime, it has been suggested that hate-crime offenders come to learn their prejudices through social interaction, consumption of biased news media, political hate speech, and internal misrepresentations of cultures other than their own.<ref>McDevitt et al., 2002</ref>

=== Risk management for hate-crime offenders ===
Compared to other types of offending, there has been relatively little research directed towards the management of hate-crime offenders.<ref>Diaz-Faes & Pereda, 2022; Dunbar et al., 2023</ref> However, risk management for hate-crime offenders is an important consideration for forensic psychology and public safety in order to decrease the potential for future harm. Forensic risk assessments are designed to evaluate the likelihood of re-offending and to aid in risk management strategies. While not specifically designed for hate crime offenders, some of the most common risk assessment tools used to assess risk for hate-crime offenders include the Violence Risk Appraisal Guide (VRAG;<ref>Harris & Lang, 2013</ref>), the Historical Clinical Risk Management 20 (HCR-20;<ref>Douglas et al., 2014</ref>) and the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R;<ref>Hart et al., 1992</ref>). Research has shown that assessing and addressing risk posed by hate-crime offenders is especially complex, and while existing tools are useful, it is important to incorporate bias-oriented factors (Dunbar et al., 2005). That is, hate-crime offenders do tend to score high risk on tools including both static and dynamic factors, but severity has been found to not be solely related to these factors, illustrating a need to incorporate biases and ideological factors.<ref>Dunbar et al., 2005</ref>