Hate CriME
Written by Adam Hodgson

I hope that most of you reading this weren’t bullied in school. I was.

Not physically, as I’m not sure kids at a grammar school would have the balls to do that, but words still hurt. They isolate you and add to feelings of depression and unhappiness that come from being gay and having no one to talk to, either at home or in school.

Homophobic bullying in schools is however one of the few glaring omissions from the single equality bill, a piece of legislation going through parliament to harmonise various equality laws, bringing a level of conformity in relation to protection against discrimination. Apparently, the current laws are adequate to deal with the situation, though the same statement applies to racial bullying, sexist bullying and bullying of disabled people.

Liverpool is at the wrong end of a visible rise in homophobic hate crimes; that is to say, crimes that are aggravated by hatred of gay, lesbian and bisexual people. The community response to the most recent attack on a gay police trainee was nothing less than amazing. Over a thousand people gathered on Stanley Street to take part in a vigil against homophobic hate crime.

Being 22, gay and in Liverpool, this crime strikes a lot closer to home than I would like. The reverberations from the attack are felt throughout the whole community, not just in Liverpool, but across Merseyside and the UK. This isn’t always the case with crimes not motivated by hate.

Hate crimes legally can attract more severe punishments from court if a person is found guilty of the crime and the hate aggravated aspect of it. This acts as a small acknowledgement to those communities who live in fear of being the next victim of crime. It sends a message that hate is not acceptable and will not be tolerated. It also allows offenders to be targeted with specific rehabilitation programmes to tackle their underlying prejudices.

Being gay can make the simple difference between whether someone hates you or not. A guy in school once said to me “Adam, it’s not you I hate, it’s your sexuality”. Maybe he would have still disliked me if I wasn’t gay but I can’t ever know that, and being gay is hardly something I can change.

Additional penalties for crimes aggravated by hate are, however, still a controversial topic for some people. Longer sentences are seen by some as saying that crimes against the straight white man are seen as being not quite as bad, which I don’t think is a fair comment. Being gay doesn’t mean every crime against me will be homophobic. The aggravation has to be proved, normally done by looking at the location of the crime, words or abuse used during the crime, the appearance of the person targeted and so on, and this is a much harder task that it might seem.

The punishment is not given just because the victim is gay or black or disabled, it is given because the offender has specifically targeted the victim and if the person wasn’t gay or black or disabled, the crime may never have taken place.

One in five gay people will attempt suicide during their lives. This is a horrible statistic, caused by years of targeted hate and discrimination and is much higher than that in the general population and any attempt to tackle this, whether via support to victims or deterrents to offenders, should be welcomed.