Mind the Gap! Making Stronger Connections Between Hate Crime Policy and Scholarship

Abstract

Despite recent progress, our collective responses to hate crime have been undermined by a disconnected approach to scholarship and policy. This article focuses on a series of problems that are created and reinforced through such an approach. This includes the limited reach of hate crime theorizing and specifically the perception that academic work is often too detached from the everyday realities confronting those who respond to—or live with—the consequences of hate crime in the “real world.” Equally problematic is policy that is not empirically driven or linked to academic knowledge, or which is based on tokenistic, cynical or “tick-box” foundations. The article draws from these fault lines to underline the symbiotic relationship between hate crime scholarship and policy formation: one where policy formation needs academic substance to be fit for purpose and where scholarship needs to inform policy to have lasting “real-world” value.