Including victims of ‘hate crime’ in the criminal justice policy process

Given the centrality of the victim to the conceptualisation of ‘hate crime’, this chapter explores the significance of including the victim in the ‘hate crime’ policy process. It analyses findings from research carried out on the London-wide Race Hate Crime Forum in 2006 and 2007 to illuminate and evaluate efforts to include victims of racist crime in multi-agency working at the London-wide level. The chapter draws out the tensions involved in confronting criminal justice agents with the experiences of victims and also the problem of competing claims by different groups of victims for inclusion in the policy process. First, it discusses ‘race-hate’ crime and multi-agency working in the European Union, and then considers multi-agency working and victims of ‘race-hate crime’ in the United Kingdom, ‘race-hate crime’ and multi-agency cooperation city-wide in London, the ‘silo-approach’ to ‘hate crime’, and lessons from the London-wide Race Hate Crime Forum.