Edited by Joseph B. Walther and Ronald E. Rice

This book explores the social forces among and between online aggressors that affect the expression and perpetration of online hate. Its chapters illustrate how patterns of interactive social behavior reinforce, magnify, or modify this expression. It also considers the characteristics of social media that facilitate social interactions that promote hate and facilitate relationships among haters. Bringing together a range of international experts and covering an array of themes, including woman abuse, antisemitism, pornography, radicalization, and extreme political youth movements, this book examines the specific social factors and processes that facilitate these forms of hate and proposes new approaches for explaining them. Cutting-edge, interdisciplinary, and authoritative, this book will be of interest to sociologists, criminologists, and scholars of media, communication, and computational social science alike, as well as those engaged with hate crime, hate speech, social media, and online social networks.

London; New York: Routledge, 2025.

By Matthew L Williams; Pete Burnap, Amir Javed, Han Liu, Sefa Ozalp

Hate crimes have risen up the hierarchy of individual and social harms, following the revelation of record high police figures and policy responses from national and devolved governments. The highest number of hate crimes in history was recorded by the police in England and Wales in 2017/18. The 94,098 hate offences represented a 17 per cent increase on the previous year and a 123 per cent increase on 2012/13. Although the Crime Survey for England and Wales has recorded a consistent decrease in total hate crime victimization (combining race, religion, sexual orientation, disability and transgender), estimations for race and religion-based hate crimes in isolation show an increase from a 112,000 annual average (April 13–March 15) to a 117,000 annual average (April 15–March 17) (ONS, 2017). This increase does not take into account the likely rise in hate victimization in the aftermath of the 2017 terror attacks in London and Manchester. Despite improvements in hate crime reporting and recording, the consensus is that a significant ‘dark figure’ remains. There continues a policy and practice needed to improve the intelligence about hate crimes, and in particular to better understand the role community tensions and events play in patterns of perpetration. The HMICFRS (2018) inspection on police responses to hate crimes evidence that forces remain largely ill-prepared to handle the dramatic increases in racially and religiously

The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 60, Issue 1, January 2020, Pages 93–117