Healing Harms and Engendering Tolerance: The Promise of Restorative Justice for Hate Crime
In N. Chakraborti (ed) Hate Crime: Concepts, policy, future directions. Willan Publishing. 2010
12 Pages Posted: 24 Jul 2014
Date Written: July 22, 2014
Abstract
Hate crime scholars have spent the best part of twenty years investigating the prevalence of hate crime, its aetiological determinants, the harms it causes, and how - within a democratic and diverse society – it could be diminished or eradicated (Herek & Berrill 1992; McDevitt & Levin 1993; Jacobs & Potter 1998; Lawrence 1999; Perry 2001; Iganksi 2008). Yet within the ‘hate debate’ there has been little attention paid to the potential efficacy of restorative justice. This chapter explores whether restorative justice practices (henceforth RJ) might have the potential to help to repair the harms caused by acts of hatred. It draws upon theoretical and empirical research on both hate crime and RJ and proffers some tentative observations from the early stage of a three-year empirical study into RJ and hate crime being carried out by the first author.
Keywords: Hate crime, restorative justice, community mediation
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