From Thrill to Defensive Motivation

Abstract

In the aftermath of the September 11 attack on America, thrill-motivated hate crimes tended to decline as the rate of violent crime generally declined, but defensive hate crimes seemed to increase substantially. Just as individual factors were important in accounting for thrill-motivated hate attacks, so group factors became important for the purpose of explaining defensive hate crimes. The purpose of the present study was to apply group threat theorizing to explain increases in hate crimes against various groups since the 9/11 attack on America. In particular, we examined the prevalence of hate-motivated assaults against Muslims, Jews, gays, Blacks, and Latinos. Two separate data sources were employed: newspaper articles from LexisNexis and the Southern Poverty Law Center “hate incidents” spreadsheet. To control for changes in the level of hate crimes generally over time, we examined the percentage of hate-motivated assaults overall (in addition to their frequency of occurrence) that were directed at particular groups by the year in which they occurred. Our results indicated that hate-motivated assaults in the aftermath of 9/11 seemed to be driven to an increasing extent by a series of group threats in the wider society. Our results suggest that defensive assaults tend to peak when a particular group is regarded as representing a danger to the dominant group’s prestige, wealth, or power.