The production of hate crime victim status: Discourses of normalisation and the experiences of LGBT community members

Abstract

This article identifies discourses which serve to ‘normalise’ experiences of anti-LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) violence and prevent harmed LGBT persons from accessing the status of ‘hate crime victim’. The phenomenon of normalisation is established in research addressing homophobic, biphobic and transphobic violence, where it is understood fundamentally as the rendering unremarkable of violent manifestations of hate due to their ubiquity. This article interrogates the dynamics of the normalisation process. Drawing on a Foucauldian approach, we explore normalisation as a disciplinary practice, through which people who have experienced anti-LGBT violence are denied access to the status of hate crime victim. Through discourse analysis of focus group data, we identify obstacles to identification and self-identification as a victim grounded in the experience and anticipation of judgement both within society and the LGBT community. Discourses against which the claims of LGBT people are adjudicated (re)produce cultural myths about hate crime, about anti-LGBT violence and about victimhood. While this article acknowledges that the value of identifying as a victim is not uncontested, it also asserts that the practice of normalisation, in denying this status, impacts on access to justice and to support. Far from passive, LGBT people who do not self-identify as victims find ways to manage the impacts of hate using their own resources. In this manner, the disciplinary practice of ‘normalisation’ responsibilises persons harmed by social ills for their own care and silences potentially disruptive claims of victimhood on the part of marginal people.

Introduction

This article explores Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) persons’ discursive positioning with respect to the status of hate crime victim. ¹ We interrogate the manner in which certain discourses serve to normalise experiences of hate crime. Here normalisation is understood in the Foucauldian sense as a process of standardisation, whereby people are persuaded to conform to social norms dictating conduct, ways of thinking and ways of being (Link, 2004). Resonating with broader ongoing debates regarding the treatment of victims within the criminal justice process (see, for example, Goodey, 2005; Hardy and Chakraborti, 2020), we argue that where harmed people choose to make themselves visible by sharing their stories, they open themselves up to disciplining technologies.

We are also concerned with the tacit rules that govern the cultural ascription of the social status of victim, without which a harmed person will ‘not be a victim in the social world’ (Strobl, 2004: 295). We do this by exploring LGBT persons’ experiences of the police recording of hate crime as a technology of examination through which the legal status of hate crime victim is given according to formal rules. We argue that, where they choose to report to the police, harmed people’s experiences are subject to documentation and examination according to narrow legal definitions of what constitutes a victim and ambiguous and often contested standards for adjudicating who is a victim of hate crime.

Furthermore, we examine the disciplining processes that happen informally in interactions between LGBT persons and members of the general population, and within LGBT communities, when people submit the harm they have experienced to the scrutiny of others. These normalising judgements are informed by discourses of power, including myths recounted by participants that hate crime must be spectacular (Wellman, 2006), that anti-LGBT violence is inevitable (Haynes et al., 2015), and that LGBT people are complicit in their own victimisation (Paterson et al., 2018). These myths exclude many LGBT people from the status of hate crime victim, thereby rendering them more docile citizens bearing their experiences as ‘natural’ and unremarkable facets of LGBT identity.

Usages of ‘normalisation’ in research on anti-LGBT hate

The theme of normalisation is by no means new to research on the subject of anti-LGBT violence. In this literature, normalisation is commonly defined as the rendering of hate incidents as ordinary, unremarkable and, consequently, unactionable. We have made similar use of the term in our own work (Haynes et al., 2015). In this article, we seek to advance upon this usage to theorise the discursive dynamics of normalisation as a means of limiting access to societal recognition of victimhood and official intervention.

Any review of research addressing the theme of normalisation should begin by referencing the work of Herek and colleagues. Herek et al. (2002) conducted research with 450 lesbian, gay and bisexual people living in the United States which found that ‘people risk victimization whenever they are labelled gay, lesbian, or bisexual’ (p. 336). The authors found that the anti-LGB hate crimes they encountered were characterised by ‘physical and psychological brutality’ (Herek et al., 2002: 336), yet many participants questioned whether their experiences merited the attention of the police, because they did not consider their experience sufficiently important to report and because they blamed themselves for their victimisation.

Although Herek et al. (2002) did not use the term normalisation, their work is cited in Browne et al. (2011) as evidence of same. Browne et al. (2011) foreground normalisation, defining it as a practice that manifests in all sections of the LGBT community. They associate the practice of normalisation with a refusal to give hate incidents recognition by ‘not defining or naming abuse’ (Browne et al., 2011: 748) and accepting abuse as an inevitable ‘part of LGBT lives’ (p. 749). Barrientos et al. (2010) identify evidence of normalisation within LGBT communities in Chile and describe it as a practice which ‘involves accepting that, due to their sexual identity, they will be subjected to prejudice and discriminatory practices’. Although Browne et al. (2011) note that in normalising anti-LGBT violence LGBT people reinscribe their experiences as inconsequential, paradoxically, normalisation can, they assert (p. 748), be understood as a ‘survival’ mechanism in the face of what are, clearly, very impactful experiences.

In 2010, Meyer (2010) published an intersectional analysis of the practice of normalisation in LGBT experiences of hate-motivated violence. He found that low-income LGBT people of colour rated experiences of hate-motivated violence as less severe than did their white, middle-class counterparts, although the former experienced physical violence more frequently. Meyer cautions against assuming that these findings imply low-income LGBT people of colour normalise hate-motivated violence in general, instead reporting that they often regarded hate-motivated violence as unacceptable and a legitimate priority for official intervention. More recently, Chakraborti (2015) has employed the concept of normalisation to describe hate crime victims’ perceptions of the ‘ordinariness’ of their experiences, explaining that they are such an ‘entrenched, routine part of their day-to-day lives that it becomes a normalized feature of being “different” and not something they would recognise and report as “hate crime”’ (p. 1748).

Chakraborti and Hardy (2015) again use the term normalisation to describe LGBT people’s non-recognition of verbal abuse as a hate incident and potential hate crime, associating the latter with ‘violent acts exclusively’ (p. 13). Notably, although they found that normalisation was apparent in all sections of the LGBT community, it was most prevalent among transgender participants. They link this increased prevalence to concomitantly higher rates of victimisation: ‘It was the frequency with which transgender people experienced hate incidents which resulted in many regarding this form of victimisation as an “accepted” consequence of being transgender’ (Chakraborti and Hardy, 2015: 14). In general, they found that LGBT people who were more visible, and therefore experienced victimisation with higher frequency, ‘were also more likely to regard the more “everyday” forms of verbal abuse and harassment as being something that they had “to put up with”’ (Chakraborti and Hardy, 2015: 15), with the implication that such incidents are not serious enough to report to the police.

While largely concentrating on rarer and more violent acts of hate victimisation in her 2018 analysis of transphobic hate crime, Jamel, nevertheless, notes the debilitating and impactful nature of the ‘volume’ acts of hate that trans people regularly experience. Colliver (2021), in his study of transphobic victimisation, notes that participants suffered what he terms ‘micro crimes’ as part of their regular, day-to-day activities. As one of his participants noted, victimisation ‘was just like part of my daily routine, get up, have breakfast, go out, be abused, come home and then start all over again’ (Colliver, 2021: 52). Some participants felt that their victimisation was in a sense ‘inevitable’ as it seemed to occur no matter what ‘everyday’ activity they were engaged in. Others, though, stated that they were victimised due to the repetitive nature of their daily routines, which could lead to them being targeted repeatedly by the same person. This resulted in their victimisation becoming normalised and assimilated into their day-to-day lives. The fact that it occurred in such a predictable fashion did at least afford some trans people the chance to prepare for and attempt to minimise the emotional and psychological impact of such verbal abuse and harassment (Colliver, 2021: 62).

Revisiting normalisation through a Foucauldian lens

The concept of normalisation is therefore used in literature on anti-LGBT violence to describe practices in which such experiences are denied recognition, minimised and rendered invisible, while being produced, not as acceptable, but as a ubiquitous, unexceptional and inevitable aspect of LGBT identities. Those that are the least privileged and most commonly victimised are more likely to disclaim their status as victims. In this article, we draw upon broader Foucauldian analyses of the practice of normalisation in order to unpick the technologies that underly the practice, and to gain insight into its discursive dynamics.

In Foucauldian terms, the concept of normalisation is understood with reference to its roots in the concept of the ‘norm’. Thus, normalisation signifies disciplinary practices, which bring potentially recalcitrant citizens back into line with established standards, and thus render them docile and more easily manageable (Foucault, 1977). These normalising technologies discipline our bodies, but also our emotions (Lee Sinden, 2010, 2013), and our attitudes. Drawing on this Foucauldian approach, we explore the normative technologies which serve to deny victims of anti-LGBT violence the status of hate crime victim, and therefore – significantly – render them ineligible for many formal supports.

Disciplining technologies

In Discipline and Punish (1977), Foucault describes three interconnected disciplining technologies – hierarchical observation, normalising judgement and examination. Hierarchical observation entails mutual surveillance which operates to rank individuals according to how well they have conformed to social norms. Individuals monitor and encourage one another to act according to established norms. The process of normalisation is advanced through the application of negative sanctions for non-conformity and positive rewards for conformity, a process referred to as normalising judgement (Foucault, 1977). Lee Sinden (2010, 2013) clarifies that this process can also operate among peers, and even in this mode can generate internal hierarchies and normal/abnormal distinctions. Boler (1999) notes that this process of alignment occurs through manipulating shame, humiliation and desire. Punishments serve to bring divergent individuals into line with prescribed ways of being, acting, and indeed, feeling (Boler, 1999). Rose (1998) and Lee Sinden (2013) show that such sanctions can operate to ‘correct’ attitudes. Thus, normalisation has the effect of not only redressing emotional non-conformity but deterring it and encouraging proactive conformity.

Hierarchical observation and normalising judgement are ever present, and operate as much through internalised self-disciplining practices as external assessment. They are combined in the technology of examination, which provides a particular opportunity for external assessment and critique. In her Foucauldian analysis of the role of examination in the production of hierarchies – not of crime victims, but within prisons – Corazza Padovani (2019) underscores that through examination the subject is re-categorised, not only as a consequence of the outcome of the examination, but through the manner in which the process is differentiated by how the examiner/examining body ‘reads’ their social location. The manner in which the examiner interprets their location determines the degree of scrutiny to which they are subject in the passing of judgement. The examination process brings together the

normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish . . .. in it are combined the ceremony of power and the form of the experiment, the deployment of force and the establishment of truth. (Foucault, 1977: 184)

In this article, we draw on this theoretical lens to understand how the social location ascribed to harmed LGBT persons along with legal, popular and community constructions of hate crime beget levels of scrutiny which can serve as an obstacle to accessing victim status. Prior to articulating how our participants described these processes, we will outline the methodology utilised across the research.

Methodology

In this article, we use the concept of normalisation as a lens by which to understand the effects of discourse on the availability of the position of hate crime victim to LGBT people. In doing so, we focus on discourses about hate crime victimisation and their structuring role in interactions between LGBT persons and the dispositif of the criminal justice system, as well as in intra-community discourse and in the self-talk engaged in by LGBT harmed persons. This article specifically draws on and out discourses of normalisation (re)produced in focus group discussions across two projects involving research with LGBT people in Ireland. Both studies probed hate incidents and crimes, as well as reporting practices. In analysing the data, normalisation was worked up as a disciplinary practice common to participants across both studies. Following Keller (2006: 223), we understand discourse analysis as ‘a process of data construction and interpretation’ and as such we also acknowledge our own role as researchers in ‘working up’ these discourses from the data and the potential for alternate interpretations.

A first study included four focus groups conducted by Haynes and Schweppe in 2018 with 16 LGBT people in two Irish cities. The focus groups explored participants’ perceptions of LGBT communities’ exposure to hate crime and reporting practices, as well as their perceptions of bystanders’ responses to anti-LGBT hate crime. Although the research focused on perceptions, participants chose also to recount personal experiences of anti-LGBT violence. The second study was conducted in 2017 with members of Ireland’s trans community. This research focused on community members’ experiences of engaging with the police across a variety of scenarios, including as victims of hate crime (Haynes and Schweppe, 2018). The study used a mixed-methods approach including three focus groups conducted with a total of 19 participants across three cities, the data from which we have analysed for the purposes of this article. Though all the focus groups were carried out in cities, those participating did not necessarily live in urban areas.

In both studies, focus group participants were recruited using a volunteer sampling strategy (Jupp, 2006), which is suitable when potential participants are less visible or are challenging to access (Elmusharaf, 2012; Parahoo, 2006; Thompson and Phillips, 2007). For subgroups within communities that are ‘invisible or understudied’ in the LGBT community, this is particularly the case (see, for example, Nadal et al., 2016). The research was advertised by LGBT and trans-specific peer advocacy and support organisations, and directly by the researchers to community meetings upon invitation.

Both studies received ethical approval from the Institution of Haynes and Schweppe. In both cases, the focus group discussions were loosely directed by a topic guide, which included understandings of hate crime, its impacts and perceptions of police reporting, as subjects for discussion.

In analysing the data, we drew upon the bottom-up approach to discourse analysis championed by Potter and Wetherell (1987). This involved identifying sections of text within the transcripts in which participants talked about their positioning with respect to victim status. This manifested, in particular, where they explained their ‘self-talk’ about experiences of anti-LGBT violence, including how they label their experiences, decide whether or not to share them with others and process others’ reactions. These data were then thematised according to the ways of talking about victim status that they manifested. Through this process, we identified patterns, which we used literature on technologies of normalisation to interpret.

Examination of the harmed

We begin our analysis by exploring the police recording of hate crime as a technology of examination. It is at the point of reporting that harmed persons make themselves visible to authority; opening themselves up to assessment, evaluation and, ultimately, judgement. Participants were very much sensitised to the role of reporting in rendering them subject to examination.

. . . it is better to do everything to hide and not make this [incident] visible to avoid any problems . . . (Focus group participant)

Visibility begets scrutiny, and many participants spoke to the stress of examination. A participant in one of the trans focus groups described the sense that ‘. . . you have to strip down yourself when you're going into make a report about something’, referring to what others described as the ‘layers’ of self-exposure which the process requires; recounting the experience of victimisation, (yet again) outing oneself and narrating the hate element of the incident. Each of these series of revelations involves making oneself vulnerable to potential disbelief and rejection.

A participant in one of the LGBT focus groups described reporting as a process which requires the subject to ‘validate’ themselves. The process of ‘validating’ the status of hate crime victim involves the formal recording of experiences of bias-involved harm. This process of documentation transforms the person into a ‘case’ suitable for examination (Foucault, 1977). Experiences are quantified and categorised in completing reductive ‘tick box’ online forms. Harmed persons are classified into victims and those whose experiences do not meet the legal threshold of a crime. Stanko (2000), writing about the impacts of the fear of crime, has argued that narrow legal definitions restrict discussions about crime to those who are legally recognised as victims. Focus group participants underscored that although the actions of the justice system might be limited to acts which are legally defined as crime, as Brown and Gordon (2019) have also argued, victim impacts are not.

If someone looks at you in a particularly funny way, you are thinking this person could kill me. That’s probably not going to happen, but there is the chance that it could, like a lot of hate crime – regardless of the level of it – have, internally, the same effect . . . (Focus group participant)

Garland and Funnell (2016) concur that among those excluded on an objective basis from the category of crime victim, non-crime hate incidents may have just as detrimental an impact. Schweppe and Perry (2022) note that individual and community experiences of hate often incorporate both crime and non-crime hate incidents and that non-crime incidents may escalate into criminal offences. For harmed persons the legal categories of crime and non-crime incidents may be experienced as structuring discourses which delegitimise their claims to much needed emotional and practical supports.

The process of examination applies standards defined in legislation and police policy to the harmed subject. ‘Expertise’ in those standards is perceived to rest with the recording officer, reinforcing the subjugation of the harmed person. The decision as to whether the harmed person has ‘passed’ rests with the police officer.

If the Gards [police] are going to bring up something to court they have to believe it’s a crime. If they don't believe it’s a crime what are you going to do? (Focus group participant)

Participants commonly asserted that they lacked a clear understanding of what legally constitutes a crime, let alone a hate crime. In general, they felt most confident categorising physical assaults which result in injury as crime, but far less certain about the criminal status of other forms of victimisation. Widespread uncertainty was expressed regarding the legal status of ‘street harassment’, but individuals were also unsure about other forms of assault and various manifestations of sexual assault. This uncertainty was bolstered by a perception among some participants that the police were interested only in ‘serious crimes’, which was most commonly exemplified as crimes resulting in obvious physical injury. It is noteworthy that, as will be elaborated later, participants’ own perception of what constitutes ‘serious’ is part of this process of subjectification and self-disciplining.

I think there’s . . . a real lack of understanding of what a crime is . . . And I think, in general, LGBT people maybe have a higher threshold for accepting or normalising what’s happening to them. So what may happen to one of my straight cisgender friends, which would be shocking to them, may not be so shocking to me when I hear about it from one of my friends because it’s something that is normal to us and part of our history. (Focus group participant)

Joyce et al. (2022) highlight that institutional and individual bias serve as additional, significant obstacles to some communities accessing victim status regardless of whether their experience meets the objective thresholds for a criminal offence. Based on their identity characteristics, some individuals are perceived as a ‘better fit’ with discursive constructions of legitimate victims (Christie, 1986). Others find themselves positioned as (un)victim; identity-based prejudice trumps others aspects of the examination process, rendering them permanently suspect (Long, 2021).

Validating hate

Ireland, as is the case in England and Wales, ostensibly applies the perception test as the standard by which to determine whether or not a crime should be recorded as a hate crime. This approach dictates that a crime should be recorded as associated with a hate element (or a ‘discriminatory motivation’ in the Irish police service’s recording system) where the victim, a witness or another relevant party perceives it as such. The perception test was designed to situate the power to determine whether a hate element should be investigated with those impacted by the crime. However, we found no evidence that the LGBT people to whom we spoke had been empowered by this policy. Indeed, participants were overwhelmingly unaware of the perception test, which is unsurprising given that Haynes and Schweppe (2019) have found that many police officers are themselves unaware of it. In such cases, officers may only record the hate element where they personally perceive evidence of a discriminatory motivation. Given shortfalls in training and the absence of recording protocols (Haynes and Schweppe, 2019), officers adjudicating on these matters may have little to rely on other than popular constructions of how anti-LGBT motivations manifest. Thus, participants presumed (arguably correctly) that, should their experience pass the threshold of criminality, the homophobic, biphobic and/or transphobic element of the harm they incurred would then be subject to examination and judgement and their word would not be sufficient to trigger recording of a discriminatory motivation:

You can say I believe I was the victim of this crime because I'm gay, but there’s no compulsion, there’s no responsibility on the individual Garda dealing with your case to have to report that [crime] as being based on the perception of your sexual orientation or gender identity. (Focus group participant)

The participant highlights that, not only are harmed persons scrutinised during the process of recording, their eligibility for examination as potential hate crime victims is dependent on more powerful social actors. The harmed person’s willingness to subject themselves to examination may not be sufficient to access this process unless the recording officer is aware that they can record a crime as having a homophobic or transphobic discriminatory motivation. There is no specific recording category for biphobic crimes, although Haynes and Schweppe (2019) have previously found that officers who are personally committed to making hate elements for which there is no category visible can produce ‘workarounds’.

Scrutinising gender

Trans (inclusive of trans+) participants described all of their interactions with authorities, and all of their experiences of engaging with formal documentary processes, as involving the probability that gender, however irrelevant, would become the subject of scrutiny. Thus, they were primed to anticipate the examination of their gender as an aspect of the process of reporting a hate crime.

In terms of reporting, bureaucracy is a nightmare for transgender people. My name is changed now so that’s a little better. You give your name and then you've got to tick a box – there’s no box for me. Or what box should I . . . maybe there is a box for me but am I allowed to tick it, will I be lying or committing fraud if I tick the wrong box. (Focus group participant)

For trans people, the scrutiny of gender renders an already forbidding process additionally anxiety-inducing.

Where the harmed person is reporting a sexual assault, the physical examination of gender is a significant additional stressor:

. . . if you need medical attention due to a crime – most obvious one being sexual crime, but also just physical crime – often you need to be physically examined, . . . and now we’re in a situation where someone has to actually examine that part of the body. (Focus group participant)

The relevance of legal standards to gender and sexual minorities was also an aspect of some participants’ uncertainty in classifying their own experiences. One trans participant noted that they were unclear how laws on rape related to trans people. A participant in one of the LGBT focus groups asserted that the police did not recognise rape within lesbian relationships. LGBT people who are harmed by violent manifestations of cis/heteronormativity also experience those standards and interpretative lenses as barriers to accessing justice.

Weighing up

LGBT people who report hate crimes are thus subject to a multi-layered technology of examination in the form of the recording process – that is, whether the hate element of the crime is formally recorded by the police. Failure to pass the examination – that is, having the hate element of the crime recorded – brings the recalcitrant claimant back into line as part of the disciplining practice. The sanction, disbelief, is emotionally punishing because it is experienced as a denial of the harmful experience on the part of the State. The anticipation of a negative outcome to the examination process often prevents victims of crime from reporting to the police. They undergo a cost–benefit analysis in which they take account of their compliance with the formal and tacit standards which will be applied in the course of reporting and recording and weigh up the likely outcomes of undergoing examination.

Subjecting oneself to scrutiny, documentation and judgement is described as an emotional labour.

It’s on the victim of the crime to put in all the effort and go and do something for probably very little return. . . . it’s just a lot of emotional and physical energy as well. (Focus group participant)

Thus, there are costs associated with engaging with the process whether or not the outcome is successful, and the likelihood of a successful examination resulting in tangible change, such as the perpetrator being apprehended and/or their prejudices challenged, was perceived to be low.

Those people won’t be removed from the streets or treated any way that would make them . . . reconsider their ways. (Focus group participant)

Thus, participants more commonly characterised the more likely successful outcome as just the recording of the hate crime itself.

Just so that there’s a record to the fact that it happened. Because if nothing else it’s a number at least. (Focus group participant)

While some participants expressed a determination to report, particularly in order that the harms to their communities be made visible to the State, in many cases participants concluded that the costs of reporting outweighed the likely benefits.

I think at the moment it’s detrimental to someone’s health to try and report. . . . you can go and retell your story and relive that trauma to somebody who does not give a crap about what happened to you – [but] unless the Gardaí [police] are going to either investigate it, because they have to as a hate crime, or if they are going to assign you a grief counsellor, then it’s just hurting you more to go and report it because nothing is going to happen about it. (Focus group participant)

The process of reporting a homophobic, biphobic or transphobic hate crime or incident to the police is therefore an examination which is fraught with risk. The subjects of the examination have little knowledge of the standards against which they are examined. The examiners themselves may have only partial knowledge of these criteria, but nonetheless occupy the status of experts. The examination process is emotionally laborious and involves multiple layers of scrutiny in accordance with standards which are perceived to be designed and interpreted through a cis/heteronormative lens. Failure in this examination cuts off access to justice, and access to police-administered victim support services. Perhaps just as significant a risk is the negative impacts of the denial of recognition.

To be equal members of Ireland, be on even ground that if anyone experiences a hate crime they would be able to go and report it. If anyone experienced any assault against them they would be able to report it. I would like our community to be able to be on the same ground. (Focus group participant)

Observation and judgement

Beyond formal technologies of examination, informally sharing narratives of harm was experienced by participants as opening oneself up to a disciplining gaze. Participants’ expectations and experiences spoke to the communication of anti-LGBT violence as an invitation to judgement – compassionate or otherwise – as to the status of the harm inflicted and endured, and the status of the harmed person. Participants spoke of naming anti-LGBT violence as a risky undertaking. Whether or not the harmed person invokes the label of ‘hate crime’, the practice of naming anti-LGBT violence draws down judgements as to the relative severity of the harm endured, whether the act that caused the harm should be considered criminal, and whether the offender was motivated by hate. The possibility of being accused of misclassification induces fear.

That fear of kind of being accused of exaggerating it . . . . . . or, you know, that . . . hate crime is almost privileging certain communities, and in fact it’s not, it’s a very necessary deterrent. And the fact we don’t have that [hate crime] law is a huge, as you know we are outside the European norm when it comes to that. So I think yes there is that fear anyway that you won’t be taken seriously. But then, even when calling it a hate crime, when that’s contested, I think that’s hugely problematic. (Focus group participant) ²

Participants spoke of self-assessing the legitimacy of their claims in anticipation of external judgement

You are going through a trauma and you now have to defend that trauma, you have to make other people believe you, because then it’s like you are lying to yourself. Am I looking for attention by doing this? There’s a lot, you just feel gross sharing that kind of thing because there’s going to be so much, it’s opening a new can of worms. Or you are opening a door that you probably didn’t think of when you said, oh I should, maybe I should share this with someone. Maybe I should post it online. Or I should share it with a casual friend I have, and if they decide not to believe me it’s like am I making a big deal out of this. Should I just put up with this? Is this what was expected when I decided to come out? (Focus group participant)

The participants’ characterisations of these disciplining practices referenced tacit standards, based on mutual observation and comparison, of the modal severity of hate-involved violence experienced within the community. Anti-LGBT incidents were subjected to the ranking and grading which is characteristic of hierarchical observation, but the normalising judgement was applied by the subject themselves:

There’s a fear or sense of guilt of devaluing someone else’s experience that you know had a worse time . . . so it’s like I don’t want to call someone throwing a slur at me while I'm walking in Pride a hate crime, when I know that someone was like beaten to death and that’s a hate crime. So it’s like I don’t want to use the term that seems to equate those two experiences because they are not necessarily comparable . . . Whereas just based on categorisation both would be considered a hate crime from an objective sense. (Focus group participant)

Chakraborti and Hardy (2015) found that normalisation, understood as the rendering unremarkable of hate incidents, was most apparent among transgender people. Trans participants in this research suggested that self-talk, disciplining people’s self-classification as hate crime victim, is particularly apparent within the community:

I think that’s very specific to the trans community more so because there’s this notion of taking up space in the trans community . . . We are very used to the LGBT bars not accepting straight-passing trans couples or trans couples who are literally straight and don’t identify with being gay or being queer. So we are very used to, like, people talking over us or people talking for us, we are very used to people taking up our space. So . . . there’s this idea that you don’t want to take up this space of the real victims. (Focus group participant)

The experiences relayed above invoke assumptions of what it means to be a ‘real victim’. The criteria of eligibility for that status are defined relationally, by comparison to the experiences of other community members. Taking emotional ‘space’ by laying claim to the status of victim is depicted as a zero-sum game in which space is occupied at the expense of others (who may be more legitimate claimants). Thus, claiming the status of victim for oneself involves risk to one’s self-perception as a ‘good’ community member.

That does fuel the idea that you have privilege in this space and therefore your experiences aren’t as valid as someone who doesn’t, which is incredibly problematic when you have a community based on oppression in the first place. (Focus group participant)

Thus, although any revelation of harm can trigger normative judgement, it is safest, rather than explicitly claiming the status of victim, to accord assignment of the label to others. Not the experience itself, but external appraisals of the experience determine whether the subject is produced as a hate crime victim:

I think how you define it does come down to the idea . . . when the community comes up at large and everyone in it is ‘I can’t believe this is happening’, say if someone is in the news about hate crime. Can’t believe this is happening in 2018, that’s when you know the community would consider it to be something worth talking about as a hate crime. But anything else is just like oh sure that’s . . . (Focus group participant)

This quotation exemplifies that the subjectification of the harmed via hierarchical observation occurs both at the level of the identity community and direct victim. Not only the harmed person but also the targeted community seek external affirmation of the classification of the harm endured as (a) criminal and (b) hate-involved.

Often it would be a case of this happened to a trans person in our community – and this is not okay – and when it’s validated by cis-people speaking to trans people, when it’s validated by cis-people, often trans people will say, okay, now it’s something. (Focus group participant)

Having previously discussed the formal standards against which LGBT people’s experiences are examined in reporting to the state, in the following sections, we describe the cultural myths regarding hate crime generally and anti-LGBT violence more specifically which manifested in focus group participants’ descriptions of the standards which they and other members of society apply in adjudicating on their experiences, and their relationship to the status of hate crime victim.

Hate crime is spectacular

The meaning of violence is contested among scholars, policy makers and practitioners. As De Haan (2008) argues, the phenomenon of violence is ‘multifaceted, socially constructed and highly ambivalent’ (p. 28). Scholars such as Walby (2013) have argued for the need to ‘unsettle old notions of the nature and direction of violence’ and others such as Hamby (2017) have offered multiple alternative frameworks for defining violence in more inclusive ways. Nonetheless, it is arguable that the common-sense understanding of violence as bodily harm resulting from the physical use of force (De Haan, 2008) remains dominant in public discourse.

In her work on intimate partner violence, Stanko (2013) argued that women’s experiences of violence in the private sphere have historically been trivialised in popular perception because ‘real’ violence is understood to be public. While researchers like Pain (2014) have used terms like ‘everyday terrorism’ to seek to prevent the normalisation of commonplace crimes like domestic violence, Philipose (2009) finds that the characterisation of everyday forms of violence as spectacular can also permit the public to characterise them as ‘foreign’, other and extraordinary.

Nonetheless, it was apparent from participants’ accounts that normalising judgements as to the legitimacy of claims to the status of hate crime victim are more likely to reference popular definitions of violence as physically injurious than more inclusive and salient international legal definitions of the construct of hate crime.

I think when people think about hate crime, if they think well, people aren’t necessarily getting murdered here you know . . . (Focus group participant)

As is evident from the excerpt above, participants held that the popular threshold for an act to be considered a hate crime is not just physical injury, but spectacular violence. This narrow definition was largely attributed to the majority population, with individual participants stating that they themselves recognise that hate crime is not exclusive to acts which involve physical contact or injury. Nonetheless, it was clear that they perceived the wider community’s judgement to be impacted by popular discourse.

But sometimes the phrase hate crime seems like not to have a concrete meaning to the community, sometimes it’s like . . . a faraway thing that happens when someone is tied to a car or driven through town it’s not like you get the ‘t’ slur thrown at you while you are walking home at night. That’s, obviously in the scale of you could be killed, it’s not a huge deal. But that’s still being verbally attacked based on your identity and based on minority status. But like a lot of the community don’t connect with that because they think hate crime is when you are killed. (Focus group participant)

In interrogating popular interpretations of hate crime, participants referenced the contested nature of violence far more often than the contested character of ‘hate’. This in itself is an interesting finding, given that the scholarly literature on hate crime more often presents the hate element of a crime as more contentious than the base act itself (see, for example, Garland, 2016). Nonetheless, a small minority of participants also spoke to a standard of intentionality in popular evaluations of the legitimacy of a claim to the status of hate crime victim.

If it’s an isolated attack . . . on a personal level friends will be supportive but beyond that I think it risks being normalised almost. It has to be almost coordinated gangs targeting people. Unfortunately, I think for the random kind of attacks they are seen as almost normalised, people aren’t shocked or aren’t surprised. And it shouldn't be, you know, hate crime should never be normalised. (Focus group participant)

Thus, the hierarchical grading of incidents commonly limits the application of the label of ‘hate crime’ to a select few of the most spectacular incidents. This process leaves much of what might even legally be legitimately considered to be hate crime unnamed and invisible.

Violence against LGBT people is inevitable

In writing about the media reporting of sexual crimes against women, Carter (1998) argued that spectacular violence was a requirement for news media coverage of sexual crimes, and that this threshold for perceived public interest contributed to the construction of such offences as ‘“natural”, seemingly inevitable’, and reflective of women’s ‘proper place in society’. Although Carter was writing about sexual crimes, her interpretation resonates with the discourses about anti-LGBT violence described by participants in our research. These discourses communicate a sense, not necessarily of the acceptability, but certainly of the inevitability, of anti-LGBT hate crime. Participants spoke to a widespread perception that hate-involved victimisation is ‘par for the course’ for LGBT people, a regrettable, but unavoidable aspect of being LGBT.

I’ve experiences where I've told people things . . . other people have said to me ‘Well what did you expect, you’re trans?’. Ireland is not as accepting as you want it to be. It’s never going to be as accepting as you want it to be. (Focus group participant)

As the excerpt above indicates, the discourse of the inevitability of anti-LGBT violence was perceived not only among the majority population, but also among members of the communities. Likewise, another participant noted,

. . . it’s almost we expect to be treated like this sometimes. So when it actually happens, yes there’s a little bit of shock, but there’s also [the sense that] I knew this was coming. . . . so I think when we actually experience anything like that it’s not so much we go, ‘Oh wow, this is a singular hate crime!’ It’s, ‘Oh, this is just another part of what I have to go through from now on’. (Focus group participant)

Carter (1998) argues that the discourse of the inevitability of sexual crimes against women was bolstered by the frequent repetition of stories of spectacular forms of such violence. Equally, perceptions of the inevitability of anti-LGBT violence appear to be bolstered by their ubiquity in shared community narratives. Paterson et al. (2019), for example, have demonstrated that indirect knowledge of hate crime victimisation within one’s community can produce emotional impacts similar to those experienced by direct victims. In the narratives which we analysed, such knowledge fed a perception of anti-LGBT hate crime as routine and inevitable. In our sample, this was particularly evident among members of the trans community who are, notably, at greatest risk of violence (Chakraborti and Hardy, 2015).

. . . if someone lives in a trans bubble or someone lives in a gay bubble or something like that, and everyone is experiencing the same things, it . . . almost seems out of place for everyone to be sitting there going, ‘Yesterday I experienced a hate crime’. Then someone else is, like, ‘Yeah me too’, and so unless it’s something where it’s so off-kilter from the everyday experience, people just are like, ‘Oh well, this is just the discrimination I experience day to day. I don’t want to call it a hate crime though. Even though it could be’. (Focus group participant)

This discourse of inevitability was linked to the requirement for external validation of the categorisation of anti-LGBT harm as hate crime:

So sometimes you need an outside perspective because you so live in it. (Focus group participant)

LGBT people are not blameless

Christie’s (1986) theory of the ideal victim articulates the cultural criteria which define ‘a person or a category of individuals who – when hit by crime – most readily are given the complete and legitimate status of being a victim’ (p. 18). These criteria are closely associated with the requirement that the harmed person is blameless in their own victimisation. Some personal characteristics are more likely to attract blame than others – masculinity and strength, for example. Blame is also apportioned where those taking judgement perceive that the harmed person engaged in risky behaviour.

The work of Godzisz and Viggiani (2019) provides an empirical test of these propositions in respect to people who have been subject to anti-LGBT violence. Their research on attitudes towards LGBT victims of crime across 10 European countries recognises that anti-LGBT violence may be brutal, unprovoked and perpetrated by groups, complying with the criteria for ‘ideal’ victimisation. However, their findings also point to the counterbalancing of these grounds for empathy, by the public perception of LGBT lives as non-normative and inherently risk-inducing. Thus, across the 10 countries studied, the general public’s empathy towards LGBT victims of crime was shaped by a person’s sexual and gender identity, with identities which might be perceived through a heteronormative lens to represent a greater threat to the normative order being treated less empathetically – ‘lesbians receive more, and transgender victims receive less empathy than others’ (Godzisz and Viggiani, 2019: 35).

Focus group participants were very aware that non-normative gender and sexual identities might exclude harmed LGBT persons from the category of ‘ideal victim’. More striking, however, was the number of participants for whom experiences of anti-LGBT harm were associated with feelings of shame because they had internalised discourses characterising LGBT identities as not just risky, but provocative.

. . . I think, particularly within hate crime in relation to LGBTQ people, there is the sense of, oh well I shouldn't have put myself in that . . . we often would put on ourselves, what was it about me that made them interact with me in that way? Or excusing people, it’s just because you know we all are in some way homophobic because we have been brought up and conditioned that way. (Focus group participant)

Older participants suggested that this discourse of blameworthiness is particularly embedded in the psyche of LGBT people who have lived experience of the criminalisation of homosexuality, which in Ireland persisted until 1993.

You can’t undo decades and decades of being told you are a deviant and being told to the extent that your identity is criminalised. That takes a long time to get over. That needs to be worked through. So I think it’s understandable that people would internalise and would say maybe I did something wrong . . . (Focus group participant)

Mason (2014) eloquently summarises the relevance of these discourses to the operation of legal protections against hate crime in a way that also has resonance with the experience of victims of crime more generally:

. . . the ideal victims of hate crime law are those who have the right amount of vulnerability, blamelessness and proximity to engender compassionate thinking and thereby help shift the normative values through which they are perceived. In other words, the potential for hate crime law to achieve its moral ambitions is only as strong as the capacity of protected groups to meet the image of a sympathetic victim. (p. 86)

Conclusion

The technologies of normalisation outlined in this article speak to the power of dominant discourses in restricting access to the label of hate crime victim, and thus to official and public recognition of the ubiquity and range of anti-LGBT violence, with all of the associated policy implications. As per Christie, the ranking of ‘deservedness’ of the status of victim is informed by the degree to which individuals are perceived to be blameless in respect to the harm they experienced, a criterion which it is difficult for LGBT people, judged through a cis/heteronormative lens, to meet. In our analysis, the hierarchical ordering of legitimacy is also based on the degree of harm which the victim can demonstrate. ‘Real violence’ is understood narrowly as resulting from unwanted and unnecessary physical force. The proof demanded is physical injury. The severity of that injury informs cultural, community and internal evaluations of the legitimacy of claims to the status of hate crime victim.

The exigencies of the examination process and the restrictive boundaries which are placed on claims to victimhood served to silence many of the LGBT people to whom we spoke, or to restrict their claims-making to only their most trusted networks. For the harmed person facing internal, community and cultural judgement, police authorities are the last quarter from whom they anticipate, and therefore seek, affirmation. This has damaging consequences for the official invisibilisation of anti-LGBT hate crime, and consequently for the recognition and accommodation of LGBT people’s experiences in state-supported victim services as well as programmes that prevent or challenge offending behaviour. While many of those to whom we spoke had developed their own familial or community-based networks of support, these existed outside of the formal criminal justice system. We acknowledge the importance and effectiveness of informal support (McCart et al., 2010). However, being recognised and classified as a hate crime victim by the state unlocks access to the systems and resources through which the state, however problematically, attempts to address the behaviour of offenders and the support needs of victims. Although certain victim-oriented services do not require the police reporting or recording of a crime, at a minimum a supplicant must be able to name the harm they endured if they are to effectively and persuasively communicate their needs. Our analysis indicates that deeply embedded cultural discourses serve as an obstacle even to such internal and informal claims. Overcoming these obstacles is essential for future policy development and improvement in this area.

In the end, discourses of normalisation responsibilise the individual for societal ills. In limiting access to societal recognition and to official intervention to a minority of those who experience anti-LGBT violence, the normalisation of anti-LGBT violence serves to support the hetero/cisnormative status quo by subjugating knowledge of the range and ubiquity of hate-involved violence and therefore the urgency of the case for structural change.