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Abstract

This article considers the modes by which hate crime shapes targeted groups’ engagement with public space. It breaks new ground by drawing on spatial concepts and embodiment theory, to consider the geographic dimensions of hate crime. The ways in which targeted groups negotiate, restrict and curtail their movements, and attempt to conceal their targeted identities, in public are detailed. We argue victims experience a profound sense of dislocation from their local communities. This is explored by focussing on the spatial consequences of hate crime for victims, both at the material level, through the restriction of their physical movement, and also somatically, through feelings of restriction inculcated into victims’ affective being. Drawing on inductive qualitative fieldwork conducted in Ireland, we consider some of the particularities of the Irish case while also advocating for a wider understanding of the link between space and hate crime.

Keywords

Hate crime Ireland LGBTQIA+nationalism racism space Travellers

Understanding hate crime

Hate crime describes acts of violence or abuse motivated by prejudice, bias or hatred towards a particular group, of which the victim is presumed to be a member (Mason-Bish, 2014; Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), 2009; Walters, 2022). These crimes include harassment, destruction of property and personal assault, up to and including homicide. It represents a greater challenge for the criminal justice system than crime that does not involve prejudice, as it has a symbolic quality that radiates beyond discrete criminal acts. These ‘message crimes’ are designed to deliver a distinct warning to all members of the victim’s (presumed) community. In Perry’s (2003) words; ‘step out of line, cross invisible boundaries, and you too could be lying on the ground, beaten and bloodied’ (p. 19).

While the definition of bias within crime is sometimes contested (Chakraborti and Garland, 2012), the construct of ‘hate crime’ recognises how marginalised groups are criminally targeted (Jenness and Grattet, 2004) and whose subjugation is both the source and result of their vulnerability to violence (Perry, 2014). In this light, hate crime is a form of resistance to any perceived diminishment in the authorial claims of hegemonic white, heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied, sedentary identities (Hesse et al., 1992). It is therefore more than the outcome of conscious acts of biased individuals but is systematic, enacted with the purpose of propagating racialised, ableist, sexualised and gendered hierarchies of the society in question. The sometimes nebulous idea of society though needs further delineation. Hate crime happens in a location; currently, there is interesting work on this within online platforms¹ (Pickles et al., 2021), yet the scholarship on hate crime in real life can remain dislocated. Drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre, we argue here that physical locations are important when unpicking the cause and effect of hate crime.

The spatial dimension of bias

In Lefebvre’s 1974 The Production of Space, he reconceptualises space as not simply a set of physical locations but as a social production. This contention has shaped a generation of thinkers. For Tonnelat (2010), public space can be defined both physically and psychologically. Michael (2009: 46) argued: ‘space cannot be viewed as a static envelope or stage within which social life unfolds. Rather it is a dynamic entity constituted out of a shifting ensemble of meanings, practices, and interrelationships’. For Lefebvre (1991 [1974]), space is produced, and gains meaning through the interactions between ‘spatial practices’, ‘representations of space’ and ‘representational space’. Spatial practices are daily routines, everyday modes of moving through space for work and leisure. Representations of space describe how urban planners, architects and local governments encode and design space while giving ‘objective’ descriptors to places. Finally, representational space, refers to how space is imagined, produced symbolically and personally felt. For Massey (2004), power relations are central to the process of constructing space. Indeed, perceptions of place include perceptions of legitimate beings, and ways of being within that space (McCartan and Nash, 2023).

Perceived legitimacy in space it perhaps most potently felt within racialised narrations of space. Indeed, while all stories are located (de Certeau, 1984), race and ethnicity scholars have illuminated how stories about a place are bound up with ‘race-making’ (Lipsitz, 2011). If places are stories, they are also tales of communities, of peopled spaces often implicitly and sometimes explicitly racialising in their narration (Byrne et al., 2023). Nationalism is often the most acute form of this process. The concept of a nation itself is a collective story, an act of imagination, often deeply felt (Elgenius and Garner, 2021). With the rise in overt nationalism propagating white ethno-states, how one is racialised often determines legal rights, membership and day-to-day safety in public spaces (Bieber, 2018). Thus, depending on one’s position in wider social structures, people are differentially located in space, with disparities of opportunities (Massey, 1992). Whether it is the local neighbourhood or the wider nation, decisions are made about the identities of places and what and who belongs there, or does not (Byrne et al., 2023).

Belonging within space

For sexual minorities, heteronormativity and the privileging of heterosexual performances in public spaces (Javaid, 2018) entrench heterosexism and often homophobia. This has resulted in LGBTQIA+² groups being vigilant around what spaces they can ‘come out’ in. The intolerance of any deviation from the heterosexual ‘norm’ has resulted in segregated zones and venues, which have become a feature of most large population centres in Western societies (Storey, 2012). While ‘mainstream’ spaces may presume heteronormativity, queer enclaves, most famously Manchester village and the Castro area of San Francisco, are often representations of space (Lefebvre, 1991 [1974]). Where queer belonging is marketed by city councils for tourist boards rather than dealing with the wider homophobia that has caused segregation (Hughes, 2003). The interweaving of neoliberal agendas with sexual politics has become a feature of what is now called ‘homonormativity’, the branding of queerness as rooted in a ‘privatized, depoliticised gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption’ (Duggan, 2003: 50). While there are those in media, politics and even academia who wish to declare homophobia extinct, any softening of attitudes appears to be for those deemed homonormative – not considered threatening to the dominance of heteronormative assumptions and institutions (Neary et al., 2017). However, the same cannot be said for polysexual identities and for those transitioning, transgender, fluid or non-binary (Bradley, 2020). Transphobia has become a major international cultural wedge issue for reactionary politics, with moral panics about trans participation receiving outsized attention (Callahan and Zukowski, 2019; Flores et al., 2020). Indeed, international progress in reclaiming space, for example, by creating queer ‘safe zones’ (McCartan and Nash, 2023), have recently been rolled back by the creation of ‘queer free spaces’ in Poland (Lewicki, 2023) and the exclusion of queer literature and history from schools in parts of the USA.

Narration of places then is entwined with material actions. For Sumartojo (2004), hate crimes are intrinsically tied to perpetrators’ interpretations of place and their attempts to defend and preserve that meaning. The story of whom belongs in space and what a place therefore means, is key to the message conveyed in hate crimes; that targeted groups do not belong; that the hegemonic identities and the power relations that underpin them must be maintained (Iganski, 2008). Hate crime then is a very effective mechanism for the preservation of power in a given space (Storey, 2012). Anti LGBTQIA+ violence seeks to maintain heteronormativity in public space; thus, it is a ‘logical, albeit extreme, extension of the heterosexualism that pervades western society’ (Flint, 2014: 1). While racist attacks send messages that racialised bodies and/or ethnicities do not fit with places and will not be accepted as part of symbolic imaginations of local, national and nationalistic spaces (Arnold, 2015; Gardell, 2015; Sugarman et al., 2018).

The limited range of research on the behavioural impacts of hate crime confirms that victims decode hate crime’s exclusionary message in the manner intended, and often with the intended effects. Targeted communities become aware that for conventional, ‘idealised geographic spaces’ to be achieved, their exclusion and/or alteration is required (Flint, 2014: 2–3). Kutateladze (2022) found that common behavioural impacts of anti-LGBTQIA+ hate crime include moving home; avoiding queer venues or friends or ‘acting straight’. Paterson et al’s (2019) research with LGBT participants identified behavioural changes including avoidance of social activity, particular places and people and securitising one’s home. Perry’s (2009) research with Native American people highlighted retreat from the geographic to the identity community as a consequence of racist hate crime. Benier’s (2017) research on ethnic minority victims targeted in their own neighbourhood and identified reduced interaction with neighbours and attachment to place. Conversely, though Paterson et al. (2019) found that responding with anger rather than anxiety can encourage prosocial responses involving community organisation among victims, which can counter the isolating impacts of hate crime. Walters et al. (2020) also showed a shared sense of suffering can emerge from hate crime experiences leading to a sense of connection to a global community. In the Irish case, a number of local organisations with international links have emerged in response to LGBTQIA+ hate crime, rising anti-immigration sentiment and the long-standing marginalisation of Irish Travellers (Haynes et al., 2017). However, the findings from this Irish case are transferable to other geographic contexts. Ireland is also an interesting example.

Irish state and space

Both a western European but also a post-colonial nation, Ireland has been a full sovereign state for less than 100 years. Irish independence from Britain was ostensibly motivated by a desire for political independence, cultural and religious differences, yet ownership of land was the material driver (Dooley, 2004; O’Driscoll, 2016). The intricacies of Ireland’s relationship with British colonialism cannot be considered here (see Gilmartin and Berg, 2007), but what Ireland shares with other post-colonial nations is a dominating interest in who owns land and ‘legitimate’ belonging within social space. This is heightened on the island of Ireland through ongoing tension in Northern Ireland, as competing claims of belonging to the land, the island and two separate nations is ongoing (Garratt, 2018). The nationalist quality to hate in Ireland then is not only connected to wider trends in anti-immigration popularism, of which Ireland is not immune (Laurence et al., 2024), but also rooted in the recent creation of the state, both at the level of nationalist narratives and legal structures.

Indeed, prior to independence, Ireland has been home to Mincéirí (in their own language) or Irish travellers; an ethnic minority group, Irish in origin, but distinct from the majority for at least 360 years (Gilbert et al., 2017). The ancient presence of this nomadic people has always challenged Irish master narratives tightly bound to land and property ownership. Mac Laughlin (1999: 129) argued that Mincéirí have been victimised by ‘rural fundamentalist nationalism’, which developed during independence and early nation building. For him, Irish nationalism–focussed on sedentary private ownership, fused with social Darwinism–marginalised Mincéirí. Nomadism was treated as though it tarnished the newly formed state’s claim of, ‘bourgeois and petit bourgeois respectability’ (Mac Laughlin, 1999: 138). Accordingly, the traditions of Irish Travellers did not figure in the restructuring of the economy and development of infrastructure. These ‘modernisations’ of the structures of State, eroded traditional forms of enterprise, safe halting sites for travellers, and effectively criminalised their traditional way of life (Mac Laughlin, 1999). Mincéirí then are arguably the original victims of targeting through a spatial lens (Joyce, 2018). At a day-to-day level, anti-Traveller prejudice is particularly notable given its consistency, endurance over time and widespread nature (Joyce et al., 2022; MacGréil, 2010; Tormey and Gleeson, 2012). Even in an increasingly diverse and racially conscious land, anti-traveller opinions and actions are the most virulent and acceptable form of racism in the Irish context (Haynes et al., 2021, 2023b). Despite the long history of prejudice and violence connected to space here, there remains a small body of literature on this topic. To fill this paucity, Haynes and Schweppe undertook qualitative fieldwork with victims of hate crime and reviewed the jurisprudence underpinning hate crime legislation in Ireland.

Methodology

While the Irish context has specificities which are important to highlight, growing bodies of evidence indicate that while hate crime can have localised dimensions, the character of the individual, community and societal impacts are similar globally (Shepard et al., 2021). However, the under-researched nature of the topic in Ireland required methods suited to its exploratory goal. Accordingly, an inductive approach, which views the participant as an expert, permits participants to shape the range of topics which are explored was undertaken (Creswell, 2007; Hennink et al., 2020). Purposive sampling methods were employed, given their suitability to studies where there is little prior literature on the topic (Clark et al., 2021). Victims of hate crime were identified in partnership with civil society organisations which support clients to report, and in some cases, seek redress through the criminal justice system. Thus, interviewees are from a diversity of backgrounds, including individuals with racialised identities, ethnicity such as Mincéirí travellers, religious practices, sexual orientation, gender expression or identity and disability. Other published research on the behavioural impacts of hate crime tends to focus on a single umbrella category; however, this research is cross-community in origin. The diversity of respondents reflects the collective movement across communities to acknowledge and address hate crime in Ireland (Haynes et al., 2017). While we view the multiplicity of the sample as an analytical advantage, we do not seek to erode the ontological specificities of experiences, or seek to argue that all groups are targeted equally, with the same magnitude, by the same people. Moreover, individual victims are likely not to experience the same degree of impact. The severity and duration of effects are shaped by many factors, including identity (Williams and Tregidga, 2014) the quality of support networks, ‘outness’ (Kutateladze, 2022) and individual emotional reactions (Paterson et al., 2019). Distinctive features and the complexity of identity are not questioned here, rather the focus of this piece is to illuminate one commonality victims expressed, that of hate crime as a symbolic and material act of exclusion from space, and therefore as an aspect of place making.

Ten victims of hate crime and two family members of victims with intellectual/developmental disabilities who had been similarly targeted are discussed here. To protect the anonymity of the participants, names and identifying details have been removed from the data presented in this article. The data were subject to thematic analysis supported by the use of QSR NVivo software (Hennink et al., 2020). Ethical approval was received from the ethics review board of the University of Limerick. Participants detailed a total of eighteen incidents which met criteria for categorisation as hate crimes (Schweppe, 2021). The crimes experienced were classified as the researchers as involving simple assault (6 cases), assault causing harm (5 cases), criminal damage (5 cases) and harassment (2 cases). In this context, it is worth emphasising that while the police were alerted to the crime in 15 of 18 cases discussed by participants, formal statements were taken in less than a third of cases, and none resulted in a court prosecution.

Findings

Within the interview data, hate crime was inseparable from public space. Fear of hate crime often manifested as a routine feature of how targeted minorities assessed their negotiation of public places. Repercussions of hate crime victimisation also tended to have spatial features. Victims described practical adjustments to their behaviour and patterns to safely negotiate the public sphere. Their experiences and fear of hate crime determined the choices they made, the streets they frequented and the areas they felt prohibited from traversing and occupying. Victims also detailed their everyday anxiety about moving through space, their aversion to confinement and the self-regulation strategies they employed to curtail their bodily expressions and embody, ‘acceptable’ somatic dispositions within the public sphere.

Curtailment of access to public space

It is harrowing, but necessary, to begin by communicating the gravity of the experiences endured by the interviewees. When discussing hate crime many participants spoke of feeling that their lives were at risk. For instance, this victim of racist hate crime describes the level of threat he experienced:

Yeah. And I felt really somebody might stab [me] . . . I felt so unsafe actually.

Another victim exemplifies the level of routine racist abuse he suffers:

‘Yeah n****r get out of our country . . . n****r get out of our country you came to take our jobs’ and things like that.

For the victim of homophobic hate crime quoted below, his experience of being targeting was so common, that despite being a victim of assault on two separate occasions, he tended to consider himself fortunate:

By comparison to some people I know; I mean know some people, friends who I asked who were kind of like ‘no I don’t know anything about this and I don’t really want to think about it’ and who have had a lot more . . . It’s cos of others, I know people who have had more.

This normalisation of victimisation was identified by Haynes et al. (2023a) during focus groups with the LGBTQIA+ community in another study. Following Chakraborti and Hardy (2015), they found that the ubiquity of hate crime informs community members’ reluctance to claim emotional ‘space’, by occupying the category of victim when so many others they know share this experience.

As the interviewee above alludes to, public space is associated with feelings of threat for respondents. Victims frequently discussed curtailment of their use of public space, explained in terms of avoidance (Paterson et al., 2019). For this victim of transphobic hate crime, the benefits of occupying public space are weighed against the risk of hate crime victimisation:

Some men have a fascination with trans women as well. Like as a guy it is rare enough that anyone will approach you in a bar but, as a woman or as a trans woman, I would be very vulnerable on my own especially. So I tend to only go out now if there is something like a Christmas party or if I am with my . . . club. . . . I don’t think I would be safe at all really. . . . I think I would be incredibly vulnerable.

Indeed, such was the impact of their past hate crime experiences, some victims rarely ventured outside their house after dark, mirroring the reduction of social activity described by Paterson et al. (2019). Many interviewees became effectively housebound for a time after their attack. A gender fluid interviewee who had been a victim of a hate crime stated:

I didn’t go out for a month after that, I wasn’t able. I wasn’t mentally able to do that. I just left and went home heartbroken.

When discussing the emotional impacts of becoming housebound one member of a couple, who had experienced a brutal homophobic physical assault, stated:

Yeah we stopped in the apartment for months on end . . . We’re still picking ourselves up now. We crashed. We hid in our apartment. We stayed in our apartment [. . .] it’s not like me or [name of partner] to want to sit around [. . ..] We love to be outside more than anything like. An adventure, want to go hiking or something. We just want to be outside and all of a sudden our relationship changed to being inside, around each other constantly.

The feeling of being confined to the private sphere was also heightened by a mental geography victims had developed, where no-go areas were cognitively mapped. This individual, who suffered a racist assaulted in the city in which she now lives, described areas she considers out of bounds:

I don’t like the . . . street area, I go there because the cinema is at the bottom but I avoid that area as much as possible.

These findings reflect the mental processes made visible in Joyce’s (2018) research on urban racism by participants mapping ‘no-go areas’. The Mincéir woman quoted above could specify certain areas and even addresses where travellers were not welcome:

Yeah. Definitely there’s areas of . . . where you would say that you wouldn’t go there [. . .] So, you’d never be part of the community so it’s like you wouldn’t even to try to–and maybe we’re making presumptions but that would be the feeling that you wouldn’t go there . . . and Travellers wouldn’t be welcome there. . . . in [name of town] you can’t buy houses in a certain area. . . . Yeah Travellers can’t buy a house in a certain area.

In this sense, hate crime is part of a wider system of discrimination which includes housing and neighbourhood segregation (see also Perry, 2009). As there were material impacts on victims due to their strained relationship with space, with house buying and leisure choices impacted and even the ability to use public restrooms complicated. Given that engaging in public spaces can bridge the gap between being alone and being with people to whom we are intensely related and, thus, offers the potential for developing new contacts and networks. Many victims were precluded from participation in these opportunities. For instance, after being assaulted, this individual avoided any form of engagement with strangers:

It is a weird thing you kind of stop doing things just to avoid any sort of interaction and I am sure that I am not the only one to do it.

Victims then suffered material spatial inequality in comparison to hegemonic society, as their access to public space and its material and social benefits were limited through their experiences of hate crime. Their personal representations of space then were characterised by fear and avoidance (Lefebvre, 1991 [1974]). This material inequality also took the form of financial strain, as many chose private travel solutions to move through public space.

Movement through space

The risks of travelling through public space was a major consideration for participants. This interviewee described her experience of racist hate crime on a public street:

Like I feel like I am being singled out just because of how I look. I am not even saying anything to anyone. On that day [of the attack] in [name of street] I was not even engaging with anyone, I was looking at my phone, yet I glanced up at the wrong second.

Victims frequently spoke of the threat associated with traversing public space and of limiting their travel with prompt returns home (using perceived safe routes). For this survivor of transphobic hate crime, keeping safe in her city was foremost in her mind:

Am well I don’t think I would be safe to be honest, walking the street or am or using the

toilets. . . . I really don’t think I would be safe.

This Mincéir/Traveller woman, who had experienced a litany of crimes perpetrated against her; including harassment, vandalism of her car and home and the assault of her teenage son; avoided being out of her house in the evenings, so she would not have to travel through her housing estate after dark:

Yeah – I wouldn’t answer my door after a particular time at night. And I wouldn’t be one for going out anyway, but I certainly wouldn’t have gone out while I lived in that house, just for fear of coming back late.

Dilemmas about how to travel to places required forward planning limiting individuals’ spontaneity, while also added an economic penalty. This gender fluid hate crime victim discusses the strategies of their friend who has also been a victim of hate crime:

Yeah to get ready and get into a taxi. We can’t get the bus or anything. Cos he’s afraid. It’s absolutely disgraceful. . . . He always gets a taxi. Taxi, taxi, taxi. Spending money, money, money. Cos he’s afraid himself. . . . He’ll get beat up or if he gets slagged or assaulted. He’s been assaulted before. He was dragged down an alleyway before for being gay. . . . he was beaten up and they threw things at him and made him run and everything and made him jog and made him do horrible things and just horrible. Horrible deeply oppressive things.

Targeted groups are also often the most economically disadvantaged, and anxiety about repeat hate crime excluded participants from public and cost-effective travel solutions. Public transport held a particular fear for respondents, being referred to as a space and mode of mobility which heightened risk. For this victim of racist targeting the bus held dread for them when halted at a red light:

Yeah . . . red light is horrible, green light is fine and I live on the green light so (laughs) but you know it is little things like that like I feel like I am being singled out just because of how I look like I am not even saying anything to anyone.

Confinement in a smaller space was associated with an increased sense of vulnerability, this was particularly the case when public transport was sedentary. In racist incidents reported to authorities in Ireland yearly, public transport is one of the top locations for abuse (Michael, 2020), not only affecting passengers but also minority racial bus drivers (Immigrant Council of Ireland, 2011). However, walking was flagged as a particularly unsafe way to move through space. This couple discussed the homophobic attack they experienced while being on foot:

We were just walking down the road and like they came behind us. Passed us out and said something really insulting. They said something about [name of partner] looking masculine or something. And oh yeah, that was when he came back. They said something really rude and I told them to get lost and they were still walking ahead of us and I was just [saying] ‘Leave us alone. Get lost’. And we kept walking ahead and the next thing they turned around and came back and one guy came over to [name of partner] and said ‘I wouldn’t hit a girl but sure you’re not a girl’.

Vulnerability to hate crime then was embedded in transiting through public space. It involves the mental load of planning travel in advance, has financial impacts through the need to pay for private travel solutions and impacts victims’ perception of their exposure to violence as related to motion. Not being able to move quickly enough through space while walking, or at a red light on public transport, increased feelings of exposure, fear and actual violence for respondents. The spatial practices (Lefebvre, 1991 [1974]) of hate crime victims then, need to be planned, limited to what was necessary, be swift and preferably privatised. Yet, how one moved through space was not simply about the mode of transport, but also about one’s appearance, comportment, dispositions, eye contact and mannerisms. In this regard, hate crime victims’ relationship with space was also embodied.

Embodied confinement

Often deriving from the sociology of Bourdieu, symbolic interactionism and phenomenological philosophy, the concept of embodiment reclaims the body from the biological sciences and argues that many attributes of the body are socially constructed. Moreover, for embodiment scholars’, bodies are often used to obfuscate social relations of power, as physicality and biology are drawn on to justify and individualise inequality (Garratt, 2018). Embodiment then simultaneously refers to the shaping of bodies through interaction, the obscuring of power relations, and the affective dimensions of living and feeling through our bodies (Garratt, 2018). As Noland (2009) argued, it is the process ‘whereby collective behaviours and beliefs, acquired through acculturation, are rendered individual and ‘lived’’ at a somatic level (p. 9). Participants in this study often spoke of their bodies as a problem for their safety. Being aware of their bodies and attempting to control and curtail their behaviour was a day-to-day strategy they employed to keep safe. For sexual minorities some strategies they engaged in included, investing in and projecting a recognisable (and hegemonic) heterosexual identity, a socio-behavioural response of ‘playing straight’ (Kutateladze, 2022). This interviewee, who was victim of a homophobic hate crime explains:

Well I guess, from an outsider point of view there’s a degree to which I think having to watch yourself and moderate yourself and decide in what spaces you come out . . . that’s just so run of the mill for gay people in this country.

After this couple was targeted, they, like many other respondents, moderated their intimacy in public:

We stopped holding hands, we stopped . . . we wouldn’t mind d’you know like . . . even in front of friends like we would be so comfortable with friends, well we used to be. We’d sit beside each other and hold hands and mess the way they would like, like couples would in our friend group.

After their assault, this gender fluid interviewee pleaded with their trans friend to avoid all intimacy to keep them safe in a local club:

I remember saying to [friend] I remember saying please don’t kiss anyone tonight. Please don’t kiss anyone tonight please because I’m so scared I’ll get a punch. . . . I’d asked her to moderate her behaviour yeah. Don’t be kissing fellas. Tell them. You know? So all our behaviour was guarded. We weren’t going on a night out and just enjoying ourselves having drinks with friends. We were going on a night out and we were guarded. We were worried about what would happen what people think. And that is not a way to live. You might as well be dead if that’s the case.

The regulation of simple connections like holding hands and kissing for LGBTQIA+ people has been well documented (Formby, 2022; Rohleder et al., 2023), but it’s persistence through time, when many wish to argue prejudice of this sort is in decline, is telling. Moreover, the moderation and guarding language used, speaks to a certain confinement of the body in public, particularly in spaces not deemed safe. Hate crime then had somatic impacts, as it seemed to regulate victims’ dispositions in public places. They recount how they reconsidered their embodiment and physical expression of their gender identity after the attack:

Oh yes I kind of ‘grannied’ [made more conservative] my walk. I didn’t have any particular sex appeal in my walk. I’d usually have a very feminine sexy walk. And I was afraid to express anything nice or good or sexy or feminine. I was very guarded and very hooded and boring and plain really. I was afraid to express myself . . . and incidents like I have described keep that to the centre or my brain . . . they heighten my sense of vulnerability: are they seeing a man dressed as a woman? I am conscious all the time and I am looking and I am constantly checking myself like what Panti³ said about protecting herself. I am always checking myself in the mirror: what do I see and what do others see when they look at me? In the street I am checking myself in the glass and think what do people see and . . . and I am checking my voice.

For this victim of racist hate crime, her experience continued to shape her posture, as she strived to move through public space unseen:

It’s kind of sad admitting this but I usually go around face down like looking at the ground when I am walking. Sometimes it is hard when you make eye contact with people you almost feel as if they are going to say something to you and sometimes they do say something and you [think] ‘Well what did I expect?’

Both the dread and the actual lived experience of hate-motivated violence became inscribed within their bodies. Both through the adoption of a posture of fear, ‘head down’ and ‘guarded’, and as an attempt to pass unnoticed in certain spaces. The effect though, was that in participants’ attempts to protect themselves and control how others may treat them, they reproduced bodies deemed more acceptable to heteronormative and indeed racist and nationalist spaces. If hate crime is a response to the perceived threat of difference, one of its effects seems to be the attempted deletion of embodied ‘difference’ in public spaces, and this has the potential to change an individual or groups’ relationship with their body.

Hiding one’s ethnicity and downplaying one’s racialised features, accent or simply one’s physical presence, has a long history in the racialisation literature (see Garratt, 2018). In fact, the term racialisation derives from the attempt of scholars to describe the ways in which embodied characteristics and bodily phenotypes are imbued with meaning through racist discourses (Murji and Solomos, 2005). However, the Irish literature has shown that despite Irelands’ long history of prejudice directed towards the country and its inhabitants, this has provided little inoculation against racism within Ireland (Carr and Haynes, 2015; McVeigh and Lentin, 2002). Indeed, even prior to large scale inward-migration, the racialisation of Irish travellers reveals the deep roots of racism within the state (Joyce, 2018; Joyce et al., 2022). Nationalist discourses about who belongs within the nation, to the nation and can embody ‘Irishness’ are widespread (Laurence et al., 2024). Hate crime compounds and materialises prejudice. It makes real the symbolic threat of hatred and sends a violent message of exclusion to minority communities. As the research on heteronormativity and transphobia shows though, this is not limited to nationalist and racist impulses; rather anyone who does not enjoy hegemony at the national and local levels is vulnerable. Systemic structures of power then create the conditions for hate crime (Massey, 1992), where individuals and groups are emboldened by power imbalances to take exception to the presence of minorities within ‘their’ space.

The body within social space then, is crucial for understanding the social geography of hate crime. Yet, the body as an object of hatred or a personal object to be controlled, does not tell the full story of embodiment, as the repercussions of violence also tended to have affective dimensions. Although emotion and affect are often used interchangeably, Massumi (2002) contended that this is not simply a semantic difference, as emotion is the cognitive rationalising of an experience, a ‘subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of a quality of experience’, whereas affect is somatic, ‘irreducibly bodily and automatic’ (p. 28). For this gender fluid interviewee, the effect of hate crime was dramatic:

I had night terrors. I couldn’t express myself. I was afraid to talk to people. I went very much into myself and I know I’m talking about it now casually, but at the time it was terrifying. I couldn’t even go into a shopping centre. I was terrified. I couldn’t be myself. I felt anxious and caged and I couldn’t let loose and relax. It was so . . . oppressive. Deeply oppressive. Deeply oppressive.

At varying levels of extremes, all respondents described their feelings after victimisation as one of constraint, oppression and confinement. Thus, they were not only tangibly limited in their physical movements but also embodied restriction in their somatic and affective beings. Mirroring Lefebvre’s concept of ‘representational space’, Thrift (2004) argued that places are the locus of affect. For victims of hate crime, this was pronounced, as public spaces were felt as personally threatening, with feelings of oppression weaved within spatial practices.

In Lefebvre’s 1967 essay ‘Le Droit á la Ville’ (The Right to the City), he focuses on the right of inhabitants to be the protagonists of their city rather than market forces focussed on commodifying urban space in service to capitalism (Butler, 2012). For Lefebvre, the function of the city should be as a meeting place for building collective life. From this perspective then, hate crime is an attempt to violently erase expanding narratives of belonging, the right to space and personal expression within it. It serves as a weapon for hegemonic groups to retain the power to, in Lefebvre’s (1991 [1974]) terms, edit the spatial practices and the symbolic and affective impacts space has on minority groups. The spatial inequality Lefevre identifies then, is not only rooted in economic power and class-based metrics, but potently felt by groups vulnerable at the level of identity and culture also, or alone.

Conclusion

A key concern of this article is to reveal how hate crime denies many inhabitants the right to communal space. Here, we consider the extent to which social space is tailored to dominant racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, ableist and sedentary codes. Though hate crime victims attempted to make mental maps of safer and less safe areas, there was no infallible cartography of physical incivility. As this article has revealed, the reality for targeted groups is that within all public domains, there are potential dangers. The bustling shopping centre, city street or homely estate provides no sanctuary for targeted groups. Hate crime victims are reminded daily that there are multiple places in which they are not welcome. The importance of making the correct spatial choices, is an everyday reality for vulnerable populations who both experience and fear violence. Defensive tactics include avoiding particular places at certain times, privatising transport, or not going out alone or at night, victims then are forced to geographically move to the margins, as they are coerced to remove themselves from public spaces and retreat to the private sphere. This marginalisation has resulted in targeted groups being increasingly cut off from the collective experience of society and incorporating fear and avoidance into their embodied and affective being. Spatial inequality is therefore reinforced as survivors of hate crime become self-taught in how to use the street, striving to go unnoticed rather than to be protagonists in defining their environments. Thus, just as Lefebvre (1991) argued, structural constraints must be put around capitalism – to at least limit its devourment of space, appropriate law, policy and enforcement must be constructed to reclaim public space as just that, for the public. Indeed, from a criminal justice standpoint, curtailment of access to public space is usually considered a sanctioning measure, through imprisonment or prohibition. However, this research contributes to the growing body of evidence that it is victims that often bear the brunt of restraint.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Lindsey Garratt

Amanda Haynes

Jennifer Schweppe

Notes

Author Biographies

Lindsey Garratt’s research interests include social construction of race and anti-racism, migration, sociology of childhood, theories of body and affect, and she is a scholar of psycho-social attributes such as authenticity, resilience and reflectivity as they are applied to policy.

Amanda Haynes’s research interests centre on the analysis of physical, discursive and classificatory violences, and their relationship to prejudice. Her current interests centre on hate crime, policing, stigma and minority access to justice.

Jennifer Schweppe’s research interests lie in the areas of hate crime and reproductive justice. Her work in the area of hate crime looks at the criminalisation of bias motivation and explores the potential of introducing hate crime offences in an Irish context.

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‘I felt . . . caged’: Victims of hate crime and their negotiation of space

Abstract

Keywords

Understanding hate crime

The spatial dimension of bias

Belonging within space

Irish state and space

Methodology

Findings

Curtailment of access to public space

Movement through space

Embodied confinement

Conclusion

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

ORCID iDs

Notes

Author Biographies

References