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Research and scholarship on hate crime has increasingly recognised that Gypsies and Travellers are high risk communities. This recognition has led to their inclusion within hate crime policy as vulnerable communities that need support to report and challenge their hate victimisation. However, in practice policing agencies primarily perceive Gypsies and Travellers as problematic communities who do not live according to sedentarist norms. They are therefore subject to conflicting policy and legislation that frames them as offenders in order to remove them from living in areas deemed inappropriate. This chapter explores how the practice of policing by multiple agencies fails to effectively engage with the hate crime agenda and subsequently fails to fulfil policy requirements to protect Gypsies and Travellers from hate crime.
This chapter examines the contours of hate within neoliberal capitalism from a critical hate studies perspective which sheds light on the breadth of hate harms that are both everyday and extreme. Drawing on two distinct case studies with Gypsies and Travellers and trans people the chapter evidences the harms of hate that imbue these communities’ lived experience. The chapter also addresses the transitory nature of culture and community within marginalized communities as they negotiate the social world according to the norms of neoliberal capitalism: traversing multiple and intersectional identities in order to be recognized. A great deal of this negotiation requires negation of identity. The mobility that Gypsies and Travellers and trans people use to navigate neoliberalism, as well as their use of particular places, provides victims of hate with a sense of safety or escape, whereas in reality it exacerbates ontological insecurity and thus the harms of hate.
This chapter examines experiences of hate within neoliberal capitalism through the lens of the critical hate studies perspective. In acknowledging the messy nature of overlapping and multiple identities integral to the formation of the self, intersectionality provides the capacity to explore lived experiences that extend beyond the assumptions bound up within narrow conceptualizations of identity and uniformity of experience within a given category. The chapter draws upon two distinct in-depth, qualitative research projects with Gypsies and Travellers, and with Trans people. Through an appreciation of the intersectional nature of individuals’ identities, this chapter illuminates how contemporary neoliberal capitalism has co-opted oversimplified ideas of one-dimensional identities to the detriment of a full appreciation of the lived realities of victimization and harm, and has therefore both obfuscated attempts at appropriate and effective responses to the issue and been the cause of further harms in and of itself.
