MEND Submission HCR2015
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Contents Introduction 2 Executive summary 5 Hate crime in the UK 6 Anti-Muslim hate crime in the UK, 2015 12 Assaults or attacks on persons of Muslim, or perceived Muslim, background 18 Attacks on Muslim property or institutions 56 Verbal abuse and hate speech/social media abuse 73 Anti-Muslim public discourse 122 Positive developments 139 1 Introduction This report contains details of anti-Muslim hate crimes in the UK reported in local and national media, and published in court proceedings, and forming part of our regular monitoring of Islamophobic incidents in the UK on our website www.mend.org.uk/advocacy. The incidents presented in this report are categorised as: 1. Racially or religiously aggravated assault or attacks on persons of Muslim background, or persons perceived to be of Muslim background 2. Racially or religiously aggravated attacks on property or institutions 3. Racially or religiously aggravated verbal abuse on persons who are, or are suspected of being, of the Muslim faith Incidents in some cases inevitably cross over into the other categories, for example where individuals have been subjected to verbal abuse in the course of an attack on a place of worship, or during physical assault. Where incidents overlap across categories they have been categorised, wherever possible, according to the primary criminal charges brought. There are 286 incidents details in this report; 256 incidents occurred in 2015. Those incidents reported here and which occurred in 2014, where reported in our 2014 HCR submission have been referenced using the incident reference from the previous year’s report. Other incidents include ones occurring in 2014, or earlier, but which proceeded to trial in 2015. These incidents are documented in full in Section 3. Compared to the previous year, assaults or attacks on persons of Muslim or perceived Muslim background rose from 29% to 34% and attacks on property or institutions fell from 25% to 19%. The number of cases of verbal abuse or public order offences remained the same at 47%. The cases documented in this report vary from those documented in 2013/14 when events led to an escalation in criminal damage offences usually against Muslim places of worship. Further analysis undertaken on these incidents provides details on the gender of victims, where available; perpetrators’ age, where recorded, and analysis of charges and sentencing for those cases which reached trial. The analysis shows a distinct difference in the profile of perpetrators with individuals in the 18-34 age groups more likely to have committed attacks on persons and property, and individuals aged 35 and above more likely to have committed acts of racial abuse or harassment. The younger age group is also present with under 18s among those who committed acts of physical assault, criminal damage and verbal abuse in 2015. Where victim gender was recorded, men were more present in the dataset than women, with 140 cases involving male victims and 67 involving female victims. Data available under Freedom of Information from police forces in England and Wales seeking gender breakdown of recorded race and religion hate crime also shows men to be the larger proportion of victims, this information is presented in the following section. Given the assumption that Muslim women are more likely to be targets of anti-Muslim incidents, the data presented here would suggest female victims of hate crime are not reporting such incidents to the police. The need for third party reporting centres to provide victim-friendly avenues for reporting Islamophobic hate crime and incidents is therefore crucial, as is better outreach work by police 2 forces to encourage Muslim women to report incidents to the police whether in person, online or via social media apps. We draw on data published in our manifesto for the Police and Crime Commissioner elections in May 2016, to reveal the low availability of third party reporting services for Muslim communities across police forces in England (those in Wales fare better). If Muslim women are more likely to make use of third party reporting centres, there is an urgent need to review their availability and their function as a reporting mechanism to ensure they are meeting the needs of victims. The hate crime cases documented here are supplemented with information on police recorded crimes marked as racial or religious hate crimes derived under Freedom of Information. The charts in the section on Recording Hate Crime illustrate the year-on-year increase in racial and religious hate crime in the last three years and provide details on disaggregated data on race, religion and gender, where available. Any consideration of the post-Brexit surge in hate crime should reflect upon the year on year increase in racial and religious hate crime in the UK (see table 2). The next section details constabularies in England and Wales that have seen the largest increase in racial and religious hate crime in the last financial year (April 2015 – March 2016). A spatial mapping of the cases documented in this report is also presented illustrating the geographic spread of anti- Muslim hate crimes. The map shows that incidents are not confined to those regions of the UK which are densely populated by Muslims but extend to those regions of the country sparsely populated by Muslims. The poor availability of disaggregated data by race, gender and religion continues to hamper efforts to assess the scale of anti-Muslim hate crimes in the UK. The trial of new religion categories in 2016/17, with the purpose of rolling out a uniform recording practice for capturing anti-Muslim hate crime in 2017/18, will strengthen the capacity of police and civil society organisations to estimate more accurately anti-Muslim hate crimes in police recorded crime data. For the present, under- reporting of hate crime and extant recording mechanisms which do not mark religion hate crimes by victim’s religious identity (or perceived identity); or which do not mark the ethno-racial identity of race hate crime victims makes it difficult to accurately deduce the number of Islamophobic hate crimes. The lack of uniform recording systems across police forces in the UK and the sheer scale of missing data – whether victim gender, or victim racial and/or religious identity – mars the quality of quantitative data available for aggregation, analysis and policy evaluation. These gaps in data collection and data analysis need to be urgently addressed. Hate crime strategies, national or local, rely upon rigorous data collection methods to evaluate the success of hate crime reduction strategies and to address the specific needs of target groups in different parts of the UK. The good work done on community outreach and public awareness campaigns on hate crime reporting is undone by the lack of rigour in recording hate crime data by police forces. In November 2010, official statistics were published capturing police recorded hate crime of an anti- Semitic nature. In 2016, responses to our FOIs have revealed that police forces do not routinely record the religious identity of victims of religious hate crime, nor do they comprehensively record the racial identity of victims of race hate crime. It will be another two years before the UK is likely to be in a position to publish official statistics on Islamophobic hate crime. It is important that all necessary steps are taken to ensure data collection is robust, uniform and comprehensive. Section 4 on anti-Muslim public discourse examines developments in the UK in 2015 which have contributed to the wider socio-political environment in which the hate crimes documented here occurred. The section details how political statements or media representations can, and are, used by far right parties and extremists to deride Islamic beliefs and practices and create an environment in which Muslims are rendered vulnerable to hate crime. As with last year’s report, the UK Independence Party’s popularity and campaigning in the 2015 general election has contributed to anti-Muslim public discourse over the course of the year. 3 We have included results from research commissioned by MEND and conducted by academics at Lancaster University which analyses media representations of Islam and Muslims in the period 2010 – 2014. Developments at home and abroad persist in influencing the domestic environment with exogenous factors playing a role in the incidence of hate crime in the UK. Of particular note are the attacks at the Charlie Hebdo offices in January 2015 and the Sousse attack in Tunisia in which 38 people were killed, 30 of whom were British. The attacks correspond to small upticks in the number of recorded hate crimes in January 2015 and June/July 2015. The Paris attacks in November 2015 do not appear to have caused a spike in racial and religious hate crime. The Home Office report on police recorded data on hate crime in England and Wales in 2014/15 detected no ‘spike’ in hate crime following the Charlie Hebdo attack.1 Police recorded crime data disclosed under FOI disproves this showing a spike in hate crime in January 2015 and following the attack in Sousse in June 2015. Terrorism and security continue to loom large with political developments in this regard contributing to policy debates about Islam and Muslims in the UK. The new Counter Extremism Strategy and the proposed Extremism Bill (now the Safeguarding and Counter-Extremism Bill) are among policies that have foregrounded discussion about “non-violent extremism” while disclosures about the volume of referrals to the counter-terrorism intervention programme, Channel, has heightened concerns about religious practises and religious symbols being mistaken for “signs of radicalisation”. A final section, Section 5, concludes with positive developments of which there have been many in the past year.