To celebrate its radical roots, this Pride we are launching a campaign against the Criminal Justice (Hate Crime) Bill 2021. Read our statement about why as a group of queer migrants and ethnic minorities, we are against hate crime laws.
We believe that hate crime legislation doesn’t prevent harm, it actively causes harm to the people it’s meant to protect. Hate crime legislation is worse than an empty gesture. It actively reproduces harmful structures and narratives, granting more power to a legal system that actively harms marginalised communities through deportations, disproportionate incarceration and legal sanctioning. We know the system is racist & anti-Black, misogynistic, queerphobic, ableist & classist. It is not a broken system, it functions exactly as intended to protect the interests of those whose existence is deemed acceptable. Hate crime legislation increases the power of the criminal punishment system (courts, police, judges, prisons), who will continue to use their power and bias when applying these laws, making the communities it is meant to protect even more vulnerable. Queer people, racialised people, people of marginalised genders and other oppressed groups have never been safe around criminal punishment institutions and we don’t believe that increasing our contact with them through hate crime laws will make us safer.
Hate crime legislation doesn’t prevent harm. It increases punishment. Punishment happens after the harm was done and study after study proves that punishment is not a deterrent. Instead, hate crime legislation would retraumatise victims of violence who need to demonstrate the harm that has been done to them on the terms of institutions like the police, courts and judges, who weren’t created to protect their interests.
Hate crime legislation increases sentences for those with “protected characteristics” (race, colour, gender, disability, etc), however it does not acknowledge power and oppression. Therefore, marginalised groups can be sentenced for criticising their oppressors, e.g. a queer person can be punished under the law for “hate crimes” against a straight person.
Moreover, hate crime legislation does not address the root causes of harm. It individualises problems that are actually systemic (homophobia, misogyny, racism etc). It lets the government and the state off the hook as the main perpetrators of these harms and shifts the blame onto individuals, providing cover for the state’s and the government’s actions and painting them as saviours instead. It does nothing to address systemic violence or make meaningful changes in the life of those who are being harmed, nor does it stop the harm from happening. Do we expect the same department of justice that deports migrants to protect and care for us?
We are aware that the allure of hate crime legislation is that it seems like a solution to violences a lot of us experience every day. But the truth is, that issues as complex as racism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, etc – issues that are rooted so deeply into our society- don’t have a quick fix . They take community work and political imagination. Instead of advocating for hate crime laws, we encourage you to ask yourselves some questions that might lead you to see an alternative and acknowledge the harm and inefficiency of hate crime laws:
-
How would hate crime laws protect you?
-
What do you need when harm has been done to you?
-
What does justice mean?
-
What’s the difference between punishment and justice?
There is no easy answer and living with an anti-carceral and anti-punishment mindset is a learning process. But we encourage you to use this as a starting point and really question whether working towards a legislation that reproduces organised abandonment will make a difference in the quality of life of the groups that it is meant to protect. And whether a system that is designed to be oppressive can create meaningful laws to diminish that oppression.
In solidarity,
Migrants and Ethnic minorities for Reproductive Justice (MERJ)
Black Abolitionists Ireland
Black Pride Ireland
Black Queer Book Club
Small Trans Library
