Mapping the scientific knowledge and approaches to defining and measuring hate crime, hate speech, and hate incidents: A systematic review.

Background: The difficulties in defining hate crime, hate incidents and hate speech, and in finding a common conceptual basis constitute a key barrier toward operationalisation in research, policy and programming. Definitions disagree about issues such as the identities that should be protected, the types of behaviours that should be referred to as hateful, and how the 'hate element' should be assessed. The lack of solid conceptual foundations is reflected in the absence of sound data. These issues have been raised since the early 1990s (Berk, 1990; Byers & Venturelli, 1994) but they proved to be an intractable problem that continues to affect this research and policy domain. Objectives: Our systematic review has two objectives that are fundamentally connected: mapping (1) original definitions and (2) original measurement tools of hate crime, hate speech, hate incidents and surrogate terms, that is, alternative terms used for these concepts (e.g., prejudice-motivated crime, bias crime, among many others). Search Methods: We systematically searched over 19 databases to retrieve academic and grey literature, as well as legislation. In addition, we contacted 26 country experts and searched 211 websites, as well as bibliographies of published reviews of related literature, and scrutiny of annotated bibliographies of related literature. Inclusion Criteria: This review included documents published after 1990 found in academic literature, grey literature and legislation. We included academic empirical articles with any study design, as well as theoretical articles that focused specifically on defining hate crime, hate speech, hate incidents or surrogate terms. We also reviewed current criminal or civil legislation that is intended to regulate forms of hate speech, hate incidents and hate crimes. Eligible countries included Canada, USA, UK, Ireland, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Australia and New Zealand. For documents to be included in relation to research objective (1), they had to contain at least one original definition of hate speech, hate incidents or hate crimes, or any surrogate term. For documents to be included in relation to research objective (2), they had to contain at least one original measurement tool of hate speech, hate incidents or hate crimes, or any surrogate term. Documents could be included in relation to both research objectives. Data Collection and Analysis: The systematic search covered 1 January 1990 to 31 December 2021, with searches of academic databases conducted between 8th March and 12th April 2022 yielding 35,191 references. We carried out country-specific searches for grey literature published in the same time period between 27th August and 2nd December 2021. These searches yielded a total of 2748 results. We coded characteristics of the definitions and measurement tools, including the protected characteristics, the approaches to categorise the 'hate element' and other variables. We used univariate and bivariate statistical methods for data analysis. We also carried out a social network analysis. Main Results: We provide as annex complete lists of the original definitions and measurement tools that met our inclusion criteria, for the use of researchers and policy makers worldwide. We included 423 definitions and 168 measurement tools in academic and grey literature, and 83 definitions found in legislation. To support future research and policy work in this area, we included a synthetic assessment of the (1) the operationalisability of each definition and (2) the theoretical robustness and transparency of each measurement tool. Our mapping of the definitions and measurement tools revealed numerous significant trends, clusters and differences between and within definitions and measurement tools focusing on hate crime, hate speech and hate incidents. For example, definitions and measurement tools tend to focus more on ethnic and religious identities (e.g., racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia) compared to sexual, gender and disability-related identities. This gap is greater in the definitions and measurement tools of hate speech than hate crime. Our analysis showed geographical patterns: hate crime definitions and measurement tools are more likely to originate from Anglophonic countries, especially the USA, but hate speech definitions and measurement tools are more likely to originate from continental Europe. In terms of disciplinary fragmentation, our social network analysis revealed that the collaboration and exchange of conceptual frameworks and methodological tools between social sciences and computer science is limited, with most definitions and measurement tools clustering along disciplinary lines. More detailed findings are presented in the results section of the report. Authors' Conclusions: There is an urgent need to close the research and policy gap between the protections of 'ethnic and religious identities' and other (less) protected characteristics such as gender and sexual identities, age and disability. There is also an urgent need to improve the quality of methodological and reporting standards in research examining hate behaviours, including transparency in methodology and data reporting, and discussion of limitations (e.g., bias in data). Many of the measurement tools found in the academic literature were excluded because they did not report transparently how they collected and analysed the data. Further, 41% of documents presenting research on hate behaviours did not provide a definition of what they were looking at. Given the importance of this policy domain, it is vital to raise the quality and trustworthiness of research in this area. This review found that researchers in different disciplinary areas (e.g., social sciences and computer science) rarely collaborate. Future research should attempt to build on existing definitions and measurement tools (instead of duplicating efforts), and engage in more interdisciplinary collaborations. It is our hope that that this review can provide a solid foundation for researchers, government, and other bodies to build cumulative knowledge and collaboration in this important field.

PROTOCOL: Mapping the scientific knowledge and approaches to defining and measuring hate crime, hate speech, and hate incidents.

The overallaim of the review is to map the definitions and measurement tools used to capture the whole spectrum of hate motivated behaviors, including hate crime, hate speech and hate incidents. This will benefit the field of hate studies by providing a baseline that can inform the building of cumulative knowledge and comparative research. The first review objective is to map definitions of hate crime, hate incidents, hate speech, and surrogate terms. Specific research questions underpinning this objective are: (a) How are hate crimes, hate speech and hate incidents defined in the academic, legal, policy, and programming literature?; (b) What are the concepts, parameters and criteria that qualify a behavior as being hate crime, hate incident or hate speech?; and (c) What are the most common concepts, parameters and criteria found across definitions? What are the differences between definitions and the elements they contain? The second review objective is to map the tools used to measure the prevalence of hate crime, hate incidents, hate speech, and surrogate terms. Specific research questions underpinning this objective are: (a) How are definitions operationalised to measure hate crimes, hate speech, and hate incidents?; and (b) How valid and reliable are these measures?

Electronic alerts for triage protocol compliance among emergency department triage nurses: a randomized controlled trial.

BACKGROUND: Alerts embedded in electronic health records (EHRs) are designed to improve processes at the point of care. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to determine if an EHR alert-at emergency department (ED) triage-increases the ED triage nurse's utilization of triage protocols. METHODS: ED triage nurses were randomized to receive either a passive EHR alert or no intervention for patients with the following complaints: minor trauma with extremity injuries or female patients with abdominal pain. The EHR alert notified the nurse that the patient was eligible for diagnostic testing: radiographs for patients with injured extremities or urinalysis for female patients with abdominal pain. RESULTS: Twenty-eight nurses triaged 20,410 patients in the 6 months before the intervention and 19,157 in the 6 months after the intervention. Before the intervention, the urinalysis protocol was implemented in 101/624 (16.2%) patients triaged by the intervention group and 116/711 (16.3%) triaged by the control group. After the intervention, the urinalysis protocol was implemented in 146/530 (27.6%) patients triaged by the intervention group and 174/679 (25.6%) triaged by the control group. Before the intervention, the radiograph protocol was implemented in 58/774 (7.5%) patients triaged by the intervention group and 45/684 (6.6%) triaged by the control group. After the intervention, the radiograph protocol was implemented in 78/614 (12.7%) patients triaged by the intervention group and 79/609 (13.0%) triaged by the control group. CONCLUSION: The use of a passive EHR alert to promote ED triage protocols showed little benefit. Before the widespread implementation of EHR alerts for patient care, rigorous studies are required to determine the best alert methods and the impacts of such interventions.

Understanding child sexual abuse by Catholic priests from a situational perspective.

Most sexual offense research focuses on offender motivation and individual risk factors rather than the criminal events themselves. This article provides an analysis of data from two studies on child sexual abuse by Catholic priests to help understand the opportunities clergy had or created to abuse youth. Findings show that situational factors played a role in victim choice among a heterogeneous group of abusers. Priests abused more male than female victims and had significantly greater access to male youth historically. When access to female youth increased in the 1990s, abuse of females as a percentage of victims also increased. The article concludes with a discussion about how ecological information can be used to craft intervention policies to prevent sexual offenses.

The impact of state laws protecting abortion clinics and reproductive rights on crimes against abortion providers: deterrence, backlash, or neither?

Since Roe v. Wade, most states have passed laws either restricting or further protecting reproductive rights. During a wave of anti-abortion violence in the early 1990s, several states also enacted legislation protecting abortion clinics, staff, and patients. One hypothesis drawn from the theoretical literature predicts that these laws provide a deterrent effect and thus fewer anti-abortion crimes in states that protect clinics and reproductive rights. An alternative hypothesis drawn from the literature expects a backlash effect from radical members of the movement and thus more crimes in states with protective legislation. We tested these competing hypotheses by taking advantage of unique data sets that gauge the strength of laws protecting clinics and reproductive rights and that provide self-report victimization data from clinics. Employing logistic regression and controlling for several potential covariates, we found null effects and thus no support for either hypothesis. The null findings were consistent across a number of different types of victimization. Our discussion contextualizes these results in terms of previous research on crimes against abortion providers, discusses alternative explanations for the null findings, and considers the implications for future policy development and research.

A reassessment of state-level covariates of militia groups.

This study investigated state-level variation in the number of right-wing militia groups. We built on prior quantitative examinations by more carefully operationalizing theoretical concepts and testing alternative hypotheses offered to account for the etiology of social movements generally and of militias specifically. Using negative binomial regression, we found that, consistent with previous research, states with higher levels of farm job loss had more militia groups. However, in contrast to prior studies, we did not find gun culture, hospitable political climate, female empowerment, or general economic deprivation to be associated with the number of militia groups. We also found no relationship between the number of militia groups and levels of fundamentalist religious culture and minority empowerment. Our study was the first to test the effects of social disorganization on the number of militias in a state, and we found the two to be positively and significantly associated. We situate our results in the theoretical and empirical literature and outline two challenges for future research. First, scholars must operationalize variables carefully since different measures of the same theoretical concept may result in diverging conclusions. Second, since one major factor (i.e., social disorganization) found in this study to be associated with the number of militia groups in a state was examined here for the first time, it is important for researchers to continue to investigate new hypotheses.