Hate Crimes

The main characters in this play are assaulted in what could be categorized as a hate crime.  According to the FBI website, “a hate crime, also known as a bias crime, is a criminal offense committed against a person, property, or society that is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin.”

In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which prohibited a variety of discriminatory and harmful acts motivated by bias.  Congress passed a new statute in 2009, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which expanded prohibitions by criminalizing the actions of a perpetrator who “willfully causes bodily injury to any person or, through the use of fire, a firearm, a dangerous weapon, or an explosive or incendiary device, attempts to cause bodily injury to any person, because of the actual or perceived religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability of any person.”

In 1990, Congress passed the Hate Crimes Statistics Act, which charged the Attorney General with collecting data about hate crimes.  The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program gathers and processes this data and publishes it online.  Their most recent publication is Hate Crime Statistics for 2008 (2009 statistics will be available later this fall).  In 2008, law enforcement agencies reported 1,617 offenses based on sexual-orientation bias (16.7% of all hate crimes reported by law enforcement agencies that year).