This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations on [17 Jul], available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/[ DOI 10.1080109596410.2015.1067063].
When Is the Time to Hate? A Research Review on the Impact of Dramatic Events on Islamophobia and Islamophobic Hate Crimes in Europe
Klas Borell
[email protected] School of Education and Communication, Jönköping University, Sweden (Accepted June 24, 2015)
Social scientists have long been interested in the significance of unexpected, dramatic events for social change. However, when it comes to research on prejudice and hate crimes, the impact of sudden, dramatic events has been little considered. The purpose of this research review is to survey European data to elucidate the temporal links between unexpected events, prejudice, and hate crimes, and also to pinpoint some of the methodological problems faced by scholars studying the impact of unanticipated dramatic events on prejudice and hate crimes; the significance of unexpected events often leaves researchers without access to relevant baseline data. The studies of Islamophobia and Islamophobic hate crimes considered in the present article privilege a dynamic view of time: terrorist attacks instill a sense of uncertainty and risk and Islamophobia and hate crimes are to a large extent event-driven and reactive, and tend to flare up on the heels of dramatic events. The recent attention paid to the role of unexpected, dramatic events represents a new and very promising
approach to the study of prejudice and hate crimes; with the earlier, essentially spatial research focus now complemented by a temporal focus, the chances increase of charting the underlying dynamics and causes of prejudice and hate crimes. Keywords: Islamophobia; hate crimes; prejudice; dramatic events; Europe
Introduction Social scientists have long been interested in the significance of unexpected, dramatic events for social change. Political scientists, for example, have repeatedly pointed to the role played by such events, sometimes known as focusing events, in changing the political agenda and potentially triggering changes in policy (Baumgartner and Jones 1993; Birkland 1998; Walker 1977). A similar approach is taken by social movement scholars, who often examine how dramatic events create opportunities that can affect the strategic capacities of organizations to mobilize support and legitimacy (Ramos 2008; Staggenborg 1993). However, when it comes to research on prejudice and hate crimes, the impact of sudden, dramatic events has been little considered. It was more than a decade ago that research on hate crime was described as “a science in its infancy” (Green, McFalls and Smith 2001). Although the literature has grown in volume since then, this judgment remains valid, above all because of the absence of any comprehensive empirical and theoretical attempts to shed light on the causes of hate crime. In the past few years, however, a number of hate crime researchers have shown an interest in a new and promising approach. Like social scientists in other fields, they have drawn attention to unexpected, dramatic events, in order to study the ways in which such events might trigger hate crimes (Deloughery, King and Asal 2012; Disha, Cavendish and King 2011). When King and Sutton (2013) recently presented this approach in a more elaborate
form, they pointed out that, when social scientists had previously studied the background to hate crimes, a one-sided emphasis had been placed on spatial relationships, with the research concentrating on the demographic composition of neighborhoods or on economic conditions as the key explanatory factors. To the extent that a temporal dimension has been included at all in these studies, it has solely been a matter of slow, cumulative social processes, as in the focus on the gradual social and economic marginalization of social groups (see, for example, Green, Strolovitch and Wong 1998; Lyons 2007; Quillian 1996). In common with other researchers, King and Sutton (2013) now argue for the importance of integrating an explicitly temporal line into what is substantially a spatial approach. It is probably no coincidence that an interest in the link between dramatic events and hate crimes and prejudice was first seen among American hate crime researchers after the unexpected and shocking attacks of September 11, 2001. The terrorists’ most important message was one of fear, and the tragic events of 9/11 confronted Americans with a dread risk that had previously been but a peripheral concern. In the days and weeks following the attacks, close to half of all Americans reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress (Schlenger et al. 2002; for a research review, see Neria, DiGrande and Adams 2011); people expressed more stereotypical views about Muslims and Islam (Panagopoulos 2006); and the number of Islamophobic hate crimes increased sharply (Byers and Jones 2007; Disha, Cavendish and King 2011). However, the high levels of post-traumatic stress turned out to be largely a transient reaction (Schuster et al. 2002), as did the increase in Islamophobic hate crimes. Hate crimes against Muslims (or those believed to be Muslims) escalated immediately after the terrorist attacks, as several studies have shown, but the backlash was generally short in duration, often no more than a couple of weeks. “We tend to observe,” conclude King and Sutton (2014, 888), “a spike after an event rather than a plateau” (see also, for example, Deloughhery, King and Asal 2012; Kaplan 2006).
Terrorism is a global phenomenon and fear of terrorist attack is not, of course, confined to the American populace alone. The purpose of this article is to study, with the help of a literature review, the significance of unexpected, dramatic, terrorist-related events for Islamophobic prejudice and Islamophobic hate crimes in Europe. A key question is whether prejudice and hate crimes in Europe show a temporal pattern similar to that in the USA, and whether the European data thus support the growing emphasis on the temporal context. The complexity of the task needs to be underlined, however. American and European researchers face a common challenge: the significance of unexpected, dramatic events is not easy to study, for, by their very nature, events of this kind cannot be predicted, leaving researchers without access to relevant baseline data and obliged to start from available ex ante facto data of largely limited relevance (Boomgarden and de Vreese 2007). In addition, unlike the USA, Europe has no single set of official statistics on hate crimes. Hate crime legislation is found in most Western societies and in all member states of the European Union. A central feature of such legislation, and for the police work done to uphold the law, consists of lists of hate crime motives and thus of vulnerable minorities. European Muslims are one of the groups that have not yet been systematically included in the category of vulnerable groups; at present, less than half of the EU’s 28 member states keep records of hate crimes with Islamophobic (or anti-Muslim) motives (see OSCE 2013). The difficulties of making fair comparisons between various European countries at different times are consequently excessive. The purpose of the present survey is thus not only to use European data to elucidate the temporal links between unexpected events, prejudice, and hate crimes, but also to pinpoint some of the methodological problems faced by scholars studying the impact of unanticipated dramatic events on prejudice and hate crimes.
Islamophobia and Islamophobic hate crimes The term Islamophobia, as distinct from terms such as racism or xenophobia, became more widely known after the report on discrimination against Muslims published in 1997 by the Runnymede Trust, a British think tank that had already brought public attention to the broader issues of racism, discrimination, and equal rights (Runnymede Trust 1997). Islamophobia was defined in the report as highly negative attitudes towards Muslims, but also as discrimination against Muslims in various economic and social contexts. Before that point, the term Islamophobia – although not the phenomena it refers to – was relatively unknown in the social sciences. A search of the Sociological Abstract publications database, for example, shows that before 1997 no article was indexed using the term, and that the first articles that did use it were commentaries on the Runnymede report. As a concept in the social sciences, Islamophobia is not without its problems, and as it gradually gained ground in the social sciences there was no consensus on what it actually stood for: it was defined in a variety of ways or, as was more common, taken for granted and left undefined (Zúquete 2008). These problems have still not been overcome, but it is nevertheless possible to discern a growing agreement on how Islamophobia can be made more useful as an analytical concept. The American political scientist Erik Bleich’s definition of Islamophobia (2012) can be seen as embodying these tendencies toward consensus (see also Helbing 2012). Ultimately, Bleich suggests, Islamophobia should be defined as indiscriminate negative attitudes and feelings directed at Muslims. At least three aspects to this definition deserve to be emphasized. First, there is the centrality of indiscriminate negative attitudes and emotions. Islamophobia, like other prejudices, is an antipathy based on stereotypes – negative overgeneralizations, in other words. The positions and behaviors of some Muslims are ascribed to all Muslims. To say that all Muslims are terrorists, even though the vast
majority of the world’s Muslims reject terrorism (Pew 2006, 2007), or that all Muslims oppose democracy, even though the vast majority of Muslims support democracy (Pew 2012), are examples of indiscriminate generalizations, of how people are lumped together and stigmatized. Second, the fact that Islamophobia is seen not only as a cognitive phenomenon, but also as an affective phenomenon, is very much in line with a longestablished perspective in sociology and social psychology: to sociologists and social psychologists, prejudice is a stereotyped cognition with a strong emotional element (Fiske 1998). Third, and paradoxically, there is what Bleich’s definition (2012) does not state. When the authors of the Runnymede report wrote about Islamophobia, they had in mind two distinct phenomena, namely anti-Muslim attitudes and the hate crimes and discrimination suffered by British Muslims. Yet when the concept of Islamophobia is overburdened with meaning in this way, it becomes not only less precise, but also misleading, because it assumes an absolute connection between attitudes and actions. By avoiding an absolute link between attitudes and the actions that may, but need not always be, their consequence, Bleich in this respect follows an established path in sociology and social psychology (see, for example, Shutz and Six 1996) Hate crime, or bias crime, is a collective term for a variety of crimes ranging from vandalism to physical assault and murder, all of which share the same strong connection to prejudice. Hate crimes are motivated by prejudice “towards the victim’s putative social group” (Green, McFalls and Smith 2001, 480). Attacks of various kinds are not directed against the victim as an individual, but against the group to which the individual belongs (or is thought to belong). The victim, in other words, is taken to represent an entire group of people against whom the perpetrator has a prejudice (Craig 2002; Perry 2001). Hate crimes are prompted by prejudice, such as Islamophobic prejudice, but Islamophobic
prejudices are not the same as hate crimes. It is a large step from believing a group of people to be “inferior” or “dangerous” to committing crimes against individuals who are thought to belong to a particular out-group, and most prejudiced people do not commit hate crimes; yet equally, of course, the few people who do commit hate crimes are guided by their prejudices.
Dramatic events, Islamophobia, and hate crimes in Europe The answer to the question of how and to what extent the 9/11 attacks affected European opinion is complicated by the general absence of the baseline data that would make it possible to compare attitudes before and after that date. The Eurobarometer, tasked by the European Union to collect survey data from member states, had asked back in 1988 whether in its European respondents’ view there were “too many” people of any group in their country. Over 40% of respondents singled out people of a different “race” or ethnic origin, but only half as many people from another religion were so identified (Eurobarometer 1988). In other words, the study did not consider specific attitudes towards Muslims per se, but the results can still be interpreted as meaning that religious affiliation at that time did not play a crucial role in the way people categorized “the Other.” Available studies from Britain and France, however, suggest that the situation was changing at the end of the 1980s. In particular, two events seem to have affected the climate of opinion there, namely the so-called Rushdie affair, when the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa in 1989 against the author Salman Rushdie for his book The Satanic Verses, and the debate in the same year about whether the wearing of headscarves should be permitted in French schools. As Bleich (2009) and Field (2007) show with systematic reviews of poll data from Britain and France, these two events contributed to a growth in anti-Muslim prejudice.
The results of polls in Great Britain and France were confirmed by data collected by the European Value Study between 1999 and 2000. A comparative study of public opinion in 18 European countries, showed the extensiveness of anti-Muslim prejudice even before 9/11. The survey asked whether respondents would be willing to live next door to various defined groups, including “Muslims.” When Strabac and Listhaug (2008) later re-analyzed the data, it became evident that in fully 13 countries negative attitudes toward Muslims were significantly higher than negative attitudes toward other migrant groups. The study does have some limitations. The response rate in this, as in many other international comparative studies, was low, and views on “Muslims” were only measured using a single question. Yet even so, there are some interesting inferences to be drawn, especially the tentative conclusion that anti-Muslim tendencies were global in character even before 9/11, or in other words were a symptom of a broader contemporary political and cultural climate. A tendency toward strongly negative views about Muslims was to be found across the whole of Europe, even in countries with very few Muslim immigrants (examples being Finland and Malta, where 19% and 28%, respectively, of respondents reported that they could not countenance having Muslims as neighbors).
Europe and terrorist attacks Prejudices about Islam and Muslims have deep historical roots in Europe (Said 1978), and in a short-term perspective we have seen that anti-Muslim attitudes even before 9/11 had been exacerbated by causes célèbres such as the Rushdie affair. Yet by the same token, the consequences for public opinion of the 9/11 attacks should not be underestimated. One of the few studies to permit a direct comparison of data collected before and after 9/11 is the survey by Fetzer and Soper (2003) of changing attitudes in France, Germany, and Britain. It is important to note, however, that the study was in no way a
direct attempt to measure the spread of Islamophobic attitudes; it was intended to shed light on opinions about European Muslims’ religious rights. Since the debate about such rights differed in the three countries, differing questions were put to respondents. In the UK, the question concerned government funding for independent Muslim schools; in Germany, whether the teaching of Islam should be included in the state school curriculum; in France, whether Muslim girls should be allowed to wear headscarves in state schools. The respondents in the three countries were presented with three possible answers: limit Muslims’ rights, maintain the status quo, or extend Muslims’ rights. The same questions were put two months before the 9/11 attacks and then again in April 2002. Although the country data are not directly comparable – they are the product of three different questions, after all – the results were still interesting. Two changes turned out to be statistically significant: in the UK, opposition to government funding for Muslim schools rose from 20% to 26%, while in Germany, support for providing education about Islam fell from 62% to 56%. Supporters of the headscarf ban in French state schools increased in number from 39% to 41%, but without reaching statistical significance. This before-and-after study, like a number of other studies, confirms the assumption that the 9/11 terrorist attacks had a significant effect on public opinion; however, it also points to the relative stability of tolerant attitudes. Even after 9/11, most of the German respondents supported the idea that Islam should be taught in state schools, and a majority of the British respondents continued to agree that government funds should be used for Muslim schools. It was not only the 9/11 attacks that influenced Europeans’ attitudes towards Muslims and Islam. Europe too was hit by Islamist terrorist acts, notably the bombings in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005. Two Spanish social psychologists (Echebarria-Echabe and Fernandez-Guede 2006) collected data at the end of February 2004 in order to validate a
scale to measure anti-Arab prejudice (largely equivalent to Islamophobia; see also Echebarria-Echabe and Fernandez-Guede 2007). A few days later, on March 11, 2004, the Spanish capital, Madrid, saw one of the worst bombings in Europe’s post-war history. Bombs placed by Islamist extremists were detonated during the morning rush hour in three main railway stations. Thousands of commuters were injured and 196 people were killed. When Echebaria-Echabe and Fernandez-Guede repeated their measurements after the attacks, they observed a strong increase in anti-Muslim prejudice, in addition to a growing political conservatism (see also Legewie 2013). The attitudinal significance of shocking, dramatic events is also underlined by Savelkoul et al. (2011). In an international comparative study of Islamophobic attitudes, based on data taken from the Pew Global Attitudes Survey gathered in 2005, they found that hostility towards Muslims was surprisingly high in Spain, which can presumably be explained by reference to the Madrid attacks. Bleich (2009) too emphasizes the strong element of event dependency in Islamophobic attitudes. A detailed review of attitude polls in France and the UK shows that Islamophobic attitudes have increased in both these countries since 9/11, although the overall picture from these studies is one of fluctuations in public opinion. Dramatic events, such as 9/11 and the terrorist attacks in London and Madrid, cause Islamophobic prejudice to flare up and then, in calmer times, to subside again (see also Bozzoli and Muller 2011). The general importance of experiences of terrorist attacks is further demonstrated in an analysis of data from the third round of the European Social Survey, collected in 2006 and 2007 (Hindriks and Mills 2010). The results show that individuals from countries with moderate experience of terrorist attacks perceive a future attack as more probable in the near future compared with those living in countries with negligible terrorism experience.
The interactive relationship between dramatic events and Islamophobic prejudice suggests that it is the perception of a threat to safety that plays a central role: terrorist attacks create shocks and a sense of threat and people who feel threatened seems to become more prejudiced toward Muslims in general. Wike and Grim (2010) analyze data from the UK, France, and Germany, together with data from the USA, gathered by the Pew Institute in 2006. In the poll, non-Muslim respondents were asked to gauge their reaction to a number of positive and negative statements about Muslims and to answer questions about their perceptions of the threat posed by Islamist terrorist groups in their own country and in the wider world. The results seem to corroborate the idea that it is the perceived threat to security that is the main factor behind prejudiced attitudes toward Muslims in the countries surveyed. Across all five countries, people who experience a strong Muslim threat are also far more likely to associate Muslims in general with negative qualities. In other words, they see no difference between Islamist terrorist groups and ordinary Muslims living in Europe. Security-related threats seem to be the strongest predictor of Islamophobic prejudice. But perceived threats come in many forms. Another suggested predictor of Islamophobia is usually described using the keyword culture (see, for example, Richardson 2004), which in the present context refers more to a perceived symbolic threat. Symbolic threats call for a specific minority group to be considered radically different in terms of, for example, morals and values, with the minority group’s divergent morality and values posing a threat to the majority’s (Riek, Mania and Gaertner 2006). As a symbolic threat, “Muslims” threaten Western civilization and values such as democracy and gender equality; Muslims in Europe are seen as having an inferior, homogenous “culture”, with which it is impossible to coexist. In several of the larger, statistically representative European studies of Islamophobia, however, security is evidently the primary factor, while the cultural
dimension is only secondary. This is particularly clear from Wike and Grim’s comparative study (2010). France – a country that at the time had not yet been affected by a major Islamist terrorist act – was the country with least negative views toward Muslims and a country where the predictive power of the security threats were weakest. While the perception of security-related threats was the strongest predictor of varying degrees of Islamophobic prejudice across the sample, perceived cultural threats were only indirectly related to prejudice. Wike and Grim (2010, 18) conclude, While many Westerners do have concerns about Islamic identity and assimilation, and significant numbers think Islam is incompatible with democracy and modernity, these are not the chief sources of negativity. It is not so much a perception that Islam is incompatible with Western society that leads to negativity, as it is the perception that extremism exists within the community of Muslims.
European hate crimes and acts of terrorism To answer the question of whether the 9/11 attacks contributed to a rise in hate crimes against Muslims in Europe, an early attempt was made by the initiative of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (now the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights). The final report (Allen and Nielsen 2002), which compiled details of attacks on Muslims in 15 EU countries, argued that Islamophobic hate crimes were a growing problem. Violent crime was said to be relatively rare, but verbal harassment – including unlawful threats – and vandalism, especially of mosques, were common. The same authors drew attention to the important indications that Muslims’ exposure to hate crimes had increased since 9/11, but here the report’s methodological problems prove a significant obstacle. In the absence of baseline data about pre-9/11 conditions, it is
impossible to draw definite conclusions as to the extent to which hate crimes actually increased, while, because the studies of the 15 EU countries were not based on a commonly agreed methodology, it is impossible to make comparisons between European countries. The study, in other words, offers no opportunity for comparisons, in either geographical or temporal terms. There are other questionnaire-based studies in which European Muslims’ experience of hate crimes have been investigated. At the end of 2002, Sheridan (2006) asked 222 British Muslims to judge how the events of 9/11 had affected their everyday lives. Respondents were asked to compare their experiences during a “normal” year before 9/11 with their experiences afterwards. By responding to a series of statements, they rated their experience of openly negative treatment, ranging from verbal insults to physical violence. A significant majority of respondents, 74%, said they had personally experienced an increase in open abuse, and some 17% reported that they had personal experience of violence. Of the limitations of Sheridan’s findings, the most important was the lack of comparison groups: the study provides no opportunity to compare Muslims’ experiences with those of other religious minorities. The problem was rectified, however, in a second study by the same researcher (Sheridan and Gillet 2005). In this survey, conducted in the fall of 2001, a selection of British Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Jews, and Christians were asked to consider their experience of hate crimes before and after 9/11 by responding to a series of statements. Of the five religious groups, only the Muslims showed a statistically significant increase in the number of perceived hate crimes. In Sweden, Göran Larsson (2005) used a questionnaire addressed to the congregation of a city mosque (n=176) a fortnight after the 9/11 attacks. The survey asked questions about their sense of vulnerability. Over 90% of respondents reported feeling more
vulnerable after the 9/11 attacks, 45% reported personal experience of verbal abuse, 7% said they had been threatened with violence, and 4% said they had experienced physical violence (for a similar study from Berlin, London and Madrid, see Bruss 2008). Studies of this kind are important, because they capture Muslims’ own experiences of hate crimes. Even so, their results must be interpreted with caution. As far as can be judged, it would seem that all the European surveys of Muslims’ perceptions of hate crimes have used some form of non-representative sampling method with a strong element of selfselection. Put differently, the methodological arrangements have been such that the interviewees themselves have influenced who is to be included in a survey sample group. The results cannot therefore be generalized to the Muslim minority in any one European country. To date, the only statistically representative survey of Muslims’ perceptions of the extent and extremity of hate crimes comes from Sweden. The data from a research project on Swedish Muslim congregations (Borell and Gerdner 2010; see also Borell and Gerdner 2011, 2013) are based not on individual but on organizational data – in other words, interview data not from individual Muslims, but from representatives of local Muslim organizations. The aim was to generate a statistically representative picture of the hate crimes directed against these congregations. Systematic data of this kind have not previously been reported from any European country, and they have important implications for understanding the background and scope of Islamophobic hate crimes. The data analysis shows that about half the Muslim congregations’ representatives reported some form of open opposition to their activities. One disheartening finding is that the congregations have not only been exposed to various legal forms of opposition (such as written attacks in letters to the editor in local newspapers or in malicious flyers), but have also been subject to criminal forms of opposition. Fully 26% of the congregations’
representatives reported that their premises had suffered vandalism, a type of anti-Muslim hate crime in which the mosque or prayer room is vandalized because it represents Islam and Muslims. In almost as many cases, 23%, active members of the congregation reported having received unlawful threats, and in a few cases individual members had been subjected to physical violence. If all these criminal forms of opposition (violence, threats, vandalism) are added together, 40% of the Swedish Muslim congregations questioned turn out to have been affected (Borell and Gerdner 2010). The Borell and Gerdner study shows that it is possible to link prejudiced opposition to specific events. Broadly speaking, it can be said that prejudiced opposition arose in the context of dramatic world events, especially in conjunction with the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but also the bombings in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005 – that is to say, because of events outside Sweden. In the second place, there was prejudiced opposition that arose in situations where a congregation had recently been started, a new mosque or prayer room consecrated, or generally speaking where events conspired to draw the local community’s attention to the congregation when its activities were reported by the media.
Discussions and conclusions Available European surveys demonstrate that European Islamophobia cannot be seen exclusively as a “Bin Laden effect.” In Europe, anti-Muslim prejudice has deep historical roots and, even taking a shorter-term view, prejudices about Muslims were evident before 2001, fueled by the Rushdie affair and the media coverage that followed this and other events. However, the consequences for public opinion of the 9/11 attacks should not be underestimated. The terrorist attacks of 9/11, together with the bombings in Europe, reignited anti-Muslim opinion in Europe. In Spain and the UK, which were the scenes of the two terrorist attacks on European soil that can be compared with the 9/11 attacks, public
opinion was influenced to a particular degree (despite both countries’ long experience of terrorism in the shape of ETA and the IRA respectively). In sum, Islamophobic attitudes seem to a large extent to be event-driven and reactive; dramatic events cause Islamophobic prejudice to flare up but, in calmer times, to subside again, although on a relatively high level. Terrorist attacks seems to be especially important events, but surges in anti-Muslim attitudes also follow other dramatic events, for example the 1989 Rushdie affair or the 2005 riots in France (Bleich 2009). A similar pattern is found for Islamophobic hate crimes. American research on Islamophobic hate crimes after 9/11 is unequivocal on one point: hate crimes against Muslims and mosques in the USA occurred largely in immediate conjunction with the attacks in 2001. Systematic, longitudinal data on Europe that would justify a similarly definite conclusion is lacking, but the available data indicate at the very least a similar tendency. Judging by the limited studies available, Islamophobic hate crimes seem to be event-driven and to have a temporally strong connection to terrorist attacks. These results are interesting, and have the potential to enrich research on prejudice and hate crimes.
Hate at length Research on prejudice and hate crimes has long been linked to various versions of what may generally be termed group threat theory. Two basic forms of threats are often mentioned. With the “realistic” dimension, an in-group’s prejudices about out-groups are thought to result from competition for limited material resources and, more specifically, from the in-group feeling that out-groups pose a threat to the political and economic power of the in-group. In other words, dominant social groups seek to preserve their relative social advantage against a perceived threat (Blalock 1967; Blumer 1958). The group threat theory tradition also encompasses a symbolic dimension. According to this, prejudice and hate
crimes, rather than resulting from efforts to preserve socio-economic hierarchies, result from efforts to preserve the world “as it always has been.” Perceived group differences are largely a question of morals, values, and beliefs, where out-groups, which are thought to entertain different values and beliefs, threaten the in-group’s traditional worldview (see, for example, Sears 1988). In group threat theory, regardless of whether the various spatial relationships are “realistic” or symbolic, they are nevertheless the focus, be they socio-economic conditions or the distribution of beliefs and values. The passage of time is only evident in gradual, cumulative social processes – the growing social or cultural deprivation of a dominant social group, for example. Hate crimes are not an inevitable result of such processes, but the likelihood of such crimes increases with a mounting sense of deprivation. The studies of Islamophobia and Islamophobic hate crimes considered in the present article privilege a more dynamic view of time that has to do with the perceived character of threat; European, as well as American studies, indicate that it is perceived security threats, and not in the first instance perceived socio-economic or cultural threats, that are the primary explanatory factor. Terrorism can serve many goals, but the terrorist’s most persuasive message is that of fear; terrorist actions are manipulations of fear, actions intended to signify risk and to instill a general sense of uncertainty. In general, emotions influence how people process information about out-groups (Fiske 1998): prejudice is a cognitive as well as an emotional phenomenon, and the emotional side seems to be especially important for Islamophobia. Security-related fear, created by terrorism, increases risk estimates and has distortive effects on the perception of ordinary Muslims. Fear, a primary and strong emotion, becomes, as Das et al. (2009, 454) suggest, “an important evaluation standard for judging out-group members.”
As seen, Islamophobic hate crimes are likely to occur in the wake of terrorist attacks, but the exact causal process linking terror attacks, prejudice and hate crimes is unclear. Hypothetically, widespread prejudice seems to contribute to hate crimes, but indirectly. Studies of perpetrators of hate crimes suggest that they are primarily associated with racist youth subcultures and organized extremists (Green, McFalls and Smith 2001), and, as noted earlier, the step from prejudiced thought to committing crimes is large. However, widely held prejudice about a minority group may lead to hate crimes being excused or even defended – “They got what they deserved” – and offers a justification to extremist groups looking to legitimize their criminal behavior, with the perpetrators of hate crimes thus claiming that they had only done things that “others would have done, if only they dared” (Ray and Smith 2001). Terrorist attacks and intensified Islamophobic prejudice thus serve as a window of opportunity for extremists. Prominent hate crimes can, however, have paradoxical effects and are, in themselves, dramatic events with the capacity to influence public opinion. Hate crime are, in essence, message crimes, with the purpose of frightening an out-group and also making impressions on a perceived in-group (Iganski 2008). But when a hate crime is highlighted in the media, it often triggers a strong counter-reaction; hate crimes challenge a collective moral consciousness and can lead to a sense of outrage so strong that people are prepared to take political action. Such action can take both internal and external forms. Hate crimes can function as a catalyst for resistance within a targeted out-group. It would seem there are no systematic studies to confirm this as yet, but there are a number of illustrative examples from qualitative studies. When Noelle (2002), after a widely publicized anti-gay hate crime, interviewed individuals in the targeted group, she found instances of vicarious traumatization, but also examples of how the crime had a mobilizing effect. One gay activist she interviewed said that she saw “a lot of positive come out in terms of
communication, in terms of organizational networking, in terms of bringing inactive people back into active organizations” (quoted in Noelle 2002, 45). Prominent hate crime can also have wider external effects. The effects of hate crimes against American Muslims immediately after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were complex: at the same time as American Muslims were hit by hate crimes, the backlash against such crimes saw the Muslim minority, “[one] of America’s least visible minorities”, as Kaplan (2006, 9) points out, “now making important inroads into the American public consciousness for the first time.” Certainly, notorious hate crimes also seem to trigger initiatives that promote alliances between targeted minorities and other actors. Hate crimes against Swedish Muslim congregations had, to give just one illustration, paradoxical effects (Borell and Gerdner 2010). In the very places with the greatest number of hate crimes, outside support for the congregations was broader and more vocal. Hate crimes galvanized community organizations and individuals who were willing to support Muslims’ rights to practice their religion freely; and when such forces rally round, it becomes possible for Muslim congregations to make allies and develop collaborations with new partners.
Interaction The conclusions about the significance of perceived security threats for prejudice and hate crimes should not be thought static, however; rather, they call for further research that looks to the interaction between the security-related threats associated with dramatic events and the perceived socio-economic and cultural threats. A perceived cultural threat from “Muslims,” for example, might influence a perceived security threat, and vice versa. A different effect of this interaction might exist between Islamophobia and socioeconomically motivated xenophobia. Several Western studies have shown that Islamophobia is more widespread than general anti-foreigner prejudice (see, for example,
Strabac and Listhaug 2008). But European studies have also underlined the strength of the correspondence between socio-economically motivated xenophobia and Islamophobic attitudes (see, for example, Gonzales et al. 2008): people who express extreme xenophobic attitudes also tend to express extreme Islamophobic attitudes. That Islamophobia today seems to play a bigger role in Europe than traditional xenophobia need not mean that socio-economically motivated xenophobia is no longer significant, of course. Hypothetically speaking, it might instead be a question of Islamophobia to some extent replacing, or coming to epitomize, traditional xenophobia. It is possible to argue that Islamophobia has contributed to a new way of concretizing hostile attitudes towards strangers through its unambiguous focus on Muslims. Such a conclusion is supported by studies of the rhetoric used by Europe’s extreme right-wing political parties. The extreme right has often been perceived as programmatically rigid, yet several researchers (see, for example, Williams 2010; Zúquete 2008) have noted that, since 9/11, these parties have revised their policy platforms, and above all that the once dominant xenophobic rhetoric is now expressed in Islamophobic terms.
Methodological challenges The recent attention paid to the role of unexpected, dramatic events represents a new and very promising approach to the study of prejudice and hate crimes; with the earlier, essentially spatial research focus now complemented by a temporal focus, the chances increase of charting the underlying causes of prejudice and hate crimes. The present overview makes the case that European empirical studies of Islamophobic prejudice and hate crimes, like existing American studies, suggest that greater heed should be paid to the role of unexpected, dramatic events. At the same time – and it is important to emphasize this point – the European results should be interpreted with great caution: the studies to
date are few and, importantly, the methodological problems are many. As we have argued, the impact of unexpected, dramatic events is difficult to study simply because by their very nature they cannot be predicted, and researchers thus have very little relevant baseline data. In the absence of uniform, systematic, and comparable European official statistics on Islamophobic hate crimes, European researchers have fallen back on studies of Muslims’ experiences of hate crime. Such studies of vulnerable minorities can potentially be very valuable, sometimes even providing a more reliable range of data than official hate crime statistics, but of course this is only true as long as they are statistically representative. With few exceptions, the European polls that have canvassed Muslims for their opinions rely on non-representative sampling methods, often with a strong element of self-selection, while longitudinal studies are notable by their absence. The problems with the surveys used thus far to describe the trends in Islamophobic prejudice are different: such surveys are generally representative, but the availability of longitudinal data is severely limited. They have an even greater problem, too: they are not based on common, universally accepted definitions of Islamophobia. Islamophobic prejudice is often measured by one, perhaps two questions – not with the help of well-tested scales (as is common in studies of racism) – and the difficulty of comparing results from one survey to the next is therefore highly significant. The study of Islamophobic prejudice and hate crimes in Europe is grappling with many methodological challenges. The results so far, despite the obvious inconsistencies and limitations, would seem to indicate that such studies have the potential to contribute to the new temporal perspective that is emerging. Such a perspective promises to provide valuable new insights into the interaction of perceived security threats and socio-economic and cultural threats, and provide new knowledge about the causes of prejudice and hate crimes.
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