Abstract
The last 20 years have witnessed a growth in the recognition of the profound negative impacts of hate crime. As a result, many criminal justice systems have adopted sentencing approaches that hold the perpetrator accountable for the additional harm these offences cause to victims. While this added sentencing penalty may be supported through a retributive lens, and the wider ‘signalling’ element of these offences, there is comparatively little robust empirical evidence which demonstrates that hate crimes hurt victims more than similar non-hate crimes. This lack of evidence leaves open the possibility that the harms of hate crime could be challenged and the sentencing approaches threatened. Using 8 years (2012/13-2019/20) of the nationally representative Crime Survey for England and Wales, hierarchical linear modelling was used to disentangle the unique emotional impact of hate-motivated violence (from non-hate-motivated violence) and hate-motivated vandalism (from non-hate-motivated vandalism). The results support the notion that hate hurts more, particularly for racist and homophobic violence and gender and disability-related vandalism. However, victims of religiously motivated vandalism did not report greater emotional impacts than those who experienced non-religiously motivated vandalism. The limitations and implications of these unique results are discussed.