The Hate & Bias Crimes Monitoring Project Form Report

At the incep on of this project in 2013, the research team set out to document 900 (for methodological reasons) cases of hate crime, hate speech, and inten onal unfair discrimina on covering a wide range of vulnerable marginalised, or historically marginalised, sectors of society. The geographic scope of the project included ve provinces in South Africa, namely the Eastern Cape, Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo, and Western Cape. By September 2017, 1061 cases had been documented, 945 of which were retained for analysis. In this research report, we re ect on factors that enabled or hampered data gathering using the Hate Crimes Monitoring Form; we report the key ndings from the longitudinal study; and we make recommenda ons based on these ndings.

Between January 2013 and February 2017, more than 150 individual volunteers or members of sta represen ng at least 85 organisa ons were trained in the use of the Monitoring Form for the purpose of gathering data about the types of hate crimes that are being perpetrated in South Africa and the impact thereof on our society. This training drive resulted in the successful uptake of the Monitoring Form in a few organisa ons which are now able to monitor and record hate crimes within their cons tuencies. However the majority of service providers were unable to integrate the use of the Form into their opera ons, resul ng in recording far fewer cases than expected and the skewing of the data towards only a few vulnerable sectors. Challenges in the data gathering process were categorised broadly as ins tu onal (rela ng to case intake procedures and organisa onal capacity restric ons); individual (rela ng to the willingness of par cipants to disclose informa on); and instrumental (rela ng to di cul es experienced in the use of the Form itself).

Nonetheless useful informa on emerged from the analysis of the available data and we were able to highlight a number of per nent ndings. Key among these ndings is that prejudice is rife in our communi es across all socio-economic levels and that it facilitates discrimina on and ul mately the dehumanisa on that preludes and accompanies hate crime.