ABSTRACT

Welcome to The Routledge International Handbook on Hate Crime. For us as editors, the construction of this book has been a challenging but rewarding experience. The idea for a Handbook of this nature was conceived in the preparations for an academic seminar hosted by the UK Ministry of Justice on the 11th of May, 2011. At that time it was clear to us that a significant amount of very good work was being undertaken by academics and practitioners around the UK, but that it was largely disparate and, curiously, in many cases was not widely known about by others similarly working in the field of hate crime. In an effort to remedy this the academic seminar, hosted in London, brought together many leading hate crime scholars to share their work, their ideas and their visions for the future direction of hate crime research, policy and practice. It seemed to us that capturing this vast array of expertise in the form of a book was an appropriate and useful activity to undertake.