ABSTRACT
The fact that hate crime is often referred to as a message crime speaks to the importance of the audiences of the act. The intent of bias-motivated violence is to speak to not just the immediate victims of the act. Rather, the aim is much broader than that. Hate crime speaks to multiple communities not least of which are those from which both the perpetrator and the victim are drawn, as well as to all members of the civic culture in question. Based on research with multiple and diverse groups, this chapter outlines the consequences of hate crime for this array of audiences.
