ABSTRACT
Bowling (1999) suggests that academic and professional interest in issues of race and racism in relation to crime (and therefore, by analogy, interest in hate crime) can be traced back to the early 1980s in the UK through two key events. The first was the urban riots of 1981, most notably in Brixton, south London, which saw the emergence of race, prejudice and discrimination as significant social issues. The second was the re-emergence of victimology in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a significant social science in its own right, and the subsequent development of social surveys that for the first time began to provide a wealth of data relating to the plight of the victim, and in particular the disproportionate victimisation of certain minority groups.
