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4.2.2.1 Hate Crime as an Explicit Part of Organizations’ Agenda
Organizations representing the LGBT community
Similar to their counterparts in Poland, organizations representing the LGBT community in Germany are among the NGOs that consciously and overtly use and promote the term »hate crime« and a victim-centered perspective on various forms of violence.
According to our survey, associations working on behalf of lesbian/bisexual women and transgender persons tend to have a capacious understanding of violence and oppression, since this group experiences various forms of victimization: widespread discrimination and hostility in both public and family life, sexual assaults by acquaintances, unprovoked physical altercations and domestic violence in samegender relationships. These organizations often try to also highlight the particularly difficult situation of lesbian immigrant women and lesbians of color, who are usually subject to multiple forms of violence, discrimination and stigmatization from mainstream society and their own communities because of ethnic origin, religion, sexual orientation, skin color and gender. (1) Lesbian Counseling Services (Lesbenberatung e.V.) has been running a psycho-social center in Berlin since 1981, providing professional assistance and advice to lesbian, bisexual women and girls as well as for transsexual and transgender people. According to this association, »violence comprises all forms of coercion and constraints—physical, verbal, mental or economic—that attack an individual’s right to self-determination.«
However, this well-established and experienced NGO also sees the necessity in distinguishing between different forms of discrimination and violence, for example, general hostility, cases of domestic violence and incidents of homophobic violence. The term »hate crime« is reserved in their classification system for incidents of »violence against lesbians, committed by offenders not known or barely known to the victims.« These hate crimes are divided up in physical, psychological and sexualized forms of violence; mobbing, stalking and damage of property are further categories used to classify different forms of harassment (see Chapter 4.2.3.1).
MANEO, a Berlin-based project that has been running an emergency hotline and advise/counseling center since 1993 for gay men affected by homophobic assaults, discusses the difficulty in distinguishing bias-motivated crimes from other acts of violence at length in its various publications. MANEO regards any violence directed against individuals based on their alleged or real sexual orientation as a hate crime, just like any other expression of intolerance:
»These acts of violence do not only have negative consequences for the individual victims severely affected physically, mentally and emotionally. They are an attack on the whole identity of a person and by this, they are directed against all members of the group who share the same characteristics and [sexual] orientation as the victim.« (2)
In MANEO’s most recent report Experiences of Violence by Gay and Bisexual Adolescents and Men in Germany, the author states that more »adequate and standardized registration criteria are needed […] that are also applicable in practice« with reference to the insufficient official registration and monitoring system for homophobic assaults in Germany. (3) At the same time, it concludes that all surveys and empirical studies on hate crimes must address: 1) the problem that there are no absolutely reliable and objective indicators available for the assessment; and 2) how to factor in subjective perceptions and interpretations of the victims groups and individuals affected. »Finally, it’s incumbent upon the respondents [and victims affected] to classify experiences of violence as homophobic hate crimes.« (4)
Even though MANEO understands the complex individual and social repercussions of homophobic crime, the organization still relies on legal categories in its reports and surveys of homophobic incidents to distinguish between different forms of violence experienced by gay men: abuse and threats, insults, coercion, damage to property, theft, robbery and muggings, attempted bodily injuries as well as less severe forms of battery and aggravated assaults (see Chapter 4.2.3.1).
Support Organizations for Victims of Right-wing Violence
The CIVITAS projects—and some informal groups linked to them such as Counseling Service for Victims of Right-wing Violence (Beratung für Opfer rechter Gewalt, BOrG) in Strausberg, Bernau and other cities — also belong to a group of NGOs that operate with a rather broad and reflective understanding of hate crimes in the German context, even if the term as such is hardly used by them. Due to the nature of CIVITAS projects and their assigned tasks by government programs (see Chapter 4.2.4.1), their main focus is on »right-wing acts of violence« or »rightwing motivated violent offenses.« These are also the dominant terms used in their publications and statistics, even though they also list and deal with incidents that could more precisely be categorized as hate crimes. This is because these constitute bias-motivated crimes, but they do not necessarily have an organized political background, which the use of the adjective »right-wing« might commonly suggest.
Similar to feminist and LGBT organizations’ pioneering role in the field of sexist and homophobic offenses, the CIVITAS projects must be also credited with having introduced the principle of a victim-centered approach into professional discourses and official programs against racism and right-wing violence. By taking into account the perceptions of hate crime victims in their assessment of reported offenses, they fulfill an important advocacy function and offer a vital alternative source of information. The experiences of individuals and communities directly affected by right-wing violence and related attacks are these organizations’ most important source of information. As one representative of the association Opferperspektive points out:
»We, as NGOs, have a much closer relationship and better access to the victims than state institutions. As an important part of our conceptual framework and mission, we feel committed to the perspective of the victims. If they are convinced that the background of an attack was racist or politically motivated, we usually support their position. In this sense, we have more leeway than the police.« (5)
When the eight victim support organizations in the new federal states started their work in 2001, the CIVITAS program did not provide any operational definition of hate crimes; it only identified the primary task for the funded projects as »confronting right-wing extremist criminal offenses and violent acts.« (6) According to our interview partners, the victim support organizations themselves created their own operational definition over time through a common quality standards process. In the CIVITAS projects’ first years of existence (2001-2003), two approaches dominated their work: one approach centering on violence with an anti-racist background, which had closer ties to victim groups such as refugees and migrants; the other with an anti-Fascist background, which focused more on anti-Fascist activists and members of left-wing/alternative youth milieus. As a result, the incidents that the CIVITAS projects handled in the beginning more closely reflected their involvement in certain political movements and social/geographic environments than their activities today. Over the years, however, the NGOs started to reevaluate and professionalize their approach by focusing more on the motivation of the offense, a criterion also used by the police today when assessing attacks and offenses in the categories »right-wing« or »xenophobic/anti-Semitic.« At the same time, there were further convergences with respect to the understanding and registering of hate crimes, like for example, by concentrating on physical forms of violence. As one of our interview partners explains:
»The more we entered into a critical dialogue with state institutions (especially with law enforcement agencies) about the incidents we included in our reports and statistics, the more we were forced to develop precise criteria for the assessment and classification of these offenses.« (7)
As outlined by Opferperspektive, the following six aspects/criteria can be understood as the joint guidelines for the CIVITAS projects and their classification of right-wing hate crimes: (8)
• The act is a criminal offense, either an attempted or an actual act of bodily injury, a willful damage to property or an arson attack, aiming to cause harm to specific groups of persons. Acts of coercion and verbal threats with severe consequences for the victims should be also considered right-wing hate crimes; simple insults should be excluded.
• A right-wing motive for the offense is attributed to the perpetrator by the victim, by a third person or by the police.
• The circumstances of the offense (certain statements by the perpetrator, his/ her ideology or attachment to the right-wing scene) provide further evidence for a right-wing background and motivation.
• Right-wing motivations reveal particular ideologies of hatred and »concepts of the enemy«: racism and xenophobia, hatred towards left-leaning individuals or punks, anti-Semitism, social Darwinism with regard to homeless, marginalized or disabled persons and homophobia.
• Relevant are the character and traits the offender ascribes to the victim, and not the real characteristics of the victim. A xenophobic attack can be also directed against a person, who was just mistakenly perceived by the perpetrator as having a migration background.
• In cases where there is also evidence for an »apolitical« background of the attack, the offense should be considered as having a right-wing motivation if racist or right-wing ideology had an escalating effect.
Borderline and Disputed Cases
Like any other institution or NGO active in counseling and victim assistance or monitoring of hate crimes, the CIVITAS projects are also confronted with incidents, circumstances and reports by victims that are labeled by some of our interview partners as »borderline cases.« Some of them refer to experiences with multi-dimensional forms of victimization, discrimination and legal problems. This is especially true in the case of refugees or migrants who become victims of hate crimes and who then seek additional assistance for other issues that are not directly related to the incident, like in earlier cases of defamation or discrimination. Other borderline cases present the challenge of distinguishing common criminal offenses, such as theft and robbery, from hate crimes because motives might overlap or are difficult to detect. Further typical borderline cases our interviewees identified are incidents of verbal threats (including hate speech on the Internet), cases of coercion and attempted bodily harm. All of these could lead to serious constraints (e.g. the ability to move freely about an area without fear) and/or the traumatization of individuals affected; however, such incidents are usually difficult to investigate and/or are not taken very seriously by law enforcement officers or the public. Other types of borderline cases include damages to property or the desecration of Jewish graveyards, which may have severe impacts on affected communities.
Some of the interviewed organizations are trying to solve this dilemma by distinguishing between a narrower operational definition of right-wing hate crimes used in their public reports and statistics and a more open internal approach applied to their counseling and victim assistance activities.
»Right-wing violence does not necessarily have anything to do with a clear-cut world view. And sometimes we do not have the means and resources to find out the perpetrator’s ideological background. But in most cases we have dealt with, there were some indications of racist or right-wing motivations. Over the years, however, incidents reported to us have become more diverse, including some borderline cases, where we and the victims had difficulties classifying the incident. That usually did not pose a problem for the counseling part of our work. We did not turn people away when the attack they experienced did not fit nicely into our categories, but it led to discussions about whether we should add these cases to our chronology of right-wing violence that we publish regularly.« (9)
NGOs working in rural areas with an aggressive and openly right-wing scene seem to have fewer borderline cases. Nevertheless, almost all interview partners express the common concern about the official handling of attacks on left-wing/alternative youth or anti-Fascist activists. In some regions in East Germany, this constitutes the largest hate crime victim group (see Chapter 4.2.3.3). Most of the interviewees complained about the ongoing reluctance of local and regional police departments to acknowledge the political background of these offenses, which often get mistakenly categorized as clashes or conflicts between members of violence-prone youth scenes or are simply not registered at all.
Police Brutality and Mistreatment as a Particular Form of Hate Crime
ReachOut, an organization in Berlin included in our interviews with victim support centers, has an even broader approach to hate crimes, in that they also address the problem of police violence and brutality that especially affects people of color, non-ethnic Germans, migrants and refugees. Together with the Anti-discrimination Office in Berlin (Anti-Diskriminierungsbüro Berlin) and the Legal Team in Berlin (Ermittlungsausschuss), ReachOut established the Campaign for the Victims of Racist Police Violence (Kampagne für Opfer rassistischer Polizeigewalt Berlin), which includes a legal aid fund, strategies for raising awareness about hate crimes and victim counseling. In their chronology that catalogues incidents of police brutality from the years 2000 to 2007, they list more than 40 cases. (10) The authors refer to repeated abuse of authority by law enforcements in their relations with minority groups, often taking the form of physical abuse or racist language, the latter of which is difficult for victims to prove. This report also underlines structural prejudices within the legal system like racial profiling, a policy that negatively impacts the morale and ability of migrants to feel at home in Germany. Empirical research in this area supports ReachOut’s assertion that:
»In cases where police officers openly express xenophobic attitudes, e.g. by making discriminatory remarks with respect to the skin color, the outfit or the nationality of the victim, it is rather easy to detect a racist background. However, in many cases the existing bias and prejudice structure becomes only indirectly apparent in their particular treatment of the victim.« (11)
ReachOut and other civil rights organizations have also repeatedly criticized different forms of racial profiling in Berlin and Germany in general, as it disproportionately affects a high concentration of migrants and people of color and is often used to legitimize acts of harassment and police brutality if those affected try to protest or defy these controls. Measures taken by police that involve racial profiling include, but are not limited to: identity checks on non-suspects, dragnet checks and the classification of some inner city areas in Berlin as particularly dangerous.
1. See, for example, the project LesMigraS, which is a Europe-wide network of lesbian migrants, black lesbians, lesbian and migrants’ projects and other individuals, coordinated by the association Lesbian Counseling Service in Berlin: http://www.LesMigraS.de.
2. MANEO 2007. Gewalterfahrungen von schwulen und bisexuellen Jugendlichen und Männern in Deutschland: Ergebnisse der MANEO-Umfrage 2006/2007, Berlin, p. 10.
3. Ibid., p. 12.
4. Ibid.; p. 15.
5. Interview with Opferperspektive (Dominique John).
6. Ibid.
7. Interview with Opferperspektive.
8. Wendel, Kay 2005. Rechte Gewalt: Definitionen und Erfassungskriterien, Opferperspektive e.V, Potsdam, p. 3.
9. Interview with AMAL.
10. The results of their joint campaign were discussed in the Berlin House of Representatives (Abgeordnetenhaus von Berlin), where the Superintendent of the Berlin Police was one of several individuals who responded to the accusations.
11. Kampagne für Opfer rassistisch motivierter Gewalt 2007. Chronik rassistisch motivierter Polizeivorfälle für Berlin in den Jahren 2000 bis 2007, Berlin, p. 3.
(OPP)
