The Harms of Hate for Gypsies and Travellers: A Critical Hate Studies Perspective

Gypsies and Travellers have often been overlooked as victims of hate crime and discrimination. This book redresses that exclusion by shining a light on the harms of hate experienced by Gypsies and Travellers in the UK. In doing so James explores how hate permeates all aspects of their lives and identifies the hate crimes, incidents, and speech that they are subject to. It goes on to explore how hate against Gypsies and Travellers occurs as discrimination, social exclusion and criminalisation and how that hate is embedded within the language and practice of neoliberal capitalism. This book provides new insights to critical criminology and ways of understanding hate by using the critical hate studies perspective to gain a full appreciation of the harms of hate. As a consequence of this, the book is able to do justice to Gypsies' and Travellers' experiences of hate by extrapolating how harms manifest and the impact they have on Gypsies’ and Travellers’ social and personal identities. The book explains and acknowledges how hate harms imbue Gypsies' and Travellers' daily lives, including common events of serious abuse and assault, regular ill-treatment in provision of services, and everyday micro-aggressions. It argues hate experienced by Gypsies and Travellers can only be fully recognised through an analysis of the neoliberal capitalist context within which it occurs and the harmful subjective experience it engenders. The author’s expertise in this area, having carried out research with Gypsies and Travellers for 25 years, underpins the book with excellent empirical knowledge and research-informed discussion.