Survey suggests hate crimes more widespread than believed
A new survey suggests that hate crimes and hate incidents in Quebec are far more widespread than previously believed — about 50 times more — with very few of them ever reported to police.
The first of its kind in the province, the survey of close to 2,000 people concludes that 0.7 per cent of adults — roughly 46,000 people — said they were victims of hate crimes between 2014 and 2017, and 2.9 per cent (or 191,000 people) said they were victims of hate incidents.
That contrasts with Quebec police statistics compiled by Statistics Canada, which suggest there were 855 hate crimes reported in the province over those three years.
“There’s a huge discrepancy between these results and official statistics,” said Benjamin Ducol, the research director at the Centre for the Prevention of Radicalization Leading to Violence, which commissioned the survey. “We know hate crimes and incidents exist, but this shows us they are virtually invisible.”
The survey, conducted for the CPRLV by Vox Pop Labs — the same polling firm behind the Vote Compass — asked 1,843 respondents across Quebec if they had ever been victims or witnesses of hate crimes or incidents. Hate incidents were defined as actions that show hatred toward an identifiable group and affect a person’s sense of security, without being a criminal offence.
Twenty-five respondents across Quebec said they had been victims of hate crimes, and shared further information about the nature of the crime:
13 were victims of threat or ■ incitement of violence;
15 were victims of harassment; ■
nine were victims of physical ■ violence;
11 received online threats or ■ incitement to violence.
They also revealed the motives behind the crimes: The most common were ethnicity (in seven cases) religion (five), and sexual orientation (five).
Given the very small sample size of the victims, some of the results cannot be extrapolated to represent the whole Quebec population, Ducol notes. The CPRLV is still working on its report on hate crimes in Quebec, and these results, gathered between June and September 2017, are raw.
But the survey provides a profile of the crimes and the perpetrators that is nevertheless revealing.
The most common place for hate crimes to occur was at or near one’s home, in a public place, or on social media.
In 12 cases, the perpetrator was a stranger, while in five cases it was a neighbour.
In 10 cases, there was only one perpetrator; in six, there were more than five.
Online hate crimes accounted for about 20 per cent of the total — which coincides with what Montreal police are finding, since they began officially keeping track of online hate crimes as a separate category in April.
But it’s the answers to the questions about how victims and witnesses
of hate crimes reacted after the fact that are of greatest concern, Ducol said.
Only five of 25 victims of crime reported it to the police. Eleven spoke about it with loved ones, and six kept it to themselves. (Statistics Canada, in its bulletin on hate crimes in 2016, estimated that two thirds of hate crimes go unreported to police.)
Asked how they felt after the crime, 14 said they were angry, 11 said they felt vulnerable, and four said they were vengeful, among other possible answers. Ten said the crime made them want to not leave the house.
“(The CPRLV) is particularly concerned by people who say they are angry and vulnerable. That’s where radicalization might begin. This can be fertile ground for radicalization,” Ducol said. “To see that when people are victims of hate crimes they become angry and avoid places or whole neighbourhoods. That’s also a problem for public safety and for the ‘vivre ensemble’ (social cohesion). They turn in on themselves.”
Among witnesses, only four out of 47 witnesses reported the crime to the police, due largely to the bystander effect, Ducol said, adding that perhaps there should be other ways to report hate incidents, besides going to the police.
Ducol sees the problem as a puzzle. There are the lowball police statistics, then there are those kept by the various communities with different degrees of accuracy, from the Jewish community, which encourages its members to report crimes to the police — especially after an event like the Oct. 27 shooting in Pittsburgh — to the LGBTQ+ community, where certain members, for example transgender people, have had negative experiences with police, Ducol said.
The survey suggests, however, that people across regions, religions, age groups and gender believe it’s an important issue that requires the attention of various authorities.
Asked whether the Quebec government should be more active in preventing hate crimes, 63 per cent said yes. The same number said the municipal governments of Montreal and Quebec City should also be more active.
“We all have part of the puzzle but we never put it together,” Ducol said, adding the CPRLV is in the process of consulting with 30 community organizations to work together on this. “When you add it all up, it touches a lot of people, and it’s normal that a lot of people say we need to do more.”