A cartography of hatred
A research study by MEP Maite Pagazaurtundúa
📥 You can read and download the book in this link
“A cartography of hatred” is a research project spanning more than 2 years on hate-related and discriminatory incidents and crimes that have taken place in Europe, driven by the Ciudadanos MEP Maite Pagazaurtundua alongside her Office in the European Parliament and working with various experts. It looks at events from 2015 to midway through 2020 in six EU countries: Spain, Germany, France, Italy, Hungary and Poland, which amass a reasonable part of the European population from different geographic and cultural outlooks.
Pagazaurtundua is Vice-President of the European Parliament Committee of Civil Liberties, where she works intensely on the growing issue of the proliferation of hate speech and crimes. This project works from this concern to analyse the phenomenon to be able to direct policies that will curb it and from the lack of homogeneous, comparable data.
This is an initial approach to draw attention to speech and crimes that cause severe damage to each victim, irreversible in the case of murder victims and that encourage polarisation, normalisation of hostility towards anyone who thinks differently, that is in no way harmless and is weakening democracy.
The book offers analysis on what hate is, its roots from a psychological and anthropological point of view, its manifestations and key concepts, exploring social media as new platforms for hate and how they are regulated in Europe, among other content. Furthermore, it compiles and classifies the data obtained and offers a portrait of each country, working from a database of around 80,000 impact items.
This research, based on collection of 80,000 data items, goes into particular detail on tens of specific cases, giving full names when available, and includes the list of the 87 identified mortal victims of hate, mostly due to racism and xenophobia, and of the 310 victims of terrorism, the ultimate expression of hate, to bring them all out into the open, for the sake of their dignity.
AN INVISIBLE REALITY: THE ‘DARK FIGURES’ OF CRIME
Nine out of ten victims of hate-motivated or discriminatory attacks in Europe do not report it, according to data from the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights in 2017. Either they do not acknowledge that they are victims, or they believe that there is no point in reporting it. This is what the French call the ‘chiffres noires’, the dark figures of crime, the gap between acts of discrimination that are reported and how many actually take place. If it is not reported, there is no sentencing, and this fuels impunity.
This is what is happening in Europe and throughout the world: hate crimes are on the up, alongside intolerance concerning anyone who is different or simply anyone who does not think or act like us, but only a few incidents appear in official statistics. Consequently, the report combines official data, data from civil society and an own research work on what are known as off-the-radar crimes. Why these three sources?
There are forms of intolerance such as racist, xenophobic, religious and political intolerance that develop from prejudice into hate killings or even setting up terrorist groups. However, there are also less conscious forms of prejudice concerning human dignity: disability, appearance, age, social vulnerability or poverty, that also activate contempt and hate, but that rarely lead to setting up organised groups for an attack. The latter are less visible and are compiled as ‘Off the radar’.
