What is hate crime?
A hate crime is any behaviour that someone thinks was caused by hostility, prejudice or hatred of their:
- disability, including physical impairments, mental health problems, learning disabilities, hearing and visual impairments
- gender identity (people who identify as a man, woman, non-binary, trans or prefer to self-describe)
- race, skin colour, nationality, ethnicity or heritage
- religion, faith or belief, including people without a religious belief
- sexual orientation (people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or heterosexual).
Anyone can be a victim of hate crime if they are targeted because of who they are, their friends or family or even who the perpetrator thinks they are.
Hate crime can include:
- name calling or verbal abuse
- graffiti or abusive writing
- damage to property
- threats or intimidation
- bullying or harassment
- physical attacks or violence, including sexual violence, arson and murder.
Why should I report hate crime?
- By reporting hate crime, you can get the support you may need and help ensure offenders are brought to justice and can’t do the same to other people.
- By reporting incidents, you’ll enable organisations like the police, local councils and housing associations to build up patterns of behaviour locally, and highlight areas of concern within your community.
- By reporting what’s happened to you, you may also prevent these incidents from happening to someone else.
What can I do if I’ve been a victim or witness of hate crime?
- Report it to the police – hate crime is a criminal offence
In an emergency please call 999. You can report hate crime to your local police force either by telephone or by visiting any police station. In some areas you can also report hate crime online via Stop Hate UK www.stophateuk.org
If you don’t want to talk to the police or fill in the reporting forms, you can report a hate crime by calling Crimestoppers on 0800 555111 or www.crimestoppers-uk.org You don’t have to give your name and it’s free to call.
What you say is confidential but it’s difficult to fully investigate and act on an incident without your details.
- Report it to Riverside Please contact us if you’ve been affected by hate crime. Our tenants are responsible for ensuring they, their household and visitors don’t harass others.
If you report a hate incident to us we will ask for the details and discuss any immediate action that needs to be taken. If you want us to investigate we’ll interview you to get all the details and then agree an ‘action plan’. We’ll need to collect evidence to help us decide what to do and we may ask you to report the incident to the police. We may work with them to resolve the problem or leave it with them to work with you. We may interview other witnesses.
Our investigation may take a few days or a few weeks, but we’ll keep you informed as we go. We’ll then decide what action, if any, we can take to stop the problem, based on whether anyone has breached the terms of their tenancy agreement.
We’ll let you know our decision and get your agreement to any action we want to take.
Eventually we’ll close your case. We hope this will be because the problem has been resolved. Sometimes there is not enough evidence to take any action and if this is the case we will discuss this with you.