Hate violence is not a new phenomenon in the United States. Our history reveals a pattern of violence, brutality, and bigotry against those defined as "other." The campaign of genocide against native peoples is the prototype of American hate violence. In the first three hundred years of American history, hate violence was often institutionally organized and sanctioned. The government and its agents were the perpetrators. State violence was committed against Native Americans, captured and enslaved Africans, African Americans, workers, and citizens who protested against domestic and foreign policies. Hate violence, however, has also always been spontaneous and unorganized. Violence against women and gay and lesbian people has been documented since the earliest settlements and illuminates the central role of violence in American life. Women's diaries, newspaper accounts, and case records of social work agencies (which date as far back as 1870) chronicle the high incidence of rape, sexual abuse of children, and wife beating. Men were executed for sodomy as early as 1624. Lesbian women and gay men have, for three centuries, been subjected to many forms of institutional violence including forced psychiatric treatment, castration and clitoridectomy (the removal of the clitoris), felony imprisonment and fines, and discharge from the military (Herek 1999, p. 949).

Organized hate groups have played key roles in maintaining an environment of fear for minority Americans. The most well known organized hate group, the Ku Klux Klan, was organized in 1865 out of the resentment and hatred many white Southerners felt after the Civil War, and emancipated Africans were its principal targets. The KKK has been responsible for some of the most brutal violence in our history. It has used whips, dynamite, hanging, acid- burning, tar-and-feathering, torture, shooting,  stabbing, clubbing, firebranding, castration, and other forms of mutilation (Bullard 1988, p. 24). Between 1889 and 1941, 3,811 black people were lynched in the United States. In 198 1, Klansmen in Mobile, Alabama, stopped nineteen year old Michael Donald  as he was walking home from visiting relatives, cut his throat and hanged him from a limb in a residential neighborhood, because, as one of them put it, "they wanted to kill a black person" (Bullard 1988, p. 25). While the menace of the KKK has fluctuated over the years, it has never vanished. During the Civil Rights Movement, a particularly active time for the Klan, and up to the present, the Klan has developed ties, with a  number of hate groups, including the White Citizens Councils (organized to defy U.S. Supreme Court ordered desegregation), the Skinheads and the Aryan Nation and its various subsidiaries. The Christian Identity Movement, which includes the Order, the Covenant, the Sword, and the Ann of the Lord, seeks to unite religious people with the white supremacy movement (Ostling 1986, p. 74).

The Center for Democratic Renewal reports that gay people are now included with Jews and African Americans as the "favorite target for hate groups" (Herek 1989, p. 952). For example, a hate group called "Crusade Against Corruption" published a pamphlet entitled "Praise God for AIDS," which claimed that "AIDS is a racial disease of Jews and negroids that also exterminates sodomites." They called for the segregation of high risk AIDS groups  “so as to protect innocent white people from AIDS" (Herek 1989, p. 952). Similarly, the National States Rights Party's newspaper, Thunderbolt, in a front  page headline "Bisexuals Infect White Women with AIDS," claimed that "most bisexuals are Negroes who often seek affairs with White females' (Herek 1989, p. 952). Here the linkage between race-hate, gay-hate, and misogyny is evident. It is important to note that racism, anti-Semitism, and hatred of gay and lesbian people are not caused by Klan and neo-Nazi organizations; these groups merely attract individuals whose prejudice and bigotry have already developed.

The Incidence of Hate Violence
The latter part if the twentieth century has seen an alarming rise of individual acts of hate violence. While organized hate groups do advocate and promulgate violence, much, if not most, hate violence is not the work of people associated with organized hate groups. Singling out individuals for apparently random attack because of their sex, skin color, religion, presumed or known affectional identification, is a pattern of both historical and contemporary significance. Recent examples include cross burnings on the front lawns of African-American families; an attack on African Americans who moved into a predominately white neighborhoods in Philadelphia; continued attacks by neighborhood youths on families of Cambodian refugees who had to flee Brooklyn; the shootings of African American joggers; the beating to death of a Chinese American because he was presumed to be Japanese; the harassment of Laotian fishermen in Texas; the brutal attack on two men in Manhattan by a  group of knife and bat wielding teenage boys shouting "Homos!" and "Fags!"; the assault on three women in Portland, Maine, after their assailant yelled anti-lesbian epithets at them; the stalking of two lesbian women while camping in Pennsylvania, and the brutal murder of one of them; the gang rape with bottles, lighted matches, and other implements of a gay man who was repeatedly told, "this is what faggots deserve"; the stabbing to death of a heterosexual man in San Francisco because he was presumed to be gay; and the gang rapes of a female jogger in Central Park and a mentally handicapped teenage, in Glen Ridge, N.J. Unfortunately, the list goes on and on.
 

While no national data on the incidence of racial, ethnic, anti-Say and lesbian, and sexual violence exists, there is a remarkable and generally unchallenged consensus that hate violence is not only extensive but that it may well be increasing, both in incidence and in brutality (Hernandez 1990, p. 845-6; Finn and McNeil 1988, p. 2; Lutz 1987, p. I 1; Wexler and Marx 1996, p. 205). The data which support this view comes from a variety of sources, including twelve states who monitor hate crime statistics (in advance of the recent federal mandate to do so); hearings; reports from various municipalities; the FBI Uniform Crime Reports and the National Crime Survey data on rape; statistics collected by a number of concerned interest group, and the media. For example, the Anti- Defamation League of B’nai B’rith reports that anti- Semitism incidents, ranging from desecration to murder, reached their highest level in 1989 since the organization began collecting statistics eleven years ago (Toner 1990, p. A 16). The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) reports that the incidence of anti-gay violence and victimization reported to its Violence Project has risen steadily -an increase of 142 percent from 1985 to 1986 and an increase of 42 percent in 1987. In 1988, there were seventy 'gay-motivated' or 'gay-related' murders (Herek 1989, p. 950).

The Center for Democratic Renewal conducted a nation-wide study on racist violence and documented nearly 3,000 incidents of race hate-violence between 1980 and 1986 (Lutz 1987, p. 91). The study also revealed a notably high level of violence aimed at interracial couples (p. 13). The Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund reports a significant increase in hate crime, against Latinos (Hernandez 1990, p. 946). In 1988, thirty state attorneys general reported that 46 violence against individuals based on race is increasing (Hernandez 1990, p. 8). Despite the high incidence revealed by these varied sources, most also agree that there is considerable under reporting of hate violence. As with sexual violence, insensitivity and prejudice of officials, blaming the victim (especially true of women, gay men and lesbian women, who are often accused of 'flaunting' their sexuality), shame, fear of exposure, and fear that little or nothing will be done contribute to under reporting.

Finally, recent studies and reports suggest that the incidence of hate violence an college campuses is quite high. During the 1986-1987 academic year, the National Institute Against Prejudice and violence documented racist incidents on 130 college campuses (Farrell and Jones 1988, p. 214). However, most colleges and universities do not have adequate reporting procedures and this data is also seriously under representative of the actual incidence of campus hate violence.

The Roots of Hate Violence
Hate violence is neither accidental or coincidental. It is the result of acquired beliefs, stereotypes, expectations, and images that we have of ourselves  and others. These beliefs, etc. are called 'Ideology',.' An ideology is a system of beliefs about how things  are and how things should be. As such, an ideology is both descriptive and prescriptive. It helps us to process and evaluate information and events, to determine what is right or wrong, good or bad. It helps us locate and understand our place in a complex world.

Ideologies, commonly known as ‘isms’ address questions of social, economic, political, religious, and even scientific relations. The "isms" that are of primary concern in understanding the roots of hate violence are racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism. Each of these 'isms' is based on conceptualizations of superiority and inferiority. In racism, white people are defined as naturally superior to people of color-, in sexism, men are defined as superior to women; in classism, richer people considered superior to poorer people; and in heterosexism, heterosexual people are considered superior to homosexual or bisexual people. Within each “ism” is an elaborate network of beliefs and stereotypes that attempts to justify and maintain the dominance and privilege of the superior group. Dominance is maintained by an allocation of scarce resources (employment, education,  housing, health care, status, acceptance, etc.), which favors the  “superior” group. Indeed, members those groups defined as superior are taught to expect greater advantages and rewards than those who are defined as “inferior” and therefore less deserving.

Dominance is translated by the ideology(ies) into specific interests and privileges, which while  collectively defined (by race, sex, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation ) are manifested in individual expectations of resources and privileges. Harassing people of color who move into white middle-class neighborhoods and gay and lesbian people who demonstrate affection are examples of hate violence based on what the perpetrators of such violence often feel is a betrayal of what they were taught to expect about how the world is and should be. Because ideologies establish a framework for determining who is most and least deserving of opportunities for  success and fulfillment, economic conditions play a  key role in organizing hate and bigotry. Economic hardship is blamed on “reverse discrimination,” inflated welfare rolls, and unfair advantages 'given' to racial minorities and women by 'lowering standards' in the competition for fewer jobs and shrinking  resources. This 'is known as 'scapegoating'; a  process of placing blame for society's problems on people who are defined as inferior. Another striking example of scapegoating is the dramatic rise in anti- gay and lesbian violence since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. AIDS, however, is not the cause of such violence but rather the rationale used by bigots to justify their acts of hatred.

Dominance is also maintained through the threat of force and the use of actual violence against those defined as inferior. All systems of oppression employ violence and the threat of violence as an institutional mechanism for maintaining the interests and privileges of the “superior” group. Indeed, while there are differences in the manifestations of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and classism, the commonality that underlies these ideologies is force and its threat.  No aspect of well-being is more fundamental than  freedom from ideologically motivated and justified violence; that is, personal harm that is motivated by hatred and fear of one's ascribed characteristics (Sheffield 1987, p. 17 1). Richard Wright (I 945), in his autobiography Black Boy, makes explicit the fear and control of racial terrorism:

 The things that influenced my conduct as a  Negro did not have to happen to me directly. I  needed but to hear of them to feel their full effects in the deepest layers of !my consciousness. Indeed, the white brutality that I had not seen was a more effective  control of my behavior than that which I knew ... as long as it remained something terrible and yet remote, something whose horror and blood might descend upon me at any moment. I was compelled to give up my entire imagination over to it, an act which blocked the springs of thought and feelings in me (p. 190).

Sexual Terrorism
Violence against women constitutes a system of sexual terrorism - a system by which males frighten, and by frightening, dominate and control females (Sheffield 1987, pp. 171-189; Sheffield 1989, pp. 3- 19). Sexual terrorism is manifested through actual implied violence against all females, irrespective of race, class, physical or mental abilities, and sexual orientation, are potential victims at any age, at any time, any place. Sexual terrorism employs a variety of means: rape, battery, incestuous abuse, sexual abuse of children, sexual harassment pornography, prostitution and sexual slavery, and murder.

Pervasive sexual danger is a basic reality for American women. The level of violence against women is at an all-time high and many believe that it is increasing. Also, many acts of sexual violence are more severe and brutal than ever before. There is an. apparent increase in gang rapes, serial rapes, sexual torture, and sexual murder. Approximately 1,500 women are killed every year by husbands and lovers (Uniform Crime Reports 1987, p. I 1). Nine out of every ten females who are murdered are murdered by men (Uniform Crime Reports 1989, p. I 1). 'In 1990, more women were raped than in any year in United States history," according to research conducted for the U. S. Senate Judiciary Committee (Majority Staff Report 199 1, p. 1). The FBI reports that in 1990 12 rapes were committed every hour, one every five minutes, close to 300 per day (Majority Staff Report 199 1, p. 2). FBI data, however, does not reflect the actual incidence of rape due to the significant under reporting of this crime. Furthermore, the rape rate has increased four times faster than the overall crime rate during the last decade (Majority Staff Report 199 1, p. 4). Every 18 seconds a woman is beaten. An estimated 3 million to 4 million women a year are battered, largely by their husbands or men they know, (Rasky 1990, P. A19). Domestic violence is the single largest cause of injury to women in the U.S.; 22-35 percent of emergency room visits by women are for injuries caused by battering (Warshaw 1989, pp. 506-507). The March of Dimes (Brygger 1990, p. 1) reports that domestic violence is a major cause of birth defects in the U.S. Research indicates that there are nearly 38 million adults who have been sexually abused as children; 8 million who have been the victims of childhood incest (Crewsdon 1988, p. 8 1).

Violence and its corollary, fear, function to terrorize females and to maintain, the patriarchal definition of woman's subordinate place (Sheffield 1987, p. 17 1). How much do women worry about rape? According to Margaret T. Gorden and Stephanie Riger's (1989) study of female fear, about a third of women said they worry once a month about being raped --or more often; many said more than once a day. While they think about rape, they feel terrified and somewhat paralyzed. Another third of women indicated that the fear of rape is a 'part of the background, ' 'or one of those things that’s always there.' Another third said that they never worried about rape but admitted taking precautions, “sometimes elaborate ones,” to try to avoid being raped (pp. 21-22).

Women's attempts to avoid rape and other forms of sexual assault and intrusion take many forms. Women change/restrict their behavior, lifestyles, bodies, and appearances; they will pay high costs for housing, purchase and maintain cars in order to avoid public transportation, refuse employment in certain areas or at certain times -all in attempts to avoid sexual assault.  It is a system of sexual terrorism where unpredictable, indiscriminant, and arbitrary violence is an essential component of social control, these self- protective acts serve as ways for women to feel some measure of control over their lives. Adaptive behaviors are used by all victims of oppression and are functional, although not without cost, for ones psychological, if not physical, survival.

Not only are women's lives controlled by the threat or reality of men's sexual violence, but the research shows that for many women it's the men they know -those with whom they live, work, spend leisure time- who are the most likely to victimize them. A study of acquaintance rape on 32 college campuses revealed that 1 in 4 women were victims of rape or attempted rape; that 84 percent of those raped knew their attacker; and that 57 percent of the rapes occurred while on dates (Warshaw 1988, p.11). This reality, in large measure, sets sexual violence apart from other forms of hate violence. Victims of rare hate or religious or ethnic intolerance have the most to fear from strangers. While gay and lesbian youth are often subject to abuse in the home, the perpetrators of anti- lesbian and gay violence are also mostly strangers.

Violence against women by acquaintances or by strangers is an assertion of the power of males as well as the power of men as a class. In this way, the beliefs and attitudes which support male interests and privileges are reinforced and perpetuated in women's and men's daily lives. Furthermore, we live in a culture that celebrates aggressive masculinity and denigrates female sexuality. Female sexuality is defined as insatiable, lustful, even desirous of male aggressions. The pervasive patriarchal myth that 'all women secretly want to be raped' provides the lens through which women and girls are blamed for their victimization. This belief that women/girls are responsible for assaults committed against them is a primary reason for the low conviction rate of rapists (Stanko 1985; LaFree 1989).

Moreover, the image of the male as a warrior and the female as enemy is concretized in films, television, advertising, music, literature, and pornography. Every day and everywhere, in the most routine and mundane ways, women and female children are reminded visually and verbally that they are sexually objectified and are potential targets of violence. This commodification of women as sex is a multimillion dollar industry and further distinguishes sex hate from other forms of hate violence.

Sexuality does, however, play a role in other forms of hate violence. Sexual arrangements are socially constructed and are political in nature. They are often organized, imposed, propagandized, and enforced by a dominant group in order to further its aims, For example, the racist construction of the sexuality of Africans during slavery defined African men as sexual savages and particularly as rapists. This view provided the justification for lynchings, castration, and other brutal punishments designed to terrorize and control African men and the slave community as a whole. Similarly, African women were defined as sexual savages, as depraved, immoral, loose, available, and eager for sexual relations with any man. These constructions of the sexuality of enslaved Africans were translated into stereotypes that sexual violence as a hate crime is purposeful for the status quo, for it would be detrimental to the social order to define men's violence against women as a serious, hateful crime. The basic reality of sexual violence is that ordinary women are victims every day by ordinary men. In denying this, the law sets the stage for viewing other forms of hate violence as something committed by “extremists,” “irrational,” “socially maladjusted” - and not as a function of our shared political and cultural myths. Therefore, the basic social order will remain essentially unchallenged.