Informative Speech: Hate Crimes

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Introduction:

Hate crimes are an age old evil that are still haunting the modern society and have plagued the United States of America for years despite measures such as the Hate crime prevention Act which have been put in place to curb these crimes. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) report shows that hate crimes have remained steady over the past three years with 6,628 hate crime incidences based on biases and prejudice reported in 2010 (FBI Report, 2011). A person need not do anything to experience hate crimes, hate crimes can occur to anybody based on who they are and the likelihood that another person may be biased against specific characteristics of group within which this person belongs. This paper provides insight into the prevalence of hate crimes, profile of hate crime offenders and biases which motivate these crimes in the U.S. and recommends ways of reducing the occurrence of hate crimes.

What hate crime entails:

Hate crime encompasses committing a malicious act against a person, group or property because of the bias against their race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, disability, religion or nationality. They are often acts forceful violence or threats on a particular group or person because the perpetrator of the crime disagrees or does not understand the person's affiliations. Prevalence of hate crimes are very high through out all states in the United States. In the latest data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) report for 2010, hate crimes generally decreased across most victim categories, though crimes targeting individual persons rose to 61.5% in 2010 from 60.4% in 2009 (FBI Report, 2011).

Profile of the typical individual who commits hate crime:

Most hate crimes are often perpetrated by individuals rather than by groups, and over recent years a consistent though incomplete profile of the typical perpetrator has emerged: Mostly the hate crime offenders are young between the ages of 16-25, white males who normally do not come from an especially impoverished background and do not belong to organized hate groups. They also ...