BU Research Blog

Christmas came early for Jane Healy as her publication “Thinking outside the box: Intersectionality as a hate crime research framework” was published on 19 December in the conference journal for the British Society of Criminology.  Jane’s article was based on her paper presentation at last summer’s BSC annual international conference which was held at the University of Lincoln.

The conference theme was ‘Public Criminologies’ and the article draws upon Jane’s previous PhD research, her ongoing work on hate crime in the Dorset community and her undergraduate teaching for sociology and criminology students on intersectional criminology; demonstrating Fusion in action!

The article challenges the current single-strand approach to hate crime in the UK and uses case study examples to illustrate how applying intersectional analysis to hate crimes contributes to a greater understanding of the nature of victims’ experiences. This comes at a time when the Law Commission is reviewing current hate crime legislation which she argues is hierarchical and fails to provide equal protection across hate crime strands.

The full article is available Open Access at: https://www.britsoccrim.org/pbcc2019/

Further findings from Jane’s PhD are discussed in an article published by Disability & Society in June last year, entitled “‘It spreads like a creeping disease’: experiences of victims of disability hate crime in austerity Britain” which is available here:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09687599.2019.1624151

Dr Jane Healy is Deputy Head of the Department of Social Sciences and Social Work, in the Faculty of Health and Social Sciences.