Counterterrorism: Accounting for the role of Prejudiced Violence in Policy Response

Countries such as Canada and the UK are facing a growing problem of hate crime, as visible minorities increasingly find themselves vulnerable to incidents of prejudice- motivated violence. Statistics Canada data demonstrates that police reported 1,409 hate crimes in Canada in 2016.1 According to Canadian police intelligence, hate crimes specifically targeting Muslims saw a 253 per cent increase between 2012 and 2015, reflecting a rise from 45 incidents to 159 incidents of hate crime.2 Meanwhile, the British Home Office has itself reported that police nationally recorded 80,393 offences during 2016 and 2017 where one or more hate crime strands were believed to be a probable factor.3 Additionally, Tel MAMA, a British national project measuring anti-Muslim incidents, indicated a 200 per cent rise in offline related hate crime. 4 As a result of these numbers, counterterrorism agencies in Canadian and British governments are now increasingly being called to answer critical questions concerning how social structures such as systemic racism and Islamophobia can contribute to hate crime, of whether a connection between hate crime and terrorism exists, and of what government agencies engaged in counterterrorism are doing to prevent hate crime. Such questions notably fall under an overarching umbrella of even broader questions of why violence conducted with hateful intentions is not universally perceived as constituting ‘terrorism’, and how counterterrorism policy and discussion should evolve in order to improve its effectiveness