Executive summary and recommendations[1]

Facing All the Facts builds on the work of the Facing Facts project, established since 2011, to make hate crime visible in Europe. In parallel to the development and delivery of the online training courses for police and civil society organisations,[2] the Facing All the Facts project conducted a participatory action-research methodology across 6 EU Member States that:

  • Tested ways to improve understandings of reporting and recording of hate crime;
  • Supported shared conversations between the CSOs and public authority actors at the heart of national ‘systems’ of hate crime reporting and recording;
  • Created new relationships and collaborations between those actors; and
  • Attempted to shift those systems towards a victims-centred and action-oriented approach.

Starting with the first recommendation below, this section highlights the project research’s key findings, and proposes recommendations based on the tools, mechanisms and concepts that were identified, consolidated and developed over the course of three years (2016-2019).

A victim and outcome-focused framework for improving recording and increasing reporting

Simply increasing the numbers of reported and recorded hate crime doesn’t necessarily ensure that victims and communities get what they really need. Urgent questions about what actually motivates people to report and what should drive professionals and policy makers to improve recording were raised throughout this research. As a result, the project endeavoured to articulate an overarching victim and outcome-focused framework for increasing reporting and improving recording:

 

 

The overarching purpose of all efforts to increase reporting and improve recording should be to reduce risk, increase access to support and increase access to justice for victims and communities.

This framework is intuitive and simple to grasp. But it is difficult to implement due to the well-documented barriers found across Europe: discriminatory attitudes and actions that discourage victims to report; fear; disconnected technology and policy frameworks that prevent effective recording and information-sharing; and a lack of knowledge, skills and resources to identify and effectively record and act on hate crimes.

In fact, to secure this victim-focused approach, there needs to be a paradigm shift in how institutions see themselves, their partners and their role in preventing and responding to hate crime. Our research findings point to how this shift might best be supported.

Our methodology was designed to enable stakeholders to systematically experiment to identify problems and test possible solutions. Our recommendations aim to be realistic and to complement and develop existing efforts wherever possible.

Recommendations revolve around four areas:

  1. Making national hate crime reporting, recording and data collection systems visible
  2. Understanding and using the data that we have
  3. Building capacity of the various stakeholders involved in national systems
  4. Continuing to experiment and learn

 

[1] Recommendations for national stakeholders can be found in national reports.

[2] Facing Facts Online! (2019).