Report Religious Hate Crimes

Hate crime, also known as bias crime, has been defined by the Department of Justice's Community Relations Service (CRS) as :

A criminal offense committed against a person or property which is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender's bias against a race, religion, ethnic/national origin, or sexual orientation group.

"A hate crime is officially defined as illegal activity that is motivated by perceptions of difference in race, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation (McDevitt & Levin, 1993; "Hate Crime Statistics Act," 1992). Disability status was recently added as a category to the list of motivating characteristics for bias-motivated activity (Wolfe, 1995). Many national groups are pushing to get gender included on this list (Angelari, 1994; Copeland & Wolf, 1991). Bias-motivated activity can be directed against persons, families, groups or organizations. Sometimes these crimes may not involve any interpersonal contact, but instead involve destroying or defacing property. For example, swastikas may be painted on a synagogue, or a cross may be burned on someone's lawn. Most perpetrators of hate activity see their behavior as acceptable given that the victim(s) belong to a socially disadvantaged or despised group. Many hate crimes are similar to acts of individual discrimination that have occurred for centuries in this country except that these incidents violate newly written law in reference to the offender's motivation." The Program for Research on Black Americans

There are those sorts of hate crimes, and then there is hate harassment, which is not persecutable by law in most cases and can include catcalls on the street, being disowned by your family, having your job made increasingly hellish till you quit on your own, or other non-persecutable incidents as long as they are directly related to your religion/sexual orientation/gender identity/race/etc.

If you've had any of the above-described experiences due to your religion, and you're sure it was due to your religious beliefs, please fill out the form below so we can begin keeping track of a range of hate crimes and harassment rarely accepted in courts and by the government. Afterwards, you can read about others' experiences, and see a pie chart tracking the hate crimes everyone has entered so far.

Have any of the below happened to you because of your religious orientation? (If more than one applies, please fill this form in once for each incident; it cannot handle multiple options yet!)

Physical assault

On-the-job verbal harassment

Loss of custody

Rejection/disownment by family members

Fired because of religion

Censored in some way: web page content, school paper, article in newspaper, class sings Christmas carols and you're not allowed to sing Pagan ones....

Media smears/stereotyping of non-mainstream religions (like the Heavens' Gate=pagan stories or Dr. Laura's pagan-bashing)

Comments, description of incident:

Would you like to see the current survey results?

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