Four things we learned from Stats Can’s hate crime report

Hate crimes are down, but crimes motivated by sexual orientation are not

Statistics Canada’s report on police-reported hate crimes, released on June 9, 2015, revealed good news: reported hate crimes overall are down. There was a drop of 253 crimes between 2012 and 2013.

However, crimes motivated by sexual orientation remained steady — there were 186 reported in 2013, compared to 185 in 2012. As a result, they represent a larger total percentage of all hate crimes in 2013 — 16 percent.

Crimes motivated by sexual orientation are more likely to be violent

About two-thirds of all hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation from 2010 to 2013 were violent offences. Serious assaults accounted for 11 percent of reported incidents.

And compared to other groups in 2013, lesbian, gay and bisexual people were more likely to experience violence. Of the hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation, 66 percent involved violence, while 44 percent of those motivated by race and ethnicity involved violence. In comparison, 18 percent of hate crimes motivated by religion were violent.

However, discrimination often targets those who have intersecting identities. The report doesn’t make clear what overlap there was, if any.

Men are primarily the targets — and the aggressors

Just over 80 percent of the victims in hate crimes reported between 2010 and 2013 were identified as men, while over 90 percent of the accused were also men.

The report isn’t clear if the sex or gender being reported is the self-identified gender of the victims or of the accused. And hate crimes motivated by sex were down to nine in 2013 from ten in 2012 — they account for one percent of all hate crimes total in both years.

The victims and the accused are also young

Almost 50 percent of the victims of hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation were under 25 years old, while over 60 percent of the accused were under 25.

However, the number of youth accused in hate crimes has gone down since last year. The Statistics Canada report notes that this is primarily because of a large decrease in mischief-related crimes.