New victimisations and the inclusion of the non-ideal victim into the criminal justice process

Although the concept of hate crime and hate crime laws is contested, hate crime ‘has become embedded within law, criminal justice systems, academia, politics and society’ (Corteen, 2014: 175). Hate crime legislation was introduced in the UK and the US in the 1980s and 1990s. Contemporarily, in some quarters, female sex workers have been included in criminal justice hate crime policy and practice (Campbell and Stoops, 2010; College of Policing, 2014; Campbell, 2015). Legislative hate crime measures enable certain members of some identifiable groups to draw on the violences of the law and/or the violences of the criminal justice process. This is because hate crime legislation encourages and facilitates the infliction of harsher punishments in cases of crimes motivated by hate, bias or prejudice; it ‘creates a sentencing enhancement to already-existing criminal statutes’ (Contreras, 2016: 182). The recognition of the victimisation of female sex workers does not enable the violences of the law to be triggered in that it does not enable tougher sentences. However, hate crime laws and hate crime policy and practice are symbolically important in the messages that they convey to perpetrators, victims, institutions and society (Dixon and Gadd, 2006; Mason, 2013). They strongly censure crimes and victimisation motivated by bias and/or hatred and they acknowledge the actual, and signal, harms experienced by the victim and the group to which they belong (Dixon and Gadd, 2006; OSCE and ODIHR, 2009; Mason, 2013). Finally, they observe and express that such victims warrant protection and redress from the criminal justice system and access to victim services (OSCE and ODIHR, 2009; Mason, 2013). All of which have significant implications for criminal justice responses to perpetrators and victims – in this case, female sex workers and ‘their’ victimisers. Christie (1986: 18) asserts that ‘being a victim is not a thing’ or ‘an objective phenomenon’; rather, ‘victims’ are socially constructed. In this ongoing process, victims’ characteristics and their ostensive culpability or otherwise are significant.