Introduction

One of the lasting implications from decades of public and political debate on the meaning, application and impact of a multicultural population is the assumption that the younger generation have fully embraced the ‘multicultural ideology’. To Berry (2006: 728), multicultural ideology is ‘the general and fundamental view that cultural diversity is good for a society and for its individual members’. Since the disturbances in Bradford, Burnley, Leeds and Oldham in 2001, involving young people from different ethnic and religious backgrounds, there has been a growing concern that such a view is naïve and underplays the lived reality of a multicultural society. One cannot fully understand how young people come to understand and engage with ethnic and religious difference and diversity without exploring how they actually interact with their surroundings on a daily basis. It is through this methodology that research, policy and practice can achieve a more ‘real’ approach to understanding and dealing with social and community cohesion. As Navak (2003: 178) explains, when it comes to exploring the barriers to social cohesion and cross-cultural relationships, we ‘need to engage more closely with lived experience and the changing cultural and material geographies of young lives’.

Although using the notion of ‘everyday multiculturalism’ has come to feature more readily in academic research (as seen in Colombo and Semi, 2007; Wise, 2007; Harris, 2009), it has yet to be adopted as a lens in which to assess the underlying motivations of hate crime perpetration. It could be argued that racist and religiously motivated hate incidents and crimes are ‘motivated by intolerance between communities in close proximity to each other’ (Valentine, 2008: 328). By engaging with young people and therefore learning the ways in which they negotiate and interpret ethnic and religious diversity, we can begin to build a theoretical explanation, rooted in empirical data, of hate crime motivation and causation. The importance of addressing the challenges and complexities of everyday multiculturalism cannot be overstated, as Banks (2004: 291) suggests: