Hawzah News Agency - Could we have predicted the terror attacks at Masjid Al Noor and the Linwood Islamic Centre on March 15 last year .

 Authorities don’t maintain a register of hate crimes (defined as verbal and physical assaults motivated by hatred of the victim’s group identity). Nor does legal system recognise hate crime as a separate offence.

Amending the Human Rights Act 1993 has now become an election issue, with Prime Minister and Labor leader Jacinda Ardern saying it is her party’s intention to revise the law to make it illegal to abuse or threaten people because of their religious identity.

This would add to the provisions against intimidation along ethnic, national and racial lines already covered by the law.

But ACT Party leader David Seymour has said any such move would threaten New Zealanders’ freedom of expression. He called proposed hate speech laws “divisive and dangerous”.

A preliminary register of hate crimes

The lack of data means we have no way of knowing if hate crimes against minorities are becoming more common. And we can’t tell if they are more prevalent in certain regions of New Zealand or if particular groups are targeted more than others.

We also can’t determine the relationship between hate crimes and major events such as the Christchurch terrorist attacks or COVID-19. This means we can’t predict when and where identity-related crime might take place, or act to prevent it.

To address this gap and begin to answer these questions, we, along with students from the University of Auckland, have searched media reports for any verbal or physical assaults motivated by the perpetrator’s hatred of the victim’s ethnic or religious identity. Hate crimes also include targeting people because of their gender or sexual identity, but we have focused on ethnicity and religion.

This is far from the most ideal way to collect data, but it is a first step in gaining a more systematic view of identity crime in New Zealand. The result is a preliminary dataset of hate crime incidents in this country between 2013 and August 2020.

Our data demonstrate a steady if slight increase in hate crimes until 2019 when the number of incidents rose sharply. Here, we focus on the relationship between the Christchurch terrorist attacks and verbal and physical hate crimes against Muslims.