How did levels of UK hate crime change during and after Covid-19?

Levels of ethnic, racial and sexual harassment in the UK declined during the pandemic. This was largely driven by the reduction of time that people spent in public places due to lockdowns and other social restrictions.

Threatening events, such as pandemics or terrorist attacks, can trigger an increase in racist and discriminatory behaviour. In an earlier Economics Observatory article, written at the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis, we summarised previous research that shows this link. Here, we analyse recent data from the UK to address whether hate crime rose during the pandemic.

What does research tell us?

A long tradition of research on racist attitudes and discriminatory practices has shown that threatening events – such as terrorist attacks, acute economic shocks and outbreaks of infectious diseases – are associated with greater hostility among racial and ethnic majority group members (‘in-groups’) towards immigrants or ethnic minorities (‘out-groups’) – see Broom and Broom, 2017, on Australian data; Kim et al, 2016, on US data; and Johnston and Lordan, 2016 on UK data.

In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, police data and reports from non-governmental organisations revealed dramatic increases in reporting of hate crime against East Asian minorities (see Tessler et al, 2020 and BBC News, 2020, for the United States; and Vancouver Sun, 2020, for Canada).

Police forces across the UK received reports of 267 incidents of hate crime from Chinese minorities during the first quarter of 2020, compared with 375 incidents during the entire year in 2019 (Sky News, 2020).

Experimental research also showed that evoking Covid-19 – by asking individuals to answer a series of questions about the virus – increased the likelihood that experiment participants would choose to grant immigrants lower sums of money in a help or harm task (Bartos et al, 2020, for the Czech Republic).

These reports fit theoretical expectations that during events that heighten the salience of ethnic identities, prejudicial attitudes towards out-group members will grow.

This work primarily draws from data gathered at the onset of the pandemic, before lockdown restrictions were put in place. So while there was an increased risk arising from heightened prejudices, the decline in time spent in public spaces meant that there were fewer ‘opportunities’ for hate crime to occur.

The lockdowns may therefore have offset any increase in hate crime that might have been expected.

Further, the onset of the pandemic in the spring of 2020 was followed by the powerful Black Lives Matter social movement, which brought increased attention (and in some cases, actions against) discriminatory behaviours.

It therefore remains an open question whether ethnic and racial harassment would increase, decrease or remain stable through the pandemic.

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