After the 2016 EU referendum there was a spike in hate crime, this spike has been said to be connected with the EU referendum by many officials and also by news articles. Hate crime is any criminal offence against a person because of their race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or gender identity. Some of the criminal offences that could occur are verbal abuse, threats, harassment, assault or damage to property.

So when we talk about hate crime those are the sort of things going on and increasing over the years. Statics show that race and religion have been increasing the most out of the five main areas of hate crime over the years. There are also statics which show that because of the EU referendum hate crime has increased.

A man named Daniel Devine wrote an article which contains graphs showing the daily hate crime that there was during the EU referendum. Those graphs show an increase at the start of the referendum and towards day 591, there also is a steady but high level of hate crime in between those days. In the article it is pointed out that during the months of June and July there are already quite high rates of hate crime however towards the bottom of the article there was a part saying “the referendum was associated with a statistically significant rise in hate crime” – Daniel Devine (2018) LSE Blog.

This is only one source which outlines the point that the EU referendum is linked to the increase of hate crime that we have been seeing for a while now. There is also a news article which is written by the guardian called “Lasting rise in hate crime after EU referendum, figures show”.

In this article there is a bar chart which shows that there was a fairly high increase in hate crime two weeks and six weeks after the EU referendum. These figures from the bar chart were put together by the police according to the article.

Towards the bottom of the article there is a quote that says “There was a spike in crime after 23 June.” - Amber Rudd, the home secretary.

If increases after the EU referendum were high then who’s to say that after/if the UK leaves the EU that there won’t be a huge increase in hate crime.

We don’t know what will happen after Brexit because all we can do it speculate from the statics shown from after the EU referendum however what we can do is make sure that if the numbers for hate crimes increase more, that the number of reports for hate crimes increase more as well.

There are so many organizations which are there for victims of hate crimes to go to and report what has happened to them. A few websites for these organizations are: • http://www.stophateuk.org/tag/brexit/ • https://www.lgbt.cusu.cam.ac.uk/resources/trans/tackling-transphobia/ • https://www.gov.uk/report-hate-crime • https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/law-and-courts/discrimination/hate-crime/disability-hate-crime/