Federal report finds 1-in-10 US hate crimes occur at schools
About 1-in-10 hate crimes in the United States occurred at schools — from preschool through college — in 2022, according to a new report from the FBI.
The report, published Monday, found as many as 10 percent of all reported hate crime offenses in 2022 took place at schools, equal to 1,336 incidents out of the total 13,346 reported hate crime offenses that year.
Schools came in as the third most frequent setting for hate crimes, while residences or homes and roadways or alleys were first and second, respectively, in the five-year period between 2018 and 2022, the FBI stated. Residences and homes made up between 25.2 percent and 29.1 percent of all reported hate crime offenses in the five-year period, while highway/road/alley comprised between 16.1 percent and 18.8 percent of hate crime offenses.
Breaking it down by school levels, the FBI found preschool to 12th grade experienced the most hate crime incidents between 2018 and 2022, followed by college/university settings — including higher education institutes, community colleges and trade schools.
During those five years, over 30 percent of juvenile victims of hate crimes experienced the incident at school, while nearly 36 percent of juvenile offenders of hate crimes committed the offense at school, the report found, using crime data obtained by the FBI.
The FBI defines a hate crime as “a committed criminal offense which is motivated in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias(es) against a race/ethnicity/ancestry, religion, sexual orientation, disability, gender, or gender identity.”
Black students were targeted the most by hate crimes between 2018 through 2022, with 1,690 hate crime offensives reported among the demographic group, followed by Jewish students, with 845 offensives and LGBTQ students, with 342 offenses, the report stated.
Reported hate crime incidents and related offenses as a whole increased between 2018 and 2022, jumping from about 8,492 incidents in 2018 to 13,345 incidents in 2022, the FBI found. The year of 2020 was not far behind, with 12,895 reported offenses.
Intimidation was the most frequent form of hate crime at schools, followed by simple assault and aggravated assault, respectively, the report found.
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