Alarming Rise In Hate Crimes Within U.S. Schools: Report Reveals Disturbing Trends From 2018 To 2022

According to the FBI, 1 in 10 hate crimes that occur in America occur in schools. Most of the attacks targeted Black students.

According to a report released on Jan. 29 by the FBI, 1 in 10 hate crimes that take place in America occur in schools. In addition to this, most of the attacks targeted Black students, followed by Jewish and LGBTQ+ students. The report notes that the categories presented are not mutually exclusive; hate crime attacks can intersect with all these identifiers.

Schools were the third highest site for hate crimes, trailing residences and roads, but as Reuters notes, this is still significant because most schools were closed during the 2020 and 2021 school year because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The report, which covers 2018-2022, illuminates a general rise in hate crime incidents from 8,500 in the first year to over 13,500 by 2022. The numbers in schools are even more alarming, going from 700 in 2018 to 1,336 in 2022; the figure in 2022 made up 10% of all hate crimes for that year, a shocking proportion.

Though hate crime statistics are often unreliable because they are often underreported, the numbers give a good snapshot of when incidents occur and how frequently they occur. In this context, most hate crimes in schools are concentrated in the K-12 grade levels, accounting for over half of the total reported incidents in schools. The report is detailed, breaking down the types of crimes against persons and property, and the most common crimes in those categories, respectively, were intimidation and vandalism, which often are interconnected. Vandalism can be, and usually is, used as a form of intimidation. Among ethnic groups, Black people dealt with by far the most attacks; between vandalism, simple assault, and intimidation, 1,600 attacks were recorded across all years of the report. By religion, Jews faced the most attacks across those same categories, totaling 727 attacks from 2018 to 2022.

Over the years covered in the report, attacks most frequently happened in schools during the fourth quarter or between October and December. On average, October contained the most attacks; around four attacks per day happened in that month. According to the report, the aim was to gain an understanding of the scope of hate crimes in the United States.

“For more than three decades, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program has collected and published data on hate crime incidents in accordance with the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990,” the report reads. “The FBI’s UCR Program defines 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. The goal of collecting data about these offenses is to better understand the scope of hate crime in our nation and the various facets of this unique crime phenomenon.”