This first week transitioning into the program has been a great one. The directors of the program are so helpful, intelligent, and accommodating. There are eight of us in the cohort, and we spent the first day participating in icebreakers and group activities to get to know each other better. All of our personalities blend so well!
We were given a rundown of the program, which is a three year research study surveying anti-Muslim sentiment and victimization within the South. My cohort is year two, and we will be analyzing the data from the survey that was recently distributed to Muslim populations within Arkansas, write a report, and present our findings on July 27th to the community of Little Rock.
As the week progressed, we participated in an activity where we looked up the FBI’s definition of hate crime laws, and then compared the state of Arkansas’s hate crime laws to the FBI’s, as well as our home state’s. I was appalled to discover that states are given the choice to choose which hate crimes are protected and which are not. I found that Florida does not protect gender or gender identity hate crime laws, and the statute for Arkansas was extremely vague, with the state protecting even less hate crimes than Florida.
Seeing states pick and choose which hate crimes they will uphold in a court was shocking. In addition to this, we learned of how severely underreported that hate crimes are due to police typically only reporting one crime, victim mistrust in law enforcement, and victims being unsure if what they experienced even counts as a hate crime. This makes our hate crime statistics fairly unreliable.
In addition to activities such as these, we also were given lectures on the biopsychosocial nature of criminal activity, learned of different aspects to Criminology, and did a deep dive of literature pertaining to hate crime victimization.
Every Thursday we have a social event, and the first week’s social was a private room in a coffeehouse!
All in all, the first week was incredible, and I am excited to delve into research as impactful as this.
(We had wifi issues for the first week, so I am catching up on week one, which started June 5th. )
HSF House Blogs 