Time to confront the hatred

On 22 October, a man was found dead, savagely beaten and badly burned, on an industrial estate in the small Ayrshire town of Cumnock. The victim, Stuart Walker, was 28 years old and well-liked in Cumnock, where he worked as a barman. He was also gay. But although the police have been reluctant to classify his murder as a homophobic attack, that has nonetheless become the prevailing narrative in this awful case.

This is not the first brutal attack on a gay man in Scotland. It is only the most recent, and among the most horrific. But whether or not Mr Walker’s murder was driven by prejudice, the case has highlighted the lack of urgency with which policymakers in Scotland are confronting the issue of hate crime here.

It is now over a year since the implementation of the Offences Aggravated by Prejudice (Scotland) Act, which put crimes motivated by sexual orientation on the same judicial footing as those driven by racial hatred. When the law entered force in March 2010, the Scottish Government and opposition parties vowed that hate crimes - whether motivated by race, religion or sexuality - would not be tolerated in Scotland. That is a fine sentiment, but the government must act decisively to enforce the law. Crown Office statistics show a five-fold increase in crimes against LGBT people over a five-year period up to 2010, and The Herald cite a 2010 survey suggesting that two-thirds of Edinburgh’s LGBT community have been the victims of homophobic verbal abuse.

That is a staggering statistic. The need for social inclusion, and the right of every person to feel safe in their community, regardless of their ethnic background, religious belief or sexual orientation, is not a matter of debate: it is a moral imperative. Scotland has an ugly history of prejudice, from the continuing blight of sectarianism to the tragic memory of Michael Doran, the gay man beaten to death in a 1995 ‘gay bashing’ in a Glasgow Park. But this is not what defines Scotland, nor should it be. Attacks like these are more reminiscent of a medieval society than the modern, cosmopolitan Scotland we live in. The government must address the fact of hate crime from a judicial standpoint, but it must also confront the backwards social attitudes which cause these horrible attacks. If it does not, then how can the 300,000 Scots who identify as LGBT feel that their government cares about them at all?