Hate crimes are becoming a significant criminological issue and a priority in many political agendas. One of the biggest problems is the low reporting rate to police all over countries. This article presents results of an online victimization survey conducted by the Spanish National Office against Hate Crimes in 2020-21. The study aims to understand underreporting in the Spanish context, which may be also useful to guide strategies to combat hate crimes with similar characteristics. In this study, we firstly found that only 10% of the victims have reported their crime to the criminal justice system, being therefore around 90% the black figure or base Spanish underreporting rate in hate crimes. Besides, we analysed if there were significant differences between reporting and non-reporting victims in sociodemographic characteristics and specific questions of the survey. Significant differences in the likelihood of reporting have been discovered in the level of education, employment status, having been the victim of a hate crime in the last five years, the relationship between perpetrator and victim, and the seriousness of the crime. With the findings we may understand better hate crimes and lead to better policy strategies to combat intolerance in democratic countries.
Gómez et al. (Sun,) studied this question.
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