Terrorism and hate crimes as speech acts

I used to be a bit puzzled at the ideas of terrorism and hate crimes as specific criminal offences. After all, weren’t acts of violence already illegal? Why did we need additional charges on top of whatever criminal act was committed? Just because someone’s motive is political and not financial or personal or delusional shouldn’t magically transform something into terrorism, and as for hate crimes, is it better to kill someone you don’t hate? It didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Until I thought about it.

But first, let’s talk about an important limit to freedom of speech. If I tell you to give me your money or I’ll shoot you, that’s certainly a speech act, but it’s also a use of violence, even if I never actually shoot you. Indeed, if my threat persuades you to give me your money and I don’t need to follow through, it’s a successful use of violence. This is why we have laws against such behaviour, and why these laws pass constitutional muster even though they put a constraint on what you can and can’t say.

I don’t think laws against uttering threats are terribly controversial. Even strong advocates for freedom of speech usually accept that this kind speech is quite rightly criminalized. And that makes sense from a liberty perspective; after all, coercive violence or the threat thereof is antithetical to actual liberty, whether that coercion is coming from the state or some random thug. If you want people to be as free as possible, then you should be willing to accept constraints on the freedom to coerce people.

And that, ultimately, is why terrorism and hate crimes are and should be separate charges above and beyond any criminal charges for the actual acts of violence themselves. The thing to understand about terrorism is that it’s not just an act of violence; it’s also a speech act, in the sense that it’s meant to send a message, and that message is one of coercive violence. I mean, it’s right there in the name: terrorism. The people killed or hurt in a terror attack are victims of the attack, but they’re not the primary targets of the terrorism itself. The terrorist doesn’t care if the direct victims are terrified or not; the goal is to terrorize people who weren’t victims of the initial attack. In other words, terrorism is a coercive threat of (further) violence. It’s like if I shoot the person next to you before demanding your wallet, just to make sure you know I’m serious with my threat. Yes, they’re the victim of the shooting, but you’re the victim of the coercive threat. So there are two separate and distinct crimes here, the act of violence and the implied/explicit threat of further violence.

Hate crimes follow the same basic principle. The only real difference is that terrorism’s coercive threat is typically aimed at the population at large, whereas a hate crime is aimed at an identifiable subset of the community. Beating up someone you hate as an individual doesn’t really send a coercive message to anyone else; beating up someone because they’re a member of a particular group does.