Familiar faces: hate relationships and the everyday-ness of hate perpetration

Drawing on research in North East England, this chapter explores everyday experiences of hate relationships, that is, hate which is enduring, often considered ‘low level’, and concentrated in and around the home and neighbourhood. In so doing, this work demonstrates why attention to perpetrators as familiar might be significant. Ongoing and proximate harms by neighbours means hate is experienced as frequent, unpredictable and sometimes inescapable. The chapter goes on to discuss the profile of perpetrators with attention drawn to the group-based nature of perpetration, the transmission of behaviours beyond individual perpetrators and the social-spatial contexts through which hate relationships emerge. Whilst emphasis is placed on how dominant power relations give control over neighbourhoods to perpetrators, the chapter also highlights the need to do more to combat exclusionary behaviours in ways which acknowledge challenges that transcend the victim/perpetrator binary.