Understanding the Criminal Justice and Health Care Needs of Latinx Victims of Hate Crime and Bias Victimization

There are significant gaps in our knowledge of the impact of experiencing bias motivated crime among the Latinx community, particularly on service seeking and health outcomes. Latinxs are at a heightened risk for discrimination and trauma related to bias motivated crime based on their actual or perceived identity. Research is needed to better understand the role of cultural factors (e.g., immigrant/generational status, acculturation) in mediating or moderating the relationship between bias events and important outcomes including service utilization, health care access, and physical and mental health concerns. This multidisciplinary, cross-sectional, mixed-methods research project will accomplish four main goals. First, the project will evaluate the rate of bias events, hate crimes, and lifetime victimization amongst Latinxs. Second, the project will examine the role of cultural factors (acculturation, acculturative stress, etc.) on the relationship between bias events and physical and mental health outcomes. Third, the project will examine responses to bias events among Latinx adults via formal and informal help-seeking, health service utilization, and resistance strategies. Finally, this project will capture how hate and bias incidents impact people within the community using novel measurement approaches to capture the aspect of bias events as “message” offenses. Additionally, we will collect qualitative data to explore the mechanisms through which bias events impact access to services such as health care and the criminal justice system as well as the individual and community impacts of hate crime incidents. The project will collect data from 900 Latinx adults across three communities in the US as well as 45 qualitative interviews from individuals who experienced bias victimization within the sample. Community-based sampling is better able to capture individuals particularly vulnerable to bias victimization experiences and compliments research based on national samples. The project is to be conducted by a multidisciplinary team that includes criminal justice scholars, psychologists, and public health experts that specialize in victimization, health, and working with the Latinx community. Collectively this will provide significant gains in knowledge on the impact of bias victimization against Latinxs on service utilization, physical and mental health, individual and community consequences, as well as the role cultural factors play in these relationship. The results have the potential to inform how bias victimization is associated with help-seeking, health care use, and health outcomes. Additionally, it will provide information on a number of potential intervention strategies to improve Latinx adults’ access to both criminal justice and health care resources.

Note: This project contains a research and/or development component, as defined in applicable law," and complies with Part 200 Uniform Requirements - 2 CFR  200.210(a)(14). CA/NCF