In 2007-2008 the ESPRIT Lab will be undertaking primary research into the issue of Racism and will be developing social policy analysis and recommendations on race-based hate crimes.

Racism is a specific form of discrimination usually based on skin colour or membership of a minority ethnic group. It's a system of group dominance. This system is both structural and ideological. That is, it embodies political, economic, and socio-cultural structures of inequality. It involves processes and practices of exclusion, oppression and marginalisation, as well as stereotypes and symbols required by these structures and processes.

Hate crimes are offences motivated by hatred or prejudice towards particular social groups. Offences include verbal and physical abuse, assaults, criminal damage, vandalism, hate mail and violence and threats of violence. Hate crimes pose a serious social problem that scholars and policymakers have argued is, in many ways, more threatening to civil society than other types of crimes. Hate crimes are random in that perpetrators select their victims based on bias not against that individual but against a whole group with which that individual is associated.