By IANS,
Toronto : South Asians, Blacks and homosexuals are the main victims of racially motivated hate crimes in Canada, according to a study by Statistics Canada.
The study, `Hate Crime in Canada’ released Monday, said of all the hate crimes, 60 percent were motivated by race and ethnicity, 25 percent by religion and 10 percent by gender or sexual orientation of the victims.
Further, half of all hate-motivated crimes were property-related offences while one-third involved violent offences such as assault, the study said.
Blacks bore the brunt of half of all racially motivated hate crimes, according to the study. South Asians were the target of 13 percent of racially motivated hate crimes. At 12 percent, the Arabs and West Asians (read Muslims) were the third largest victim group.
Police-reported data provide details on the type of race, religion and sexual orientation of hate-motivated incidents. Among the 502 incidents motivated by race/ethnicity in 2006, half were targeted at Blacks, 13 percent at South Asians and 12 percent at Arabs or West Asians.
Jews were the major target of all hate crimes motivated by religion, accounting for almost two-thirds of religion-based incidents. Another 21 percent were targeted against Muslims and six percent against Catholics.
Though Canada is one of the few countries to legalise same-sex unions, homosexuals were the prime target of hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation.
Worse still, more than a half of attacks against gays were violent in nature, higher than the proportion of incidents motivated by race/ethnicity (38 percent) or religion (26 percent).
On the positive side, the study said, hate crimes accounted for just one percent of all kinds of crimes in Canada in 2006.