Subculture Hate Crime

In Manchester, England, on April 8, 2013, a 14-year-old and a 44-year-old man repeatedly punched a 16-year-old boy in the face simply because of his emo appearance.  Luckily he was only injured, but Sophie Lancaster, was not so lucky in 2007 when she was murdered by a group of youths just for her gothic lifestyle.  As a result of Lancaster’s death, England created new hate crime policies inclusive to subculture lifestyles.

The United States is no stranger to hate crime.  Alternative lifestyles and counter-culture are no exceptions.   In 1997, in Texas, a punk was brutally murdered by jocks.  Starting with the earliest murder up to the present allows a historical perspective of how bigotry changes over time.  Before moving forward, it is important that the subcultures are defined.  These definitions are based on personal experience and general knowledge of the topics.  It is possible that more than one label could apply to a person.

Definitions

Emo:  Emo is short for emotional.  Emos prefer to express their emotions rather than bottling them up.  Behaviors:  Crying, being dramatic, wrist cutting (though not all do this).  Fashions:  Windblown hair over the eyes, mostly black clothing, thick black eyeliner; skinny jeans.  Music:  Dashboard Confessional, Taking Back Sunday, Hawthorne Heights, My Chemical Romance, Bullet for my Valentine, etc.

Goth:  Goth is about appreciating all things dark, fascination with the macabre.  Goths embrace their personal dark sides rather than denying them.  Behaviors:  Solitary walks, visiting graveyards, enjoying horror movies/books, making art, loitering at the mall.   Fashions:  All black clothing with some exceptions, corsetry, fishnet tights, leather/pleather garments, black makeup, platform boots, etc.  Some is historical clothing and punk fashion can be incorporated.  Music:  Bauhaus, Siouxie and the Banshees, The Cure, London After Midnight, The Cruxshadows, Voltaire, Ego Likeness, Rosetta Stone, etc.

Punk:  Punk is expressing your views and being yourself and not caring what other people think of you.  Behaviors:  Playing rock instruments, making art, skateboarding, protesting their political beliefs.  Fashions:  Dyed hair, Mohawks, spike studded clothing and jewelry, ripped jeans, leather jackets, fishnet tights, etc.  Music:  Ramones, Dropkick Murphys, Crass, Anti-Flag, etc.

Jock:  Jocks love to play sports.  They are athletic people.  Behaviors:  Playing sports – varsity or intramural, excelling in gym class, collecting sports paraphernalia.  Fashions:  Team uniform, regular clothes – jeans and shirts.  Music:  Queen (think “We are the Champions,”) contemporary rock; pop music.

Prep:  Preps are either scholarly, party-goers, or popular people.  They are generally happy, extroverted, and have conservative ideals.  Behaviors:  Partying, studying, socializing, playing sports and games.  Fashions:  Originally, preps dressed in business attire.  Modern preps wear Abercrombie & Fitch, Hollister, American Eagle, Aeropostale, Gap, etc.  Music:  Pop and rock music usually.

Hipster:  Hipsters like to have the latest gadgets but also appreciate vintage technology.  They enjoy little-known bands and dislike conformity and the mainstream.  Behaviors:  Collecting gadgets and antiques, watching old movies; being the first to follow a trend.  Fashions:  Thrift store clothes, large black rimmed glasses, etc.  Music:  Inde-music, bands that “you’ve never heard of.”

 

The Murder of a Punk in America

In 1997, in Armarillo, Texas, 19-year-old Brian Deneke, a punk, was murdered by Dustin Camp, 17, and his gang of jocks. The media later called them preps.  Leading up to the murder, Deneke and his punk friends were repeatedly assaulted by the football team at school and in public.  These jocks would call them fags.  Deneke’s group was resilient in spite of the constant attacks, and they continued living life as they wanted.  Deneke sported a blue Mohawk and many piercings.  He listened to Dropkick Murphys, Crass, Fifteen, and other punk rock bands.  He had a reputation for being a good person and loved animals.  His boss referred to him as “Sunshine.”  On December 12, 1997, the group of punks went to their favorite restaurant, the International House of Pancakes.  Outside the football team was waiting.  Brian walked out of the IHOP, and was immediately attacked.  The jocks pummeled, kicked, and jumped on Brian, who was curled up in a ball, especially toward the end.  Dustin Camp drove his Cadillac over Deneke’s curled up body.  He put the car in reverse and ran over Deneke again.  Before putting the car back into drive, Dustin lowered his window and bragged to a female classmate witnessing.  He smirked and clearly said, “I’m a ninja in my Caddy!”  Then he ran over Brian’s body again.  The jocks were cheering.  He fled the crime scene and later lied to police.

The defense attorney presented Camp as the All-American boy, and that being a punk/thug was a good reason to kill Deneke.  Camp’s statement was, “I was just going to knock him down with my car. I [sic] was icy on the ground [and] my car slid. And I guess he slipped and my car went over him.  …”  This basically means, I just wanted to hit him with my car, but I lost control of my car and accidentally hit him.  His mother, Debbie Camp, was proud of her son for “taking care of his friends,” since two of Deneke’s friends tried to defend him in the beginning of the 20 to 1 fight.

Camp was convicted of manslaughter and only received 10 years probation and a $10,000 fine.  In 2001, Camp was caught underage drinking, and spent the remainder of his term in prison.  On July 31, 2006, Camp was released on parole.  Texas is known for enthusiastically giving out the death penalty, but somehow spared Dustin Camp for playing high school football and looking “normal.”

Anti-Emo Bigotry

Even though the Texas murder took place 16 years ago, America has seen little change in terms of subculture based bigotry since the murder of Brian Deneke.  The only change is that the roles have been skewed.  The previously outcast punks, goths, and metalheads now bully emos.  Although there are countless examples of emo bashing, the following is a strong example.

A YouTube Channel, S.O.R.P., which is run by a punk, Zachary Byron Helm, displays two videos that entertain the violent ideation toward emos.  They were titled “Emo Assault Squadron,” (2006) and “Emo Assault Squadron 2” (2009).  The first video received 469,249 views with 4,204 likes and 822 dislikes.

In the video, Helm portrays himself as a punk police officer driving a refurbished hearse in persecutory pursuit of emos.  He is black clad with sunglasses, and a V-shaped mohawk.  He talks about emo as if it were an actual crime, even in jest.  He assumes he has the responsibility and authority to rid them in order to save the town.  He complains of the gender ambiguity of emo boys.  He implied it makes him question his sexual orientation, threatening his male ego.  He hunts down an emo kid, and attacks him, instructing his partner to give kidney punches.  At the end, he simulates an emo boy being curb-stomped.  The emo kid did absolutely nothing to offend the fake punk cops.  All the characters in the videos are fictional and no one is actually hurt, but he seems to endorse hate crime as a joke.  The once unpopular punks are shown preying on a less accepted group.

On a side note, no where on his official site tells what S.O.R.P. stands for.  I googled it and found, “Statement of Recommended Practice,” and “Sex Offender Registry Program.”  In the merchandise section of Helm’s website, he sells many S.O.R.P. items, including a T-shirt for Emo Assault Squadron, thus furthering the anti-emo agenda. 

Hipster Hate

Fast forwarding to the present, subculture bigotry continues.  Besides emos, hipsters are popularly hated because they are perceived as snobs.  From YouTube, MyBrainHumor’s two anti-hipster videos are chillingly similar to S.O.R.P.’s anti-emo videos.  They are titled, “Hipster Hunters,” (2011) and “Hipster Hunters Ep.2” (2013).  The first video received over 259,000 views with 3,645 likes and 112 dislikes.

In the first video, Carl and Travis portray themselves as professional hunters, garbed in cowboy hats; Western movie styled clothing.  They hunt for hipsters as if they were bears or deer.  They either shoot them dead or tag them to trace their migratory behavior later.  Tracking them is stalking the hipster’s Twitter account.  At the end, Travis is surrounded by hipsters, and he gets turned into a hipster as if it were a contagious disease.  This is very similar to Sage getting turned into an emo in “Emo Assault Squadron 2”  Except the emo was depicted as a zombie, rather than an animal, infecting people with his lifestyle.  Zach Helm shot his friend, Sage, out of mercy the same way zombie-bitten victims are killed in movies.  Both sets of videos dehumanize their targets.

In “Hipster Hunters Ep. 2,” instead of killing his friend, Carl takes him to the hospital.  Travis could not be cured, so Carl cared for him as if he were a mentally challenged person.  Throughout the episode Hipster-Travis seems like he has brain damage, but the show directly suggests that he is like a dog.  Carl puts him in a kennel and leads him on a leash in public.  He later gives his friend away to a Hipster Preserve where a cattle rancher can care for him.  At the end, Carl massacres a bunch of hipsters via gunfire and hatchet, then beating them.

Creating these videos are not crimes and are upheld by the US Constitution, however they are promoting hatred and joking about murder.  The makers of these videos may not truly hold bigoted views, but real bigots who are predisposed to committing hate crimes would sympathize with the videos, taking them seriously – and continuing to spread hatred to new sympathizers.  They make humor out of hatred.  Bigotry is not a crime, but it leads to crime.

These videos are recent, which shows that subculture bigotry is consistent over time.  Even before 1997, people were abused over lifestyles.  Nerds have been bashed at least since the 1950's or earlier.  Looking back at 2007, the most recent subculture based murder occurred, and the abusers thought they were funny too.

The Murder of a Gothic Woman in England

Across the Atlantic, a goth woman was murdered while protecting her goth boyfriend from their assailants on August 11, 2007.  Sophie Lancaster, 20, and Robert Maltby, 21, were in Stubbylee Park in Bacup, Lancashire, England.  They were talking with some friendly people when five teenage boys spontaneously attacked them.  The main attackers, Brendan Harris, 15, and Ryan Herbert, 16, were inebriated, which is a fact, not an excuse.  One pointed at Maltby, "Shall we batter him?"  Harris initiated the battering, punching Maltby in the face.  The abusers were laughing the whole time as they punched and kicked his head.  Lancaster held her boyfriend’s head in her lap, pleading them to stop.  Maltby was already unconscious at this point.  The gang then started kicking and stomping Lancaster as hard as they could, jumping up and down on her head.  She fell into a coma, just as Maltby did.  When the brutal incident finally ended, the attackers were gloating about their criminal acts to friends who were nearby, and even joked about stealing Maltby's cellphone.  One perpetrator used the cellphone to call the victims' mutual friend, Jonathan Smethurst, at 1:30am.  Smethurst texted back to make sure everything was okay.  At 2:10am, Smethurst received a call from Maltby's phone and instead of hearing his friend's voice, he heard one of self-incrimination:  "Have you got two friends down in Bacup Park?  ...  There's two moshers here and they look like they're dead." [sic].

A 15-year-old witness called 999, and paramedics came.  Police swarmed the park area.  The victims were transferred between different hospitals.  Maltby awoke from his coma, but Lancaster did not.  She died 13 days later on August 24, 2007.  Maltby endured long term injuries, including memory loss.  He did not make a full recovery even after one year, and suffered depression.  The loss of Sophie was heartbreaking.  They were together for almost three years, lived together, and were possibly considering marriage.  Maltby was an art student, and Lancaster was an English major.  She loved to read, and sometimes finished a book within a day.  Maltby later mentioned that he wished his girlfriend ran away to safety, and that he would rather have been the one to die.

Both Harris and Herbert came from broken homes and had alcohol problems.  Herbert never met his father, and his mother worked in retail.  Herbert's mother was in denial of her son's crime, but Harris's mother laughed and joked with her son during their first police interview.  Harris told the police that his motive to committing the murder and Maltby’s brutality was being “drunk and showing off.”  The Lancashire police condemned both the attackers and the parents for letting their kids to go out drinking late at night.  England’s courts were not sympathetic with the juvenile murderers either.  Harris and Herbert were found guilty of murder and given life sentences.  The three other youths, Joseph Hulme (16), Danny Hulme (15), and Daniel Mallett (17), were found guilty of grievous bodily harm with sentences ranging from four to six years.

England amended their hate crime laws to include subcultures and murder specifically for a victim’s appearance.  Although the laws were tougher, two people still beat a teenager for being emo last April.

Analysis

Court Reactions: Texas vs. England

The Texas courts sided with the perpetrator, Dustin Camp, due to Texas’s ideals and norms.  During the court proceedings, one of Deneke’s friends asked if the situation were reversed, would a punk receive the death penalty for murdering a normal looking person.  The immediate answer was yes.  In England, the courts recognized that prejudice as a motive to kill is fundamentally wrong.  There is a decade’s difference between those cases, though Texas has remained predominantly conservative since 1997.  Still, after Deneke’s murder, his family, friends, and other sympathetic people saw the evil in Camp’s actions.  Schools in the area created programs to combat stereotypes.

Parental Reactions

Notice both Camp’s parents and Harris’s mother were approving of their children’s criminality.  Debbie Camp prided in her son’s bravery while enduring prison, and in the murder case she was proud that her baby boy was defending his friends from the thug-punks.  Mrs. Harris laughed along with her son when faced with the police showing her evidence, most likely the hospital pictures.  In the recent emo hate crime, the attackers are unnamed, but the ages were 14 and 44.  Was the 44-year-old man the father of the juvenile delinquent partner?  If so, this is another example of a parent approving of hate crime.

Compare and Contrast: The Two Gangs

Both Deneke’s and Lancaster’s attackers were groups of people.  Both gangs were “normal” looking.  Both hysterically cheered and congratulated themselves for their evil deeds.  In contrast, there were socioeconomic differences between the groups.  Deneke’s assailants were middle class from cookie-cutter shaped homes and families.  They were racially homogenous, telling from their football picture.  Harris and Herbert were from lower middle class homes and they had alcohol problems.  Herbert was semi-literate, telling by his grammar mistakes.

Subculture Bigotry can go both ways.

Subculture based bigotry seems to have shifted over time.  In Texas, 1997, the jocks were admired for their athletic abilities and favored by the teachers.  Punks were considered the “thugs” as the media described them during the trials.  Punks were thought of as the bad guys and more likely to commit crimes.  Over the 2000’s, goths and punks became more accepted and understood.  Stereotypes were made to be broken.  However when emo music became popular, and the kids expressed the fashion statements with it, Goths, punks, and metal music enthusiasts hated the new genre and the people who liked it.  Since emos sometimes look similar to goths, they can be confused.  Even though emo music started in the 1980’s, the long-standing subcultures felt that their “scenes” were being threatened by the prevalence of emo in the media.  Moreover they perceived emos to be too effeminate and “faggy” similar to how Dustin Camp’s football team felt about punks.  In the jocks’ minds, punks were not manly.  They were not the ideal; rather strange.  Masculinity was expressed through sports which the punks did not do.  Jocks also hated their crappy, punk music, just like how some punks, goths, and metalheads complain about emo music.

The same groups of people who used to be rejected are now the ones doing the rejecting.  It does not matter if it is peers, parents or society – if someone was oppressed for belonging to a subculture but demeans another person’s freedom to belong to another subculture, it is wrong.  The person is no better than their previous oppressors.  If Brian Deneke and Sophie Lancaster were alive today, they would probably hate these hypocrites.  Even if the goth or punk was not previously abused, they should still be aware that others were before.  It is important to remember these horrendous murders to stop people from continuing the hatred under a different guise.

Bigotry is getting lamer.

In a world where there are truly ignoble people such as pedophiles, human traffickers, bombers, cold-blooded killers, child pornographers, animal rapists, elder rapists, scam artists, corporate criminals, and other felons, one would think there would be a greater cause for hatred.  Instead subculture bigots are against people who dress differently.  Parents made their kids dress up for special occasions in itchy, “nice” clothes.  Later in life, these same parents fight with their teens over what to wear, trying to make their children look “normal” and “neat.”  Bigots are mad about clothes that are not even on their own bodies, and no one is forcing them to wear.

A person should be free to like or dislike whatever they want, but wanting to take away that same freedom for others is weak.  So what if someone likes a band that you do not like?  Who cares if someone wants the new iPhone and a rotatory phone?  Who cares about someone else's hairstyle?  Who cares if someone likes black roses and teardrops?  People complain that emos are whiny, drama queens who cry and complain about having typical teenage problems.  Newsflash, that’s called adolescence.  It is possible that these subcultured people are going through difficult times, or maybe not.  They may just like the fashions and music.  If you do not know someone, you do not know what they are going through.

Bigotry has sunken to a new low.  Without racism, sexism, and xenophobia, prejudiced people are scavenging for ways to hate.  Though, it is arguably as stupid to hate someone for the color of their skin as hating someone for the color of their clothes.  Another form of hatred that goes back to the beginning of human civilization is religious bigotry.  This prejudice is not even appearance based.  This is hating someone for having a different thought about God, the afterlife, or the theory of how the universe was created.  It is a hatred that attacks a person’s right to think.  Bashing handicaps is pathetic because instead of being grateful for one’s health and well-being, it is hating someone for being less fortunate.  Hatred based on sexual orientation is more complicated due to religion.  It lends the false fear that the person is preying on anyone of the same gender, consenting or not.  All it takes is the realization that they do not have those intentions.  Heterosexuals are not all sexual predators, so why would that apply to homosexuals or bisexuals?  Also more complicated is the hatred against immigrants.  Bigots argue that they are taking our jobs, however they are still living, breathing people with thoughts and feelings, and they do not deserve to be abused or killed.

Instead of feeling the job market is being threatened, punks and goths feel their music scenes are being threatened by emos and more derogatorily, posers, people who do not meet their personal standards of the subcultures.  Some metalheads feel that hipsters and emos are infesting nightclubs, simply because those subcultures are too popular.  Jocks and “preps” feel their environments are being threatened by punks and goths, due to them being stereotyped as criminals and that they perceive them as trashy.  Some black people feel their culture is being taken by white people, “wiggers,” who copy their fashion statements and indulge in rap music, which Harris and Herbert listened.  It does not matter, a music genre will not be ruined simply because new people have entered “the scene.”  If it ruins a person’s perspective of their longtime loved music, books, movies, and friends, then that person has a weak mind for not maintaining the memory.

After some pondering, the older forms of hatred are just as lame as prejudices against subcultures.  Although, the new low that bigotry has reached is the cause is ever weaker.  Fear of not being able to get a job due to competition is a more mature fear than a music scene being polluted by new tastes.  Hating emerging subcultures is like hating immigrants in the sense of fearing multi-culturalism.  In this case it is a fear of multi-subculturalism.  Ultimately, it is a fear of diversity.

©2013 Caroline Friehs

Originally posted:  May 16, 2013

Updated:  May 17, 2013.
Updated upon blog renovation completion.
Last update on April 9, 2019 to clarify points in last section that reflects updated knowledge.

 

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