Hate can manifest in many different ways, and there are a proliferation of terms to capture the outcomes of hate. Examples of these terms are: vilification, prejudice, discrimination, bias, hate crime, hate speech, violent extremism, terrorism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, racism, ableism, ageism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, lesbophobia, extremism among others. This fragmentation of language is one of the main hurdles to the study of hate, and to the coordination of responses to hate.
What is the relationship between these different forms of hate? Most security and legal practitioners would say that they are different behaviours, offenders, motivations and need different responses. If we look at how police forces and government work, different units independently tackle forms of hate such as terrorism vs hate crimes, racism vs homophobia, ableism vs ageism, and so on. Different agencies address different degrees of severity of hate conduct: usually, human rights organisations deal with less severe incidents regulated by civil laws, and law enforcement agencies deal with more severe incidents regulated by criminal laws. However, scholars have been suggesting for a long time that phenomena like hate crimes and terrorism cannot be fully understood without looking at the enabling context, which includes more subtle forms of discrimination, hate speech and poplar, political and media imagery.