Hate mail (as
electronic,
posted, or otherwise) is a form of
harassment
Harassment covers a wide range of behaviors of offensive nature. It is commonly understood as behavior that demeans, humiliates or embarrasses a person, and it is characteristically identified by its unlikelihood in terms of social and moral ...
, usually consisting of invective and potentially
intimidating or threatening comments towards the recipient. Hate mail often contains exceptionally abusive, foul or otherwise hurtful language.
The recipient may receive disparaging remarks concerning their
ethnicity
An ethnic group or an ethnicity is a grouping of people who identify with each other on the basis of shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can include common sets of traditions, ancestry, language, history, ...
,
sexuality
Human sexuality is the way people experience and express themselves sexually. This involves biological, psychological, physical, erotic, emotional, social, or spiritual feelings and behaviors. Because it is a broad term, which has varied ...
,
gender,
religion,
intelligence,
political ideology, sense of
ethics, or sense of
aesthetics. The text of hate mail often contains
profanity, or it may simply contain a negative, disappropriating message.
Senders of hate mail normally send anonymous letters or pose as someone else (either a different or fictitious individual) in order to avoid being identified and tracked down, as the nature of some hate mail would inevitably result in criminal charges if the sender was identified.
Notable examples of hate mail
Hate mail has frequently been issued to footballers and managers by fans of rival football teams, and also by their own fans who are dissatisfied with the performance of an individual player, manager or the team.
Neil Lennon, the former
Celtic F.C. manager, received hate mail including a package containing a
nail bomb
A nail bomb is an anti-personnel explosive device containing nails to increase its effectiveness at harming victims. The nails act as shrapnel, leading almost certainly to more injury in inhabited areas than the explosives alone would. A nail ...
from
Rangers
A Ranger is typically someone in a military/paramilitary or law enforcement role specializing in patrolling a given territory, called “ranging”. The term most often refers to:
* Park ranger or forest ranger, a person charged with protecting and ...
fans. Two men were jailed for five years in April 2012 for sending a nail bomb to Lennon.
The parents of 10-year-old Holly Wells, a
Cambridgeshire girl who was murdered along with her friend Jessica Chapman in the highly-publicised
Soham murders in August 2002, received several letters shortly after their daughter's body was found, accusing them both of being involved in the murder of the two girls. They also received several letters with content including that they "got what they deserved" for allowing their daughter to play out on the Sabbath. Other letters with sexual content referring to the possible circumstances of her death were also written.
The parents of
Sarah Payne, who was murdered in
West Sussex in July 2000, received an anonymous letter while she was still missing, accusing her father and grandfather of having murdered her. After Sarah's body was found, her parents also received letters berating them for allowing Sarah and her three siblings to play unsupervised on a beach. Her mother,
Sara Payne, now a child protection campaigner, closed her
Twitter social networking account in November 2014 following a long campaign of abuse by
trolls
A troll is a being in Nordic folklore, including Norse mythology. In Old Norse sources, beings described as trolls dwell in isolated areas of rocks, mountains, or caves, live together in small family units, and are rarely helpful to human bei ...
, which included allegations that she had made a vast amount of money from her media work and was "glorying in a lavish lifestyle" as a result, suggestions that
Roy Whiting (convicted of Sarah's murder) was innocent, threatening messages from Twitter users claiming to be paedophiles, and remarks about the death of her former husband Michael from an
alcoholism related illness the previous month.
See also
*
Death threat
A death threat is a threat, often made anonymously, by one person or a group of people to kill another person or group of people. These threats are often designed to intimidate victims in order to manipulate their behaviour, in which case a deat ...
*
Flaming
*
Hate crime
A hate crime (also known as a bias-motivated crime or bias crime) is a prejudice-motivated crime which occurs when a perpetrator targets a victim because of their membership (or perceived membership) of a certain social group or racial demograph ...
*
Hate speech
Hate speech is defined by the ''Cambridge Dictionary'' as "public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation". Hate speech is "usually thoug ...
*
Obscene phone call
*
Poison pen letter
*
Fan mail
References
External links
The Forensic Linguistics Institute
Scholarly articles
*
*
News articles
"Jewish activists opposing the Israeli government's policies face intimidation and harassment via email and on the internet."''
Guardian Unlimited'', 19 January 2004
"Racist Hate Mail Found In Durham Mailboxes" WRAL-TV, 10 October 2006
{{abuse
Postal systems
Hate crime
Abuse