A new study from the University of West London argues that what victims do in the first moments of a hate incident can differ sharply by community, with Jewish and Hindu participants most often describing outward inaction, while Muslim participants reported a broader range of responses, including confronting perpetrators and seeking formal help.
The research, published in 2026, focused on religiously motivated hate incidents in the United Kingdom and drew on interviews with 30 victims and three focus groups, examining both criminal hate crimes and noncriminal incidents such as bias and discrimination.
The study arrives as Britain’s official figures show a rise in religious hate crimes even while overall hate crime declined for the first time in a decade. According to the paper, an “unprecedented” 9,387 religious hate crimes were reported by March 2023, with Muslims making up 39% of victims, Jews 17%, and Hindus 3%. The author adds that the data highlights a disproportionate burden on Jews, who make up less than 1% of the UK population yet account for roughly one in six religious hate-crime victims.
Four immediate reactions
Participants described their immediate reactions in one of four ways: outward inaction, seeking some form of recourse, verbally confronting the perpetrator, or retaliating with violence.
The author’s most striking finding was that none of the Jewish or Hindu participants reported responding with verbal confrontation, retaliation, or physical aggression, and their typical response was outward inaction. Muslim participants, by contrast, described all four response types, including verbal confrontation and physical retaliation, alongside seeking recourse.
One Muslim interviewee described the moment as a test of whether to “stay quiet and get offended” or to speak up so others “could learn from it.”
Visibility and traditional clothing
The study’s interviewees ranged in age, background, and gender, and all were considered visibly identifiable as members of their religious group, though the author notes visibility varied. The paper describes Muslim women who wore hijab or niqab and men who wore a turban and often had a beard, while Jewish men wore a kippah or black hat and often had a beard, and Jewish women were described as less immediately identifiable to some observers.
Participants were recruited through local religious organizations and hate-crime groups, as well as snowball sampling, and the interviews lasted 45 to 60 minutes.
The author frames the work as the first to compare “immediate responses” across these three communities, while noting that longer-term coping responses, such as avoiding certain places, will be examined separately.
Why it matters for Jewish communities
For Jewish readers, the study’s takeaway is uncomfortable but newsworthy: the most common immediate response described by Jewish participants was outward inaction, even as antisemitic targeting remains high relative to population size. That gap raises questions about trust in authorities, expectations of escalation, the social cost of confronting an aggressor, and what communal security groups describing antisemitic incidents are seeing on the ground.
The findings also intersect with a post-October 7 reality for many diaspora communities: spikes in hostility often follow geopolitical flashpoints, and religious hate-crime patterns can change quickly in response to events. For Israel-focused coverage, that context supports a broader argument that antisemitism is often experienced as a daily public-sphere pressure, not only as an online phenomenon or a headline-grabbing attack.
Still, the author’s conclusions come with obvious limits. The sample is small, qualitative, and UK-specific, so it does not establish how often each response occurs in the wider population. It does, however, offer a rare look at the immediate moment, where fear, identity, and perceived risk collide before anyone has time to think through a “best” response.