This report describes socio-demographic characteristics of perpetrators and victims of racist violence (age, sex, social status, group context, delinquency etc.) and analyzes typical constellations of perpetrators and victims and central aspects of their interactions by identifying opportunity structures, actions, and reactions of perpetrator and victim and the behavior of bystanders. The empirical data result from an analysis of police records on racist violence in North Rhine-Westphalia in 2000–02 and from qualitative interviews with perpetrators and victims in 2003.

The results are measured against two hypotheses: the youth conflict thesis and the hate crime thesis. Our findings confirm the results of studies of the socio-demographic characteristics of perpetrators of racist violence conducted during the 1990s. Our results concerning the socio-demographic structure of victims of racist crime—the first produced on a broad empirical basis—show that the typical constellation of perpetrators and victims in the field of racist violence is different from what we know from general youth violence, especially group-related violence. While in the field of general youth violence, perpetrators and victims show many similarities concerning age, gender, social status, etc., in the field of racist violence victims are—generally speaking—older, more often female, always migrants or persons from minorities, and do not share the low social status of the perpetrators.