AT least once during your school days you get sent to Coventry. By the same token at least once during a career in the media, you get sent to Los Angeles. Last week it happened to me.

I went with the Lawrence family's barrister to a place called Lancaster in Antelope Valley, an hour and a half north of LA and known (unfairly as it happens) as the Hate Crime Capital of America.

Unfairly because they merely notice more hate crime. The sheriff's department in LA County takes the effort and trouble to record and try to combat hate crimes, so it has more on its books. Louisiana and Alabama, you will be amused but saddened to know, report no hate crimes at all!

When I went I was fuzzy about exactly what hate crimes are. And I discovered an interesting reversal of the way in which most British legislation on the subject is framed. Here these kind of protective laws are articulated for the protection of (certain) minorities, mainly ethnic.

The laws are called things like race relations or aggravated racial harassment. Hate crime legislation in America is drawn on a much wider legal principle. A hate crime in the States is defined as a crime committed against an individual because of their actual or perceived membership of a particular group, based on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, disability or mental health. Which pretty much covers everybody. The point of the law is to say that you may not damage, attack or in the worst of circumstances kill someone merely because of who you think they are, motivated by your hatred of that fact. And sentence will be higher if you do. What this does is to give the people of California (for hate crime laws are adopted state by state) a law which protects all citizens from the hatred of others.

This has two main effects. One, because the First Amendment of the US Constitution guarantees free speech, the law concentrates on crimes not words. There is no argument that the law is interfering in what people think or feel, merely that it prohibits them from acting on those thoughts. And secondly, because the two agencies responsible for detection and prosecution of crime, respectively the sheriff's department and the DA's office, are headed by representatives elected in high turnout polls, the challenging of hate is on the political agenda.

So when we went to the police station in Lancaster, the captain of police, Tom Piggot, was spending the whole morning with a group of 90 school kids talking with them about practical ways of challenging and dealing with hate in the playgrounds. Hate based on race, gender, ethnic origin, sexual orientation . . . aah yes, sexual orientation.

And yet again it struck me forcefully why Section 28 must be repealed.

Teachers don't want to teach kids about the mechanics of sex. They want to teach them to respect others. And there is a link between simple prejudice and crime. Hate crime laws recognise that it is not a big step between devaluing a lifestyle to devaluing a life. Surely we all believe that teaching kids to respect other people's way of life is a fine thing to be doing as we move into the new century. I never thought I would

discover that in Los Angeles. Let's make it happen in Brighton and Hove. Happy Christmas.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.