FOLLOWING THE RECENT SHOCK-ing death of 20-year-old goth Sophie Lancaster, after she'd tried to protect her boyfriend, Robert Maltby, from a gang of teenagers who were attacking them, 7,153 people signed a petition calling for the Government to "widen the definition of 'hate crime' to include crimes committed against a person, or persons, on the basis of their appearance or subcultural interests."
Number 10 responded with a polite "no", because "these are not intrinsic characteristics of a person and could potentially be very wide ranging, including, for example, allegiance to football teams – which makes this a very difficult category to leg
islate for".
Yet as the blog Alterophobia (www.alterophobia.blogspot.com) exhaustively details, abuse against people who align themselves with goth culture is rife worldwide. And if any alternative lifestyle is as intrinsic to a person's being as a religious faith, it is this one. Appropriately for a murky world fascinated by vampires, goth is the subculture that never dies. Indeed, it is more popular than ever.
Yes, you can grow out of it, unlike your sexuality, disability, race or other categories that are officially included in the classification of hate crime – but many don't.
Emerging from the post-punk scene of the early 1980s in the black-clad shape of bands such as Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Sisters of Mercy, the early proponents of goth still thrive. Both Siouxsie Sioux and The Mission (an offshoot of The Sisters of Mercy) performed major live shows as recently as March this year, and in the same month Bauhaus released their first album since 1983.
Musically, the sound has splintered many times, but the macabre, glamorous aesthetic remains. There's the sexually charged metal of Marilyn Manson, the garage punk of London's latest ghouls The Horrors, and theatrical rockers My Chemical Romance, figureheads of the milder emo scene who still thrive on similar dark imagery and songs of outsiderdom.
The latter two groups have both been victimised for their style: My Chemical Romance were bottled off at the 2006 Reading Festival and Horrors singer Faris Rotter lost a tooth after being assaulted by seven people in Whitechapel the same summer.
Goth tends to attract the alienated and lonely, hence the perception that it's a world of losers. With their white faces, lank hair and extensive piercings they are still more likely to be laughed at than physically attacked. The other British goths in the news this year were the couple who were kicked off a bus in West Yorkshire because one was holding the other by a dog lead, which gave the papers a good giggle.
Yet time and again we hear that for all the violent music and horror imagery, they couldn't be a more mild-mannered and peaceful bunch. If the sympathetic public reaction to the Sophie Lancaster case is anything to go by, we know who the real losers are.
The full article contains 489 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
