Should Misogyny be Considered a Hate Crime?

 by Manon Francis

Misogyny - dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women.

Hate Crime - a crime, typically one involving violence, that is motivated by prejudice on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation or ethnicity.

Currently, there is no specific hate crime offence that can be committed in England and Wales. However, when a crime is proven to have involved prejudice as described above, judges have enhanced sentencing powers and can increase the punishment as a result. A legislative debate for prejudice against women to be included in this list, on the basis that misogyny is a root cause of violence against women, has re-enforced this argument and the killing of Sarah Everard in March 2021 reignited the debate. Citizens UK and other groups, such as Refuge and Women's Aid, also believe the approach "would provide critical data on the link between hostility to women and the abuse and harassment women experience". An amendment to the government's Domestic Abuse Bill, presented by Labour MP Stella Creasy, would compel the police to record when a crime was motivated by hatred of someone’s sex or gender- Nottinghamshire Police first implemented this policy in 2016. The University of Nottingham and Nottingham Trent University co-authored the Misogyny Hate Crime Evaluation report, which recommended nationally rolling out the policy to increase publicity and the reporting of incidents. Creasy told the BBC: "You will have heard over the last four or five days an outpouring of stories from women about the abuse, harassment and violence they face. Most of it doesn't get reported as they don't believe it is going to be taken seriously. In the police forces where they are already doing this, not only has it helped with detecting crime, it has also helped with confidence in police and changing the culture in the police about how the deal with violence against women." 

Aside from 10 other local forces, voluntary implementation of this policy by regional police forces like that of the Nottinghamshire Police has not occurred and neither has legislation to force it, as some in power have reservations over the necessary statute that would be required. Former Equalities Minister Victoria Atkins said Parliament "must be careful about creating laws that would inadvertently conflict with principles of equality." She continued "Women are not a minority, and I would be hesitant to put us forward as one." Whilst it is a valid point that principles of equality must be upheld, the implication of the proposed policy is to add prejudice on the basis of gender to the list of what is considered a hate crime, rather than explicitly prejudice towards women. This would then cover crimes motivated by prejudice against both men and women - it just so happens that statistically it is more likely that a prejudiced attack against a woman would occur than one against a man (although it is not unheard of), causing the policy to be invoked. Therefore, the actual policy proposed would apply to both men and women, and although there is a general consensus that it would have a larger impact on women's interactions with the law, it means the principle of equality with regard to the actual policy, rather than its ensuing results, would be upheld. There is also Atkins' point of not wanting to depict women as a minority - statistically they are not (50.59% of people in the UK were female in 2020, according to the World Bank), and this policy would not change that. A person does not need to be a minority to be a victim of a hate crime - it is based more on the prejudice of the attacker rather than the identity of the victim. Therefore, making gendered violence a hate crime would not make women a minority. 

John Szepietowski from Audley Chaucer Solicitors told the BBC that some critics also feared it would become "too broad" a category, and that any attack on a woman would be at risk of being classed a hate crime. The "too broad" argument is a common refrain amongst sceptics of the policy and understandably so - creating and implementing policy which only serves to make the persecution of genuine perpetrators of gendered violence less distinct is counter-productive. However, violence against women is normally paired with another crime, and so the policy would be used in conjunction with another charge against a perpetrator. For example, if someone physically assaulted a black person, whilst yelling slurs and/or using white supremacist language, they would be charged with committing a hate crime, because the perpetrator physically assaulted someone, and was motivated by a racial prejudice. This policy would use the same logic, and so avoid invalid accusations based purely on supposed prejudice. In 2020 the World Economic Forum produced a new first-of-its-kind report from the Femicide Census that shows a man kills a woman every three days in the UK– a statistic unchanged across the 10 years studied. “Men’s violence against women is a leading cause of the premature death for women globally but research in the UK and Europe is limited and unconnected,” said Karen Ingala Smith, co-founder of the Femicide Census. “By providing detailed comparable data about femicides in the UK since 2009, including demographic and social factors and the methods men selected to kill women, we can see that these killings are not isolated incidents, and many follow repeated patterns.” This type of violence is specific in that it is motivated by prejudice against women or a similar motive, such as a horribly misguided justification for ‘revenge’. The policy would demonstrate to both would-be perpetrators and victims that the criminal offence consists not just of the violent action, but also the systemic misogyny that contributed towards it. 

A former chairwoman of the National Police Chiefs' Council, Sara Thornton, argued police forces were too "stretched" as it was, telling a conference in 2018: "We just do not have the resources to do everything that is desirable and deserving." Instead, she said they needed to make a return to "core policing", adding "I want us to solve more burglaries and bear down on violence before we make more records of incidents that are not crimes." Whilst it is not the intention of Creasy and the coalition of groups who have campaigned in support of the policy to take the spotlight from the victims of the crimes listed, the argument of not making records of incidents that are not crimes is rather paradoxical since the whole point of the policy is that it would be a crime. Also, a lack of resources to police a crime doesn’t make it not a crime, and simply not dubbing a certain action a crime doesn’t mean these harmful actions suddenly disappear. Cybercrime (defined as criminal activities carried out by means of computers or the internet) was not a thing in the 1950s, due to the lack of ‘cyber’. The Computer Misuse Act 1990 (CMA), which handles many of the malicious attacks or offences against computer solutions, including hacking and ransoming, was passed to validate the offence of ‘cybercrime’. However, that didn’t mean that before 1990 it didn’t exist. It also shows how it is useful and relevant to update what is regarded as a criminal offence: modern society has changed, so it is logical that criminal law should move with the times. Also, unlike cybercrime, which has had to evolve along with the internet, computers and similar technology, unfortunately misogyny has always been present in UK society, and is likely to remain so unless concrete action is taken.