Making misogyny a hate crime misses the point

Apr 3, 2022 by

by Josephine Bartosch, The Critic:

Women need better application of the law, not new legislation from posturing MPs.

When Stella Creasy MP stood up in parliament last week and made the case for adding “misogyny” to the statute, many were left wondering which group of people it is she believes to be victims of misogyny. This is because, despite wielding her baby in parliament to highlight discrimination against mothers and making earnest entreaties to her fellow politicians to take violence against women seriously, the Walthamstow MP refuses to accept the definition of “women” as “adult human females”. Nor does the Fawcett Society, which has long supported her drive to make misogyny a hate crime. Both have abandoned biology in favour of the ideological line touted by Stonewall and its allies — that being a woman or man is a matter of identity.

Creasy first raised the issue of making misogyny a hate crime in 2018, which resulted in a consultation by the Law Commission. Since then, proposals to write misogyny into legislation have been floated at various points through the chambers of Westminster, only to be roundly rejected. In December, the Law Commission released its report which concluded that crimes such as domestic abuse and sexual violence are “already difficult to prosecute, and adding an extra layer of proof and complexity could worsen this”.

The Law Commission is right to highlight the difficulty in securing prosecutions — according to the most recent statistics, 61,158 rapes were reported to the police in 202021, resulting in 1,557 prosecutions and a mere 1,109 convictions (1.8 per cent of the total reported to the police). Experts in the field have described the current situation as “the decriminalisation of rape”. Similarly, domestic abuse remains tough to prosecute. Last year a report by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary found three-quarters of all domestic abuse cases — including sexual assaults — are closed early without the suspect being charged.

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