The real reason women now feel unsafe
by Melanie Phillips:
[…] Now there are calls for the government to add misogyny to the roster of “hate crimes”. Oh, for goodness’ sake! Why not add misandry and misanthropy too, and make a clean sweep of prejudice against women, men and the entire human race?!
As with all hate crimes, the subjective nature of “hate” means that such legislation serves potentially to criminalise all criticism or mere dislike. The power vested by “hate crimes” in police and prosecutors to harass people — in this case, men — on the basis of highly disputable classifications of attitudes that are deemed to be beyond the pale — in this case, by women — is enormous and potentially oppressive.
The move to suppress attitudes that some women may not like also sits very ill with the protests now swelling against a proposed new law extending police powers to stop public protests, a law which critics say would be so broad and ill-defined it would clamp down oppressively on the right to free expression.
The extremist feminist agenda that’s now running is itself prejudiced and bigoted because it damns and demonises the entire male sex. Does one really need to point out that it is extremely rare for a woman to be abducted and murdered in broad daylight, and that most victims of violence (as well as perpetrators) are male? Does one really need to point out that not all men accused of rape are guilty, which those demanding that the rape conviction rate be increased inescapably imply? Does one really need to point out that, just as it would be wrong to lump all women together and generalise about their behaviour, so too it is equally wrong to do that with men?
Yes, unfortunately one does.
Yes, there is a problem of men all too frequently harassing, stalking or groping women in public. And yes, too many men are violent to their female partners (although research has persistently found that it is mostly women who initiate domestic violence against their male partners and not the other way round, a finding confirmed by more than 200 studies of intimate violence as reported here).
But there are many men for whom all such behaviour would be abhorrent. They wouldn’t dream of harassing, abusing or attacking a woman. These are almost always men who have themselves been brought up in stable families with decent male role models, and which adhere to strong codes of self-restraint, civility and respect for women. Where whole communities adhere to such values, often because they consist of certain religious, ethnic or other tightly-knit cultures, women in those neighbourhoods feel safe when out at night alone.
So this is not a problem with masculinity. It’s a problem with the erosion of the social, cultural and moral codes which restrain the savage and uncivilised in all of us.
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