As anger grew in Britain last week over the justice system’s approach to violence against women, public discourse turned to a new question: should maltreatment be considered a hate crime?
The debate comes amid widespread national outrage over gender-based crimes following the murder of Sarah Everard, whose abduction and murder by a London police officer has shocked Britons and new ideas for the way police and courts handle such cases. Checked out thoroughly.
Activists, criminal justice experts and opposition lawmakers have called for legislation to ensure greater punishments for crimes such as harassment, domestic abuse and stalking, and to expand the definition of hate crimes to indicate the seriousness of such crimes. is invoked. But the government has so far denied it.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson says there is already “abundant” legislation to tackle violence against women but it is not being implemented properly. In an interview during the Conservative Party’s annual convention last week, he acknowledged that the way the justice system handles these crimes is “simply not working”, but said he felt “widening the scope”. This will increase the burden on the police.
That logic has confused some activists.
“When did we ever take the scale of a problem as a reason for not acting on it?” asked Ruth Davison, chief executive officer of Refugee, a charitable organization providing support for women and children experiencing domestic violence.
Activists point to some powerful figures. According to government statistics, one in four women in the UK has experienced sexual assault. About 1 in 3 women will face domestic abuse in their lifetime. According to the Femicide Census data, on an average, a woman is murdered by a man every three days in the country, which includes many cases of domestic violence.
The killings of several other women in Britain this year – including last month’s Sabina Nessa – have sparked calls for change.
Refugees – which staged a related protest last week to draw attention to police violence against women – is one of several groups that treat the crimes contained in hate crimes as hate crimes. Groups say that misogyny is the basis for most male violence against women and that the government has so far failed to tackle such violence.
Flowers are placed at Clapham Common in London to remember Sarah Everard, who died at the hands of a London police officer on March 17, 2021, inciting national outrage. (Mary Turner/The New York Times)
Davison said Refuge’s efforts were not intended to create a new classification of crimes, which opponents say would be a complicated additional burden for police. Rather, the group says that recognizing malpractice as a hate crime would expand the powers of the justice system to deal with the wider issue.
In England and Wells, a crime is considered a hate crime when it is proven that the offender was motivated by hostility or prejudice related to one or more of five categories: race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or transgender identity. It allows judges to impose stricter punishments and gives police more clarity on enforcement by classifying these offenses as more serious.
Campaigners want gender to be added to this list.
The Law Commission, an independent body that reviews laws in England and Wales and advises the government, is in the midst of a government-ordered review of existing hate crime laws, and while its official recommendation is still pending, a preliminary conclusion It has been recommended to add gender or gender to the list of protected characteristics under hate crime laws.
Andrew Beazley, policy manager of the Fawcett Society, a gender-equality charity campaigning for change, put it simply: “It’s about acknowledging the misogyny that exists within existing crimes.”
Some women’s rights advocates have suggested that an amendment to expand the definition of a hate crime should be added to a policing and crime bill that is making its way through parliament. But Johnson has made it clear he opposes the move, and his government has come under sharp criticism in recent weeks from opponents who say it is not taking the issue seriously.
For example, conservative leaders have resisted growing calls to replace the Metropolitan Police chief, Cressida Dick, for the way Everard’s killer used his authority as a police officer to kidnap her. After the shocking revelations about him.
Criticism intensified last week after Britain’s Justice Minister, Dominic Raab, was unfamiliar with the meaning of the word misogyny. Asked how he feels about classifying it as a hate crime, he said he does not support the move, saying, “Corruption is absolutely wrong whether it is a man against a woman.” Be it, or a woman against a man.”
Their mistake – misogyny is defined as hatred or implicit prejudice against women in particular – sparked a swift response.
“This is the real Justice Secretary who will be charged with responding to Law Commission proposals on how to enforce misogyny as a hate crime,” said Stella Cressey, a labor lawmaker, with a video of Raab’s mistake. wrote in a post on Twitter.
“Hate crime doesn’t make anything illegal that isn’t already there,” she wrote in Grazia magazine, “but it ensures that the abuse inherent in discrimination is taken more seriously.”
Still, not all advocates or criminal justice experts agree that making malpractice a hate crime would be the most effective move. Zoe Billingham, former inspector of an independent monitoring group that reviews policing in Britain, said more should be done to make police officers use the tools they already have.
“The police are not doing some basic things right to protect women from crimes of domestic abuse, stalking, harassment, rape, serious sexual offenses and child sexual abuse,” he said.
Less than 2% of reported rape cases in England and Wales result in a person being charged, and 3 out of 4 reported domestic-abuse incidents are closed early on the grounds that The victim did not support the police action.
Marion Duggan, an associate professor in criminology at the University of Kent whose research focuses on violence against women and hate crime policy, agrees that the current system is broken. She said a hate crime situation can be a powerful symbolic tool that focuses on the perpetrator rather than the victim.
In a culture where blaming victims in cases of violence against women has long been the norm, Duggan said, this would be “a seismic shift”.
Some police departments in England and Wales are already tracking misdemeanors as hate crimes to raise awareness and collect data. But activists want national enforcement and legislation that supports these measures to allow for harsher punishment.
This spring, following Everard’s murder, the government directed police services to begin recording crimes of violence motivated by a person’s sex or gender as hate crimes on an experimental basis. The national police coordinating body did not respond to questions about how many departments have conducted the exercise; Preachers say only 11 out of 43 have done so.
Nottinghamshire Police, which in 2016 became the first army in the country to treat and track misogyny as a hate crime, is seen as a model. An independent study of the effort two years later showed that it has begun to change the attitudes of both victims and potential perpetrators and is leading to better reporting of these types of crimes.
Some European countries and some US states are also tracking these crimes. In March a gunman stormed three massage businesses in Atlanta and shot and killed eight people – seven of them women, six of them Asian – in calls similar to what was classified as a hate crime in the United States. .
But Duggan said that viewing malpractices as a hate crime is only part of a complex process of dismantling a broken system. She would also love to see more early intervention, education and prevention work.
“A more severe punishment,” she said, “does not undo what has been done to the victim, especially if she is dead.”
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