UK report: crimes motivated by misogyny should be classified as hate crimes News
UK report: crimes motivated by misogyny should be classified as hate crimes

Crimes motivated by misogyny should be classified as hate crimes, according to a report [press release] released Tuesday by the Fawcett Society [advocacy website], an organization that campaigns for women’s rights in the UK.

The report is the result of the research their Sex Discrimination Law Review panel conducted on the effectiveness of sex equality legislation in the UK post-Brexit.

The report discusses domestic violence, employment discrimination and a litany of other issues that women face in the UK. According to Fawcett Society’s chief executive and panel member, Sam Smethers, the culture of misogyny to which women are subjected on a daily basis permits the normalization [Metro report] of harassment and abuse and allows the legal system to continue to fail at providing women access to justice.

The panel has identified various gaps in the existing protections for women, such as disparities in wages, the lack of laws in place to protect women who experience harassment in the workplace and the increasing number of women and girls who are becoming victims of domestic violence. The report made a series [Guardian report] of recommendations, including “strengthening the law on sexual harassment at work to […] making any breach of a domestic abuse order a criminal offense, reviewing the law on the admissibility of previous sexual history evidence in rape cases, and strengthening the definition of revenge porn.”

It also suggested that crimes motivated by misogyny should be classified as hate crimes. The report posited that:

Hate crime against women and girls is a cause and consequence of gender inequality and should be treated as unlawful. It is important that the hate crime in question is misogyny hate crime, not gender hate crime, recognizing the direction of the power imbalance within society. This would be consistent with the one-directional nature of transgender or disability hate crime.

So far, police forces in Nottinghamshire and North Yorkshire have already begun to recognize misogynistic crimes as hate crimes.