Misogyny is hate, so why aren’t crimes motivated by misogyny considered hate crimes? That’s a question a lot of people in the UK have been asking for a long time.
The discussion has a particularly raw edge to it these days, in the wake of the brutal rape and murder of a 33-year old London woman named Sarah Everard, a mortifying event that has UK citizens worried about the safety of women on the streets. Especially since the killer was a cop.
But not everyone is on board with the idea of making misogyny a hate crime. Oafish British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is one of them. Asked about the issue recently, he explained that making misogyny a hate crime would just make more misogyny.
After declaring that violence against women is “the number one issue in policing,” he went on to argue that the real solution would just be to enforce current laws more stringently. Because making misogyny a hate crime would give police and the courts so much new work to do that it would just overwhelm them. And somehow this would cause misogyny to get worse.
“To be perfectly frank, if you simply widen the scope of what you ask the police to do, you’ll just increase the problem,” he recently told reporters.
It’s a little hard to take this logic seriously. It’s not as if making murder a crime increased the number of murders. Johnson’s argument is less an argument than a rather flippant excuse for the status quo, and UK women deserve a lot better than that.
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Johnson’s flippancy on almost every subject is a patent attempt to make the subject seem not worth his time or yours. It’s a blatant way of saying ‘Pay no attention what I’m doing.’.
It’s particularly ironic since his government has been merrily trying to increase the scope of what counts as a crime e.g. protesting.
You see, if it is legal it is not our problem!
For eff’s sake.
Boris Johnson is the Clayton Williams of Jordan Petersons.
Is this guy from the same country that insists that trans women are more of a threat to cis women than cis men themselves?
Relevant
https://twitter.com/adam_macqueen/status/1445656793716183047?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1445656793716183047%7Ctwgr%5Ehb_1_7%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fdisqus.com%2Fembed%2Fcomments%2F%3Fbase%3Ddefaultf%3Dwonkettecomt_i%3D2655225070t_u%3Dhttps3A2F2Fwww.wonkette.com2Fcorey-lewandowski-not-fired-you-are-firedt_d%3D0A2020202020202020Corey20Lewandowski20Not20Fired20YOU20ARE20FIRED0A20202020t_t%3D0A2020202020202020Corey20Lewandowski20Not20Fired20YOU20ARE20FIRED0A20202020s_o%3Ddescversion%3Db1150b22c6c1379ec0e72833a2a571ec
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Living in the UK is so depressing.
@Crip Dyke: Wow, that is a staggering level of ignorance there. If I were really generous I’d say he mixes up or conflates toxic masculinity and misogyny. But I really doubt it.
@Battering Lamb
Raab is one of those politicians you always suspect has been put there as some kind of elitist joke. He famously conceded as Brexit minister that he “hadn’t quite understood” that Dover-Calais is a shipping route, which is like giving the job of baking a cake to someone who admits they haven’t quite understood the workings of an oven.
The extent to which you can “fail upwards” in this country is pretty mind blowing.
@Lollypop We here in the US feel for you – it’s depressing to live here too.
Why do the worst people always survive Covid?
Protesting violence against women is the number one issue in policing
Fixed it for ya
But making murder a crime does increase the number of murders. If there were no such crime as ‘murder’ there would be no murders. There would still be killings, true — but there would be no murders. In statements like this one Johnson reveals how radical he actually is: they’re much akin to the far-right propositions (which are usually hinted at rather than stated outright) that there would be no anti-Semitism without Jews and no anti-immigrant sentiment without immigrants.
Johnson is not an inventive man. He didn’t come up with these sentiments himself; he isn’t capable of it. He got them from somebody else. He must have.
BoJo doesn’t want to see the prosecution of misogyny-motivated crimes, lest too many of his school chums wind up in the dock. 🙁
Why do the worst people always survive Covid?
Because they’re rich and can get the best care
@Britgeekgrrl: Not to mention probably himself… I mean, I don’t know if he’s ever done anything worthy of prosecution, but if he actually believes in the existence of woke brigades, it’s little wonder he’d be worried.
For those unaware of what a charming fellow this father-of-six is, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/oct/06/tottymeter-and-girly-swots-how-johnson-shows-women-respect
(He finally confirmed recently that he has six children by a slightly smaller number of women, but no one’s sure whether to take his word for it. Pretty sure that as a Tory he’s required to hate single mothers, though.)
And of course our useless opposition are missing all these Tory open goals.
As much as I’m loath to admit it, Johnson may have accidentally made a fractional point here, though it’s not the one he was trying to make. In the US, DAs go for a hate crimes charge relatively rarely because the standard of proof is so high (you have to prove, for example, racist intent) that prosecuting under a hate crimes statute is much more likely to result in acquittal, where you might be able to make a straight murder charge stick.
That’s not to say that it would “increase misogyny” — but it might result in more acquittals.
@ notorious phd
That’s been a consideration here. There is an Independent body here though called the Law Commission. They make recommendations as to changes in the law.
They have tentatively come out in favour of creating new offences where the crime is motivated by ‘sex or gender’.
https://www.lawcom.gov.uk/project/hate-crime/
But as you say, it’s not as straight forward as it seems. (I won’t take up pages with all the technical stuff.)
So say someone is charged with racially aggravated assault and the jury find the assault happened but they can’t be sure of the motive, then they can still convict of regular assault.
The problem there is the offender can now only be sentenced on the basis of regular assault; which is a lower sentence.
Before the specific offences were introduced, judges could take into account such aggravating features as they thought were present. So the prosecution didn’t actually need to prove to the requisite standard (i.e. ‘so that you are sure’) the racially aggravated element. A judge could just say ‘well I can infer that’ from the other facts of the case.
Theoretically a defendant can then challenge that finding by way of something called a Newton hearing; but most don’t bother.
Ugh, it seems like bigots like Boris are enabling these horrid incels.
Here is one particularly bad post:
https://boydoesntmeetgirl.wordpress.com/2020/07/18/incels-an-extremist-group/
Trigger warnings for racism, islamafobia and misgynie.
I mentioned this before bu feel free to ask wordpress to take down offensive things that violate the terms of service. A horrible site called Eradica was finally taken down so it works.
I seem to remember that the police were called out to a domestic dispute at the Johnson house a few years ago. No arrests were made.
@Sheila Crosby: You are correct – https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/21/police-called-to-loud-altercation-at-boris-johnsons-home
Of course, most of our press tried to discredit the story because a) the neighbour who reported it to the police RECORDED WHAT HAPPENED* and b) after informing the police, the neighbour then reported this to The Guardian**.
* Preserving evidence is apparently the same as entrapment
** Passing your story on to a newspaper that largely opposes the Tories is the same as making it up, you see
Native brit here. Making flippant excuses for the status quo, whilst virtue signalling to his base of daily mail reading yoghurt pots who want to bring back hanging, is Boris Johnson’s MO.
@Waywatcher of the green
Genuine philosophical question: is it actually possible for a person to “virtue signal” (nebulous and pejorative a snarl word it may be); if the signal the person invokes is devoid of any and all actual ‘virtue’ worth signaling?
Especially given that Boris Johnson is among the ilk who are devoid of any actual virtue.