Misogyny as a Hate Crime

Nottingham police are treating misogyny as a hate crime: ‘The force defines misogyny hate crime as “incidents against women that are motivated by an attitude of a man towards a woman and includes behaviour targeted towards a woman by men simply because they are a woman”’ (The Guardian 10 Sept 2016). The issue raised at the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Domestic Violence in March 2017 was whether this could be rolled out nationwide or whether the term misogyny would have to be replaced by ‘gender based’ hate crime. In my view a case could be made for retaining the term misogyny – but it may be contested. The problem has been identified as the Equality Act 2010 and whether it is legitimate to treat men and women differently. The Equality Act is not necessarily a bar to treating misogyny as a hate crime because it is aimed at dealing with a different mischief/issue