On 18th January, the House of Lords voted to make misogyny an aggravating factor in the sentencing of anyone convicted of a criminal offence, with 242 peers backing the amendment and 185 opposing. If passed by the Commons, this would grant both the judiciary and the police new powers: judges would be able impose higher sentences for crimes driven by prejudice against women, and the police would be able to list misogyny as a motive for a crime.
Leaving aside misogyny as a motivating factor, Violence against women has always been a problem—with the 2018 Femicide Census estimating that a woman is killed by a man every three days—but the full extent of the epidemic of gendered violence has been exposed in the past year. While the murder of Sarah Everard shocked the nation in March 2021, a further 81 women, including Sabina Nessa, were killed by October that year. Last year also saw a record number of rapes reported in the UK.
When it comes to gendered violence, we’re in the midst of a crisis. That much is clear. But we need to be careful of confounding an acknowledgement of this issue with tangible action being taken to address it—because if these statistics are anything to go by, we have a long way to go.
That isn’t to say voting to classify misogyny as an aggravating factor in a crime is the wrong choice. By giving police the option to record misogyny as the motive of a crime, we will, for the first time, be able to have a clear indication of how systemic misogyny is and, more importantly, the extent of its impact.
But this is all hope and hypotheticals. The idea that a a judge might issue harsher punishments for misogyny-rooted crimes is great in theory. Still, the chances of these kinds of crimes even appearing in front of a judge is pitifully low. Rape, for example, only has a 5.7 per cent conviction rate, while less than one in 60 rapes reported lead to a charge. And as for recording criminal motives as misogyny, can we really trust the government and police forces to put this into action? Both the prime minister and deputy prime minister have spoken out against the proposed classification and vowed to reverse the ruling.
Meanwhile, in the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder by an off-duty police officer, the police have themselves faced criticism for misogynistic attitudes. A string of investigations in 2021 revealed that hundreds of UK policemen had a history of sexual harassment towards women, while following the killings of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, police officers were revealed to have distributed images of the bodies, making lewd jokes. A police officer also made a joke about “luring” women when the Everard’s body was found. Even if we try to reduce the behaviour of these officers as a few “bad apples,” advice distributed by the Metropolitan Police in October 2021, suggesting that women flag down a bus to avoid attack, shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the scale of the issue women are currently facing.
While the categorisation of misogyny as an aggravating factor would be a cause for celebration, we must be cautious about getting caught up in the symbolism of it all. If we want to end violence against women, we need to go further than symbols. We need institutions like the government and police force to ensure that they couple this acknowledgement with on-the-ground, practical measures in order to prevent crimes like these from happening in the first place, irrespective of what we call them. A new box on a checklist won’t stop women being killed. We need more. We must demand more.
