Addressing Misogyny: The Law, Hate Crime and New Feminist Approaches

Violence against women and girls has become an urgent contemporary debate in the United Kingdom (McGlynn, Rackely and Houghton 2017). Recently, attempts have been made to use hate crime legislation to address the role of misogyny in gender based violence. In 2016, the chief executive of Women's Aid stated "violence against women is underpinned by misogyny" (Sandu, 2018) and the Nottinghamshire Police piloted a pioneering Misogyny and Hate Crime policy (Mullany and Trickett, 2018). In 2018, Labour MP Stella Creasy sought to use hate crime legislation to address the role of misogyny in gender based violence through an amendment to the Voyeurism (Offences) (No2) Bill to include gender as a protected characteristic, raising the possibility of extended sentencing where misogyny was found to be a motivating factor in criminal activity. Hate Crime is not a single offence, but exists across a range of legislation. Five characteristics - race, religion, disability, sexual orientation and transgender identity - are protected under this legislative patchwork, only two of which - race and religion - have the potential to affect sentencing. Hate crime is a 'slippery' concept, both theoretically and operationally. A 2016 report on Hate Crime by the Equality and Human Rights Commission determined that, 'though the term hate crime is widely used in the media and criminal justice system ... it is not always clear what the term actually means'.

Aginst this urgent backdrop, this socio-legal research will investigate the concept of misogyny in both feminist theory and the practice of feminist lobby groups, asking what potential current hate crime legislation has to effectively respond to misogyny. It will use emerging practice of feminist legislative drafting to offer a more effective legal response to misogyny. Twenty semi-structured interviews with key feminist lobby groups across the four UK jurisdictions will provide qualitative data which will be transcribed and analysed. Informed by the qualitative research, the project will first investigate how theoretical concepts in feminist legal theory map on to practical understandings of misogyny and hate crime within feminist lobby groups and then draw on the nascent methodology of feminist legislative drafting (Askin, 1997; Enright et all, 2015; Enright and de Londras, 2018), proposing ways in which legislation can grapple with deeply ingrained social structures that perpetuate violence against women. For maximum impact, research findings will be made available as a resource to feminist lobby groups engaged throughout the project and could potentially offer recommendations for government. Finally, this research will make an original contribution not only to socio-legal work on hate crime, but to the emerging field of feminist legislative drafting more generally.