Hate Crime Law: Misogyny

Luke Myer Excerpts

Monday 7th September 2026 Westminster Hall

[Luke Myer (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I congratulate my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) on introducing the debate. I am grateful to the petitioners for bringing this important issue before the House, and to the more than 114,000 people who signed the petition, including over 100 from my constituency. Might I say, as a former sabbatical officer myself, that this is yet more evidence that the phrase “student politics” should be seen as a compliment in this place, rather than a criticism?

Misogyny and violence against women and girls are not inevitable, and they should not be dismissed as something that women and girls simply have to put up with, whether on the street, in the workplace, in school or, increasingly, as the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) said, online. I have spoken in this place before about the scourge of deepfakes and AI-enabled abuse. In the spirit of cross-party collaboration, I also commend the work of Baroness Owen in this regard.

I welcome the Government’s commitment to tackle violence against women and girls and halve it within a decade. Prevention, early intervention, relentless pursuit of the perpetrators and proper support for victims are the foundations that we absolutely need. We need to deal with the attitudes and behaviours that allow violence and abuse to develop in the first place.

That is particularly important when we consider the growth of misogynistic material online. Young people can now be exposed very quickly to content that presents contempt for women as normal, glorifies control and abuse, and can draw boys and young men into increasingly extreme communities. That is why the Government are right to put prevention at the heart of their strategy, including through schools, colleges and universities, and to recognise the particular challenge posed by online misogyny. However, there is much more to do, and the petitioners are right to ask us to recognise misogyny as a hate crime.

The fact is that our hate crime framework has developed unevenly, although we have seen some progress. As we heard from the hon. Member for Bath and my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe, the Crime and Policing Act added sex to the characteristics covered by aggravated offences, which is a significant step forward. But the petition raises the wider question of consistency, and I hope the Minister will look carefully at whether hostility on the basis of sex or gender should be reflected consistently across the wider sentencing framework. There is also the question of stirring up hatred. The Law Commission has previously recommended extending such offences to cover sex or gender, in part because of the growth of extremist misogynistic ideologies and their potential to contribute to serious offending.

I heard today from organisations working on the frontline in my constituency, and what they told me should be part of this debate as well. My Sister’s Place supports women experiencing domestic abuse across Teesside. We have had some progress recently in the form of domestic abuse specialists now embedded in the 999 control centre at Cleveland police—something that the Government promised in their manifesto and are now starting to deliver. That is a positive step forward, but one issue that My Sister’s Place raised with me is that there are simply not enough refuge spaces or suitable move-on housing locally in Middlesbrough, so a woman who makes the extraordinarily difficult decision to leave an abusive relationship faces the question, “Where is it safe to go?” I would welcome the Minister’s saying a little about how the Government intend to improve the availability of safe accommodation and, crucially, the route from emergency refuge provision to decent and permanent housing.

[Wera Hobhouse]

I thank the hon. Member for mentioning women fleeing domestic abuse. Their recovery should be subject to a longer-term strategy; it is not just about finding crisis accommodation. Often, women face their abusers for many years and do not get any support. Does he agree that we need to look at the longer-term effects, too?

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[Luke Myer]

I absolutely agree, and I thank the hon. Member for making that point.

That takes me to the next point I wanted to raise, from the second specialist organisation that I spoke to today. ARCH Teesside does vital work supporting victims and survivors of sexual violence and preventing harm before situations escalate; it puts wraparound support around an individual. It raised with me today a practical concern about what will happen to prevention funding, particularly when police and crime commissioners are abolished from 2028. They are often a main source of funding for local specialist violence against women and girls organisations. ARCH Teesside is concerned that the need for services will not change when the structures change, and it does not have certainty about the funding currently held by PCCs.

Organisations such as ARCH need to be able to plan ahead, retain specialist staff and know what funding framework they will be working with. I will be grateful if the Minister can give some reassurance that specialist local services will not lose dedicated prevention funding as responsibilities move away from PCCs, and tell us a little about the clarity that organisations will receive about the future framework into which they will need to bid.

[Marie Goldman (Chelmsford) (LD)]

The hon. Gentleman makes a really important point about certainty of funding. Some of the organisations that I have spoken to in my Chelmsford constituency that deal with victims of domestic abuse point out to me that often the funding is project-based. It is not about what they have tried before, have proven to work and want to continue with; they find that people say, “Oh, yes, but we’re starting this new project now, so we’re only accepting bids for new projects and things that haven’t been done before,” and all the great work that has been done before is forgotten. Does he agree that we are always going to be chasing our tails in that way, and nobody will be well served by it, and that we need certainty of funding for things that are proven to work as well as for trialling new stuff?

[Luke Myer]

I agree. This is slightly tangential to this debate—I apologise—but when I was in local government, we set up a specialist team to work with families and young people at risk of exploitation, and we gave them that sort of long-term focus and freedom to approach things in a range of different ways, rather than giving them time-limited funding, say for three months. Chopping and changing can be very disruptive for families, and it is exactly the same here.

The petitioners are right to ask Parliament to take misogyny more seriously. The Government have taken some important steps, which I welcome, but I hope they will now build on that work, look carefully at the remaining gaps in the law and, above all, make sure that the ambition of halving violence against women and girls is matched by what women experience in communities such as mine.

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[Satvir Kaur]

As the Home Secretary said during her statement to the House last week, it will form part of the ongoing policing reform. That will naturally have an impact on how regional and local areas are funded, and that is right and proper.

[Luke Myer]

PCCs will be abolished in 2028, but the reforms will take much longer than that. In many parts of the country the PCC role will easily transfer over to a mayoral role, but that will not be the case in Cleveland, where the boundary of the police is not coterminous with that of the combined authority. The Minister mentioned that one of my councils is very advanced in this work. Can she take away the proposals for some of the funding and powers to go straight to the local authority level in cases where there are such tensions between different government boundaries and bodies?

[Satvir Kaur]

I am more than happy to arrange a meeting with the relevant policing Minister to ensure that that is explored fully.

Before I conclude, I want to cover the other issues that have been raised. On data gaps and reporting, I want to highlight that the Enough campaign is bearing fruit, but it is obviously a big piece of work. Specialist VAWG teams are also going into local areas, and a part of their role is ensuring that local police forces work with local communities so that there is an uptick in reporting, which must be taken more seriously to help address data gaps, because we know that is an ongoing concern.

I was asked about conversations with police forces, and those are ongoing. The hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Tom Gordon) has left the Chamber, but he mentioned what happened to the female protester at the Reform conference. That was disgusting and unacceptable, and I know that the police are encouraging the victim to come forward; I feel we should all do the same to ensure that justice is done.