Misogyny as a Hate Crime

Stella Creasy Excerpts

Wednesday 7th March 2018 Westminster Hall

[Melanie Onn]

It is welcome to hear that it has been a success. The police more widely do not seem to object to the extension of the definition of hate crime. The police are looking to the Government to support them in that action and to ensure that appropriate sentencing facilities are available to support any action they might take.

Contrary to media hype, there was not a surge of reports complaining of wolf-whistling, but arrests have been made for public order offences and actual bodily harm incidents that were classed as misogynist. That certainly reflects the experience of my hon. Friend the Member for Ashfield (Gloria De Piero), who claims that the initiative has been a success. There are specially trained officers in place in a city that has two universities, and the change has made positive difference to women, who feel better able to report unwanted attention and receive appropriate support where necessary.

Ultimately, I hope that if we set our laws appropriately, there will be a reduced need for police intervention, because behaviour and culture will evolve to fit the new standard. Dame Lara Cox, who chaired the Fawcett Society sex discrimination law review, said:

“Laws are instruments in changing attitudes, setting the bar for expectations of treatment and behaviour”.

She made the point that our laws are not stagnant and that they must reflect the reality of today’s society.

The reality, as borne out by campaigns such as #EverydaySexism, #goodnightout, #girlsagainst and, more recently, #MeToo, as well as, internationally, #StopStreetHarassment, is that today’s society is awash with misogynistic acts such as groping, sexual comments, upskirting, revenge porn, sexual remarks, leering and stalking. As the nature of harassment changes, so must the laws that govern it, and too many incidents do not meet the criteria for assault, discrimination or public order offences.

The fact that I have had the temerity to call for this debate—this exploration of ideas—has provoked a backlash of vile fury. I have been told that I am in some way a man-hater, that I have no sense of humour and that I should most certainly learn to take a compliment. Because I am not a snowflake, as has been suggested, that has not dissuaded me from continuing to discuss these ideas, but it highlights why women and girls are so often put off from directly challenging behaviour at the time the incidents occur. They are put off from even reporting them, given that the potential response is so aggressive.

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am pleased that my hon. Friend has introduced the debate, not least because I am a strong defender of the reputation of men. Sexual harassment is not a given—people can choose not to do it—so it is really important in debates that we do not disrespect men by somehow suggesting that they are incapable of controlling their behaviour. I am pleased that she is setting out a way in which we can differentiate between the men who understand the 21st century and those who do not.

[Melanie Onn]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point that is hard to disagree with. Some responses that I have received over the last few days have not shown men in their best light, which is incredibly unfortunate, because all the men in my life accept that any actions or behaviours that put women in an uncomfortable position or make them feel unsafe or not secure in their environment are not acceptable. The defence of some of that behaviour has been quite surprising.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to be able to contribute to the debate, Sir David, and I apologise for having been a little late, due to the vagaries of the Victoria line. My hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn) made a powerful speech and has campaigned powerfully on this issue.

Women in Walthamstow feel very strongly about the gauntlet that they too often have to run when they walk down some of our main streets where there are busy cafés and pubs, especially when the weather gets a little warmer. For many, it is a nightmare. As the first female MP for Walthamstow, I have received a deluge of emails from residents who say that they cannot walk down their streets and feel safe during the day time, let alone at night. We have campaigned about this problem for many years—I pay tribute to the Take Back the Streets group in Walthamstow. Literally, women cannot go about their business. This debate is fundamentally about freedom—the freedom for women to be able to use the spaces and places in our society just as equally as men do.

It is a sad fact that Hoe Street in Walthamstow is a gauntlet for women to walk down, especially on a warm and sunny day, and that in workplaces women do not always feel safe. As a society, that holds us all back. Half of women say that they have been sexually harassed at work; one in five regularly experiences sexual harassment on our streets. There is a day-to-day phobia of passing a group of men, although sometimes it is unfounded— I am sure that the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) wants me to point that out. But all too often, women know that as they walk past, they may be subject to touching; somebody may follow them; and somebody may try to engage them in a conversation, even when they have said no.

The other night, when I left Parliament I was followed down the street by a young man who would not take no for an answer—he kept trying to put his arms around me and touch me. Sadly, that is a day-to-day experience for too many women in our society. The trouble is that women are taught to minimise that behaviour—to brush it off, to somehow find a way of avoiding it, to feel that perhaps they should not be out on the streets late at night or that perhaps they should scream.

Sadly, it is part of our culture that someone feels they have the right to touch and to feel a woman at will. We need to change that. We know that 400,000 women were sexually assaulted in our country last year. That comes from being in a culture not of sex but of power. It is about entitlement. It is about the concept that a woman’s body is the primary thing of interest about her and therefore what matters is how men respond to it.

We should be very clear that this is #NotAllMen. What is so powerful about recognising misogyny as a hate crime is identifying that that is not normal human behaviour. It is not about men and women flirting with each other; it is not about men and women being able to banter with each other; it is not about men and women being able to ask each other out. Perhaps they exist in our society, but I have yet to meet a women who went out with a man who followed her down the street and tried to put his hands on her bottom. It is about being able to say that this sort of behaviour is holding too many back in our society.

Let us look at the figures for sexual harassment of young women in our society: the figure of 50% of women experiencing sexual harassment in the workplace rises to 63% among 18 to 24-year-olds. It is a damning indictment of Britain in 2018 that a young woman cannot start her career without the fear that she might face groping in her workplace, unwanted sexual advances and being told that she cannot seek a promotion if she dares to say no. The #MeToo campaign in particular shows that that is widespread behaviour.

The good news for all of us is that the public are with us. In surveys about sexual harassment, 80% of the public recognise that harassment. No woman should have to fear when she gets on a tube train that the man opposite has a mobile phone with him and what he might try to do with it. Upskirting is a completely unacceptable form of harassment. It is an abuse of the power of a man to define what is important about a woman. No woman should be subject to groping of her breasts in the workplace, but we have seen those reports. Through treating misogyny as a hate crime, we can change the conversation about what is acceptable. That is why I am such a fan of what has been done in Nottinghamshire and why I hope that the Mayor of London follows suit.

We women in Walthamstow know first hand how difficult that is. The honest truth is that when we started recording the spaces and places in our local community where women felt unsafe—where they could not walk past a particular pub or café without feeling attacked or being harassed—the police told us it was a cultural matter. They said we simply could not stop men hanging out together and that that was just what happened. As a big champion and a big respecter of men, I believe that is simply not the case. There is nothing that says that, when men get together, they have to harass women.

Importantly—I really hope the hon. Member for Shipley defends us and supports us in making this argument—making misogyny a hate crime is a way of clearly stating that. It is a way of standing up for men’s reputation and men’s right to be seen as equal citizens rather than as predators in waiting, by separating out unacceptable behaviour and recognising those men who abuse their power and strength. That is the difficult thing. People might think this debate is about jokes, but a rape joke is never funny, because it is always about the power imbalance. It is always about the possibility that someone might follow through and use their physical strength to pin you down—the possibility, when they follow you down the road, that they might follow you all the way home and force their way into your house. That is a threat that women often live with daily.

By categorising sexual harassment as a hate crime, we would change the conversation so that it was not about what women need to do to avoid it. I am sure many of us have been frustrated when police officers have suggested that women need to change their routes. I was furious when my local police suggested to girls at a local school, because we had had reports of someone flashing, that they needed not to travel home alone—that they needed to moderate their behaviour, rather than us needing to catch the man who was doing that. We must change the conversation and say, “Here are people committing a crime.”

We do not let the victim drive what we do about other crimes. We do not say when there is a burglary, “What really matters is that you have better locks on your house rather than that we find the persistent burglar in this community,” but all too often we do when it comes to sexual harassment. We warn women to be careful rather than finding the peepers and flashers. We warn women about being alone at night rather than saying we will put more police on the streets. We say that we cannot tackle men’s behaviour rather than asking them to change.

We have had a great experience in Walthamstow: when we have gone in to talk to café and pub owners, we have found that they want change, too. They recognise that it is bad for their business to have a reputation for being a hotspot for sexual harassment. They recognise that their patrons’ behaviour might be inappropriate and that that is bad for them. We have tried to use anti- social behaviour legislation to challenge that behaviour and to make those businesses take it seriously, but many of them have risen to the challenge without being asked.

That is one of the important things about this conversation and why, for too long, we have let hate crime against women somehow be seen as hate crime against any other protected characteristic. In having the conversation, we have not spoken up for the best of people or for the best of characteristics: treating one other with respect. Respect is not just about being in a workplace with a colleague without feeling the need to touch their bosom; it is also about a man being able to walk along the street with a woman and feel that she is not frightened of him. Yet the honest truth for many women is that if a man is walking behind us late at night, many of us might stop, look at our phones or cross the street. What a damning indictment it is of men in our country that we are in a position where we feel like that!

Making misogyny a hate crime would help us change the conversation about men as much as it would help us ensure that women are safe. I really hope that the Government listen and work with police forces to get this right. My biggest fear is that the police will say, as they have said to me, “What would we do with all the reports?” as though the problem is the amount of data rather than the fact that these things are happening. Data drives conversations. When I talked to people from Nottinghamshire, they made such a powerful case about how data had driven conversations, not just about street harassment but about the connection between sexual assault and violence against women more generally. That has been a powerful way of changing the conversation.

Sir David, 2018 is the year of #MeToo. Everyone asks whether this will be a watershed in the way women are treated in our society. The honest truth is that we will not be able to answer that question until 2019, but I really hope that the Minister listens to the powerful case my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby made and to the pleas from women in places such as Walthamstow and that he helps to ensure that that happens. Perhaps then, in 2019, we will be able to look both our sons and our daughters in the face and say, “Finally, we are moving towards a better society.”

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[Victoria Atkins]

Very much so. I am setting out these points because one’s instinctive reaction might be, “Yeah, let’s go for it”. But we must be mindful of unintended and inadvertent consequences. I wonder whether hate crime legislation is definitively the best way to treat these crimes. Women are not a minority, and I would be hesitant to put us forward as one.

Perhaps I am a little more robust in the way that I would like this abuse and harassment to be treated. Within equalities legislation, it is being a minority covered by the five strands that causes something to fall under hate crime legislation. [Interruption.] I see that the hon. Member for Walthamstow is perched on her seat.

[Stella Creasy]

We must be very careful when we talk about being “robust”, because we are putting this back on to women and how they manage these experiences, rather than challenging the behaviour. The Minister says that this is about being a minority, but the disproportionate balance of power in our society means that one “minority”—men—have disproportionate power over women.

These incidents are about the abuse of that power, just as we see the abuse of people on the basis of their religious characteristics or ethnic identity. I do not think the Minister’s minority/majority point is robust enough to defend not looking at whether, if we were to categorise misogyny as a hate crime, that would recognise fully the protected characteristic that we are seeking to include.

[Victoria Atkins]

I am so glad that the hon. Lady clarified that. I was not for a moment suggesting that women themselves must be more robust in the way they deal with such things. That is not my intention. I am saying that we as a society should be more robust.

It comes down to attitudes—something that has been raised a great deal in the debate. I am treading carefully at the moment with respect to equalities legislation because, as far as inserting anything into the current hate crime provisions is concerned, there are legal wrangles that we have to consider. We want to ensure that any changes that we make in the law to reflect the abuse in question would not have any impact on the five protected strands—of religion, and so on.

[Victoria Atkins]

No. At the moment we do not have any clear evidence and, as I have said, we welcome the evidence from the pilot projects. However, the practical legislative steps are what we must put our mind to—as we are doing. I am flagging them up as issues that we shall have to settle one way or another.

For example, there are high rates of under-reporting of the existing five strands of hate crime. We would not want to remove the focus from them, because we want to encourage more people to report that they have been abused racially or because of their religion. Perhaps the best way I can sum up our position is to say that the Government are listening.

There have been calls from both sides of the Chamber for a change in attitudes. When I practised at the criminal Bar, I used to say that by the time things have got to court the harm has been done, and it would be much better if they did not happen in the first place. We all need to challenge the attitudes that normalise or excuse the abuse and harassment of women. We have had examples today of the abuse that colleagues have, sadly, faced in their professional lives. I commend their calling out those instances of abuse. Perhaps I may say that I constantly admire the hon. Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) for the beautiful necklaces that she always wears, and I do not understand why anyone would feel they had reason to make any criticism about that.

The Government Equalities Office is taking forward a programme of work to identify and challenge harmful social norms, ensuring that men and boys are included in the conversation as well as women. We need to ensure that all children grow up understanding that we should all be treated with respect, and not abused on the basis of gender, race or religion, and so on. Working with the Advertising Association, we have provided teachers and parents with resources to improve primary school children’s resilience with respect to harmful gender stereotypes. In addition, following on from the successful “This is abuse” campaign—and it was successful in teaching people about what constitutes an abusive relationship and what should be normal and acceptable in a loving relationship—the Home Office and the Government Equalities Office have provided £3 million in the past year to develop and run a new “Disrespect NoBody” campaign, to tackle abuse within teenage relationships and encourage teens to rethink their views on violence, controlling behaviour and the meaning of consent in relationships.

Modern life can impinge on those matters as well, in the form of sexting and so on. We are also engaging with young people on questions of respect and equality to prevent such behaviour in the first place. That is why we have committed to making relationships education mandatory in all primary schools, and relationships and sex education mandatory in all primary schools from September next year.

[Stella Creasy]

I completely agree about the importance of getting sex and relationships education into every school. It is age-appropriate and sensitively done, so does the Minister share my concern that parental withdrawal might undermine the principle of giving every young person the best start in life and the best values about how we should treat each other?

[Victoria Atkins]

I must admit I am naturally cautious about the state interfering—or rather, because “interfering” is too pejorative a term, about the reach of the state into family life. Of course it is justified on occasion, but at the moment I do not have enough evidence to suggest that the rate of withdrawal would be very high; we simply do not know at the moment. Also, we should try to take parents with us. There is a lack of understanding about the education intended for primary school children about relationships and respect. We need to explain that more, so that when children start to receive that education people understand the boundaries of what their seven, eight or nine-year-old will hear in school. I would naturally just pause before setting out such legislation to make it mandatory, before we have evidence about how many families are going to withdraw.

To move on to the legal framework, there are of course criminal laws that prohibit sexual harassment, assault and rape. They include the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, which could cover sexual harassment, as well as the Sexual Offences Act 2003 and the Public Order Act 1986. We want women to know that those protections are there for them in law. It is also vital that when women and girls report their experiences they feel that they are treated with dignity and respect. We have recognised in our violence against women and girls strategy the gendered nature of crimes such as domestic abuse, sexual violence, so-called honour-based violence and stalking. As I have said, we have committed more than £100 million over this spending review period for critical services for victims of those crimes. We are committed to ensuring that victims of sexual assault have access to the specialist support that they need. We are also ensuring that the police and Crown Prosecution Service use the powers that they have to charge and prosecute for the abhorrent practice of upskirting. We are reviewing those powers to ensure that they are still fit for purpose.

Laws need to keep pace with modern life—and upskirting is, indeed, an example of that. We are determined that the internet should not be a safe place for those who carry out threatening or abusive behaviour online, whoever is being targeted. The Government are clear that what is illegal offline is illegal online.