Should misogyny be a crime?

Should misogyny be regarded as a hate crime? At least two of Northern Ireland’s eleven local councils think so. Belfast City Council and Lisburn and Castlereagh Council recently voted for identical motions that supported “the inclusion of misogyny as a standalone offence and as a category of hate crime.”

The timing of the votes was not accidental. A senior judge is currently conducting an “independent” review into Ulster’s hate laws on behalf of the Department of Justice. Judge Desmond Marrinman claims that current provisions across the UK have “a dismal record of ineffectiveness” and he expressed his openness to considering “something more radical”.

Earlier this year, the MP for Bath, Wera Hobhouse, introduced a private member’s bill at Westminster demanding that misogyny should be added to the list of categories that define a hate crime in England and Wales. Under this legislation, an offender could face a tougher sentence if misogyny were considered an “aggravating factor” that motivated them to commit a crime.

Predictably, the Northern Ireland council motion, which was tabled by the Green Party, goes further and suggests that an attitude — a prejudice — should constitute a “standalone offence”. This may be a dangerous, sloppy idea, but it’s difficult for other parties to oppose, because inevitably they are accused of misogyny if they suggest it hasn’t been properly thought through.

It doesn’t help when local councillors express their opposition in crass language. The DUP mayor of Lisburn, Alan Givan, described the motion as a “gagging order on the comments that so many of us often make” and said there were “better ways to protect the ladies.”

Rather than making it sound like the proposed law would infringe his right to make off-colour remarks, it might have been more fruitful to analyse weaknesses in the argument that misogyny should constitute a standalone offence. It certainly appears as if the intention is to make behaviour that is not currently considered criminal into a new crime.

Then, in keeping with woke jargon, there were the motion’s references to “transmisogyny” and its effect on “trans” and “non-binary” people.

This raises an entirely new dimension, because a keenly contested debate is still raging about the boundaries between biological sex and gender “identity”. Trans activists have already used the law to try to impose their new orthodoxies, and, ironically, given that this motion was intended to oppose misogyny, their targets have often been feminists who insist that biological women should be treated differently from people who were born male, but claim a female identity.

In 2018, a women’s rights activist, Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, was investigated by West Yorkshire police, after Susie Green, the CEO of trans charity, Mermaids, accused her of a hate crime. The campaigner had posted a video on YouTube criticising Ms. Green for supporting her child’s well-publicised decision to become the youngest person in the UK to transition from male to female.

Last year, Humberside Police visited a former police officer at his workplace, after he was accused of posting “transphobic” opinions on Twitter. While he was not eventually charged with a hate crime, his tweets were recorded as a “hate incident”, before the High Court ruled that the force’s actions amounted to “disproportionate” interference in the man’s freedom of speech.

Allegations of “hate crime” are already being used to silence people who don’t accept that gender is purely a matter of identity. At a time when the consequences of encouraging children to “transition” between genders, and the effects of allowing former men into women-only spaces, are still being worked out, it’s dangerous to provide new legal means to hinder these discussions.

Then there are the pitfalls of insisting that the law should become involved in identifying obnoxious attitudes and punishing the people who hold them. Many critics of the view that misogyny should be a hate crime claim that misandry should be included in any legislation as well. That’s the kind of fractious oneupmanship that our current obsession with identity nearly always encourages.

A number of police forces followed the lead of Nottinghamshire police by investigating “hate incidents” that were allegedly motivated by misogyny but which fell short of criminal behaviour. This practice already provides the possibility of malicious and vexatious complaints. If the law went further, and deemed misogyny a standalone offence, the potential for abuse and miscarriages of justice would surely increase, particularly in a climate where it’s deemed unacceptable to treat any claim by an alleged victim with scepticism.

Nobody seriously disputes that misogyny is appalling and intolerable. People think appalling and intolerable things all the time and their conduct is sometimes shaped by appalling and intolerable motivations — but that doesn’t make them criminals. The idea that misogyny constitutes a crime should be debated with care and the potential for unintended consequences should be fully explored.

The law isn’t a vehicle for promoting virtuous attitudes. We should only create new crimes where it’s absolutely necessary and when the alternatives have been exhausted.