Suzanne Harrington: Let's root out misogyny and legislate to make it a hate crime
As the family of Ashling Murphy are left with the unimaginable task of assimilating her murder into their family story, a catastrophic event that will forever divide their lives into before and after, let her death not slowly become for the rest of us just another woman killed by just another man.
Let us instead dig into the culture of hatred against women, a rotten deep-rooted hatred, and expose it to the light of why. Where it comes from, how it pervades, and how it continues to be propped up. Its depth and scope, its colluders and enablers.
From threatening women online to murder, from supporting outdated ideas that transgressive behaviour is allowed if you have a penis - boys will be boys – while accepting that 87% of women murdered by men know their killer - often intimately - it’s all part of the same thing. It’s all linked. Every single bit of it. And we are all involved.
What remains astonishing is that misogyny is not a hate crime. We protect those who need protection. My daughter, a year younger than Ashling Murphy, is brown; were she the victim of racially motivated assault, it would go to court as a hate crime. Were she the victim of sexually motivated assault, it would not be considered a hate crime. Why not? My partner is Jewish, and his predecessor Muslim – both are protected in law from anti-Semitism and Islamophobia (in theory anyway).
We resist making misogyny a hate crime. Here are some reasons. It’s because women are not a minority; it’d be too hard to police; everyone would be screaming ‘hate crime!’ every time they had a row with their fella; most men are perfectly decent and how dare we suggest otherwise.
We need to get beyond this most-men-are-decent thing. They are. This is not about attacking men, it’s about protecting women. The CSO stats speak for themselves, but let’s wheel them out again, exhausting as they are: 99.4% of sexual attackers are men. That’s a sliver short of 100%. 79% of male sexual violence is directed at women. Anecdotally – confirmed by the majority of male faces in government – women are less inclined to enter politics because of death threats, rape threats, stalking, online abuse, generalised hatred of their femaleness.
So let’s make misogyny a hate crime. This does not mean criminalising or demonising men; the fact remains that half the population is continuously under threat from the other half. This is oppressive, unjust, and sometimes fatal. Making misogyny a hate crime is about setting boundaries, refusing to tolerate violence – any variety, in any setting. And it’s not just the perpetrators, but their enablers - misogyny is embedded in our cultural DNA. We need to root it out, call it out, bin it. For everyone – men, women, children, all of us.
