Misogyny Fuels Violence Against Women. Should It Be a Hate Crime? - The New York Times - 0 views
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Misogyny Fuels Violence Against Women. Should It Be a Hate Crime?
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Experts say the everyday harassment women have learned to put up with — the catcalling and lewd gestures — connects directly with more serious abuses.
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“Men who kill women do not suddenly kill women, they work up to killing women.”
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Sarah Everard in London. Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Ae Yue, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Xiaojie Tan and Daoyou Feng in Atlanta.
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Eight women, two continents apart, killed in the space of two weeks. The suspects in both cases are men.
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London, Ms. Everard disappeared while walking home from a friend’s house, and was found dead a week later. A police officer was charged with kidnapping and murdering her.
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In Atlanta, a gunman stormed three massage parlors and shot and killed eight people — seven of them women, six of them Asian — raising speculation that the attack was racially motivated
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In the days after Ms. Everard’s body was found and protests calling for deeper social change grew across the United Kingdom
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the British government announced an experimental pilot program (though there is no fixed start date yet) that would categorize cases of gender-based violence and harassment motivated by misogyny as hate crimes.
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“Across the country, women everywhere are looking to us not just to express sympathy with their concerns, but to act,”
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“Stop telling them to stay at home and be careful, and start finding those responsible for the violence.”
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In Atlanta, the arrested suspect told the police he had a “sexual addiction,” according to the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office, prompting some activists to call for him to be charged with a hate crime there, too.
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“What can’t be forgotten is the hate crime statute says ‘because of gender’ as well,”
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“The angle of misogyny has to be looked at.”
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Do ‘sweat the small stuff’
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As women around the world watched the two events unfold, they started sharing their own stories on social media of having been in similar situations that had the potential to escalate and turn similarly violent.
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Women spoke of all of the things that they — like Ms. Everard — did “right,” including walking on well-lit streets, and talking on the phone or clutching their keys in their pockets while doing so — and described how they still ended up in dangerous situations.
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Asian women spoke of all of the ways in which sexism and racism coalesce to expose them to a unique form of harassment that can lead to violence and abuse.
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Their stories confirm that violence against women isn’t an aberration, but a “global public health” crisis of “epidemic proportions,”
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In the United States, one online survey in 2018 found that 81 percent of women had experienced some kind of sexual harassment during their lifetimes. In the United Kingdom, 97 percent of women aged 18 to 24 said they had been sexually harassed, according to UN Women UK.
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These numbers are all from before the coronavirus pandemic; with the onset of the health crisis, domestic abuse surged and public spaces became eerily empty, leaving women feeling increasingly worried about their safety.
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Violence against women is consistently underreported because women are scared of retaliation for speaking out or they fear the stigma associated with sexual violence,
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UN Women’s initiative to end gender-based violence.
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“We’re not joining the dots, nobody is making connections,
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“There is a big picture here that we are just repeatedly missing. There are connections between the normalized daily behaviors that we brush off and the more serious abuses.”
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a woman recalls that when she was in school, at age 13 or 14, a few girls complained to a teacher that the boys in their class had been groping them and the teacher said that they were “being oversensitive.
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In another example, a woman recalls waiting at a bus stop when a man walked up to her and grabbed her bottom but everyone around her who had witnessed the incident remained silent.
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a woman recalls how a man sat directly opposite her on the train and touched himself and then got off the train on the next stop, as if nothing had happened.
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There is plenty of evidence to suggest that misogyny and gender-based violence are also correlated with broader threats
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a spike in gender-based violence — particularly domestic violence — correlates with “rising levels of insecurity in society more broadly.”
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A sudden disappearance of girls from schools, for example, could point to a rise of fundamentalist views
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“If only we were to listen to women and pay attention to the misogyny and aggression and violence that they deal with on a daily basis.”
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As pervasive as sexism, misogyny and gender-based violence are, none are inevitable and they can be countered
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“The term ‘violence against women’ is a passive construction — there’s no active agent, it’s a bad thing that happens to women,” he explained, but it’s as if “nobody’s doing it to them.”
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“shifts the accountability off of men and the culture that produces them and puts it onto women.”
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The second step is recognizing that male aggression against women is a manifestation of a broader systemic problem. “There’s this impulse to pathologize the individual perpetrators — that somehow the individual perpetrator is some monster who just kind of crawled out of the swamp,
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“But if you accept the concept that it’s systemic, then there are policy implications and political implications and introspection that can be uncomfortable.
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“And how that message plays in the community, how you talk about it, how you have police understand it.”
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“Making misogyny a crime is like making racism a crime — it’s unfortunate, it’s ugly and we wish people wouldn’t do it, but you can’t punish somebody for saying something,” he said.
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In other words, they’d have to show that the man assaulted her because she’s a woman, which is a tough standard to meet.
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In the United States, a crime motivated by gender bias is considered a hate crime at the federal level and in 35 states.
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Reporting hate crimes also requires a police force that is trained to appropriately respond to those complaints.
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But that would only broaden the powers of law enforcement, which several women’s rights groups argue wouldn’t do much to prompt deeper cultural change.
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. Many still felt, according to the survey, that incidents like name calling or groping seemed too normal for the police to take seriously.
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“So what’s the point of me going to the police station and sitting there for two hours with a policeman who probably just thinks, ‘Why are you wasting my time?’”
