‘Some men deeply hate women, and express that hatred freely’: Examining victims’ experiences and perceptions of gendered hate crime
| Author | Marian Duggan,Hannah Mason-Bish |
| DOI | 10.1177/0269758019872903 |
| Published date | 01 January 2020 |
| Date | 01 January 2020 |
Examining the boundaries of gendered hate crime
‘Some men deeply hate
women, and express that
hatred freely’: Examining
victims’ experiences
and perceptions of gendered
hate crime
Hannah Mason-Bish
University of Sussex, UK
Marian Duggan
University of Kent, UK
Abstract
Extensive debate about the place of gender within the hate-crime policy domain has been fuelled by
national victimisation surveys indicating people’s experiences of ‘gender hate crime’ coupled with
Nottinghamshire Police’s decision to begin categorising misogynistic street harassment as a form of
hate crime. Drawing on the results of an online survey of 85 respondents, this article explores
people’s experiences of gender-related victimisation as ‘hate crimes’. The analysis demonstrates
how participants relate their experiences to the concept of hate crime, their perceptions on
punishment and reporting to the police, and also wider impacts on their recovery processes. This
paper provides a timely contribution towards current debates around using the existing hate-crime
model for addressing crimes motivated by gender hostility.
Keywords
Gender, victimisation, hate crime, criminal justice, misogyny
Corresponding author:
Hannah Mason-Bish, University of Sussex, Freeman Building, Falmer, East Sussex, BN1 9RH, UK.
Email: h.mason-bish@sussex.ac.uk
International Review of Victimology
2020, Vol. 26(1) 112–134
ªThe Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0269758019872903
journals.sagepub.com/home/irv
Introduction
In July 2016 Nottinghamshire Police announced that it would become the first UK force to treat
misogynistic street harassment as a form of hate crime. This decision followed a survey of 1,000
people undertaken by Nottingham Citizens Advice examining hate-crime provisions in which it
found that 38%of women who had experienced a hate crime felt in part that it had related to their
gender (Nottingham Citizens, 2014). They recommended a new approach that would provide
women with additional support in reporting and might also have an educative function and con-
tribute towards a ‘culture shift to reframe these behaviours as socially undesirable’ (Jeffs, 2016: 2).
It is of note that Nottinghamshire Police chose to use the term misogyny rather than the more
neutral ‘gender hostility’ so as to be clear that they were talking about hatred and hostility towards
women. This was the first time that gender had been officially recognised in hate-crime policing
policy in England and Wales; since then, several other forces have followed suit.
In the UK, the Crown Prosecution Service defines a hate crime as being any criminal offence
which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice
towards someone based on one (or more) of the five legally recognised personal characteristics.
1
These are racial identity, religious affiliation, disability, sexual orientation and transgender iden-
tity. All are included in legislation which allows for sentence enhancements to recognisethe
presence of hostility, while both racial and religious aggravation are additionally recognised as
separate offences. Gender is not currently recognised as a protected characteristic informing UK
hate-crime legislation in any respect.
Despite this omission, victim surveys have indicated that, when asked, some people do consider
themselves to have experienced ‘gender hate crime’. The largest source of information on criminal
victimisation in the UK is the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW).
2
This is undertaken
with a representative sample of 35,000 adults
3
about their experiences of being a victim of crime in
the previous 12 months, which is then used to estimate the overall amount of crime in England and
Wales.
4
The CSEW has collected data on hate-crime victimisation since 2009/10; for the first two
years (2009/10 and 2010/11) it listed ‘gender’ as one of the options for discerning on what identity
basis a person had been a victim of a hate crime. Since 2011 there has been some variation in the
way questions have been phrased; the 2011/12 survey replaced the term ‘gender’ with ‘sex’ and
included ‘gender identity’ in the list to reflect transgender hate crime. However, from 2012
onwards, the CSEW did not analyse responses related to hate on the basis of sex, instead only
publishing analyses related to the five recognised hate-crime strands cited above.
By multiplying incidence rates by population estimates, the findings suggested that there were
around 120,000 incidents of gender-motivated hate crime in the 2009/10 and 2010/11 periods.
Breaking this down further, the survey indicated that incidents were more likely to be against a
person than a household (90,000 and 30,000 respectively) and that men and women experienced
similar levels of victimisation (41,555 and 50,158 respectively). In addition, and contrary to other
forms of criminal victimisation, the estimates also suggested that for both genders, those in the
youngest age bracket (16–24) were the least likely to experience gender hate crime (Home Office,
2012).
A curiosity about the types of incidents categorised by victims as being indicative of ‘gender
hate crime’ coupled with the policing developments in actively recording such hostility led us to
conduct a pilot project in the form of an online survey to learn more about this developing
phenomenon. This article, based on responses received from the 85 self-selecting male and female
participants, offers insight into subjective understandings of what may or may not constitute a
Mason-Bish and Duggan113
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