This is the text of Hilary McCollum’s speech on the Violence Against Women as Hate Crime? panel discussion at Feminism in London 2010.
Hatred and misogyny are important to understanding violence against women and girls. The development of my own feminism was deeply influenced by Andrea Dworkin’s Woman Hating. It provided a coherent narrative explaining how violence against women and girls is sustained and revealed by cultural representations from fairy tales to pornography. Dworkin made explicit how the cultural model of dominant masculinity and submissive femininity is linked to actual violence. She also made clear that such violence is not inevitable – it’s culturally not biologically determined.
In Britain, the state has not recognised hate as a motivation for violence against women and girls and until recently did not recognise violence against women and girls as a continuum. I think not recognising hate as a motivating factor tends to normalise violence against women and girls.
Hate crimes are seen by the Home Office and in law as different to other crimes. The Home Office website states that hate crimes are a form of discrimination; they result in greater psychological harm than equivalent crimes not motivated by hate; they create fear not only in the individual victim but also in the group to which they belong; and they encourage communities to turn on each other.
The Lawrence Inquiry resulted in real improvements to the state’s responses to hate crime. Two developments which might be of interest for violence against women and girls are sentence uplifts and minimum tariffs. The former enable judges to increase sentences where an offence is proved to be motivated by hostility. The latter provide a minimum starting point for a life sentence tariff for murderers motivated by hostility.
It might sound like I think we should be campaigning for gender to be added to the definition of hate crime. However I think there would be drawbacks, both theoretical and practical, to defining violence against women and girls as a hate crime.
The Duluth integrated approach to domestic violence developed a model which showed how power and control were at the heart of both domestic violence, and patriarchal violence generally. Both hate crimes and violence against women and girls are crimes of domination. Without power, hate crimes can be depoliticised as motivated by irrational prejudice, rather than domination, exclusion and control.
As well as this theoretical concern, I also have a practical one – I don’t think defining violence against women and girls as hate crime would help its victims access services and redress. Many people covered by the existing hate crime definition don’t readily identify their experiences with the term – ‘hate’ can feel too big a word, especially for crimes committed by people known to the victim.
Current concepts around hate crime generally fail to adequately address inter-sectionality (or multiple discrimination). The Metropolitan Police Service reanalysed cases of racist and homophobic hate crimes and found that a disproportionate number of victims were disabled. It appears that there is an interaction between different protected characteristics which puts some people particularly at risk.
This is also true for violence against women and girls. We know that disabled women, for example, experience higher rates of victimisation. We need to pay more attention to women’s multiple identities and how they influence experiences of violence.
During the early development of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, End Violence Against Women (EVAW) successfully lobbied for violence to be treated as a cross-cutting issue which impacted across marginalised groups. The Commission has recently published its first ‘triennnial review’, which identifies identity-based violence as one of 5 key equality challenges. The Commission is developing an identity-based violence strategy which will include gender. We need to ensure that power and control are recognised as key motivations for violence against women and girls with hatred as an aspect of such domination.
So, rather than having violence against women and girls recognised as a hate crime, I want us to re-politicise hate crimes as crimes of domination. I want us to do more to address intersectionality in both hate crime and violence against women and girls. And finally I want us to continue to promote an understanding of violence against women and girls as a continuum of behaviours, rooted in a culture of misogyny and motivated by power. Only by doing so can we hope to end it.
Hilary McCollum, 23 October 2010