I will confine my remarks to Lords amendment 72. Let me to say at the outset that I understand the laudable intention behind it, but I want to explain why, with the greatest of respect, I believe it to be misconceived.
It was the murder of Stephen Lawrence that set the origins of hate crime in train. He was killed in 1993, and hate crime became a criminal offence in 1998 under the Crime and Disorder Act. There was some confusion about the chronology earlier, but it is set out in paragraph 1.3 of the final report of the Law Commission. A hate crime is not a stand-alone offence, but it elevates another crime, most commonly assault, to an aggravated offence under section 28 of the 1998 Act if the prosecution can show that the offence was motivated wholly or partly by hostility towards another group. In the following year, the Court of Appeal finessed the test that applied, saying, in The Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) v. Pal, that the prosecution must prove some demonstration of that hostility, most often a form of language that was used at the time when the crime was committed.
There are two reasons why I do not think that the amendment works in the context of violence against women. First, it sets the jury off down the wrong line of inquiry. Do we really want to legislate for a system that invites juries to judge the seriousness of an offence such as stalking, rape or domestic abuse through the prism of whether the perpetrator demonstrated hostility towards women? Even leading juries down that line of inquiry risks making acquittal more likely if they conclude that the defendant harboured no particular ill will towards women. When would we find examples of that kind of language? It would be much more likely in “stranger” contexts, and less likely when the victim had been on Tinder that night, had been out at a club or had been drinking, and this took place were behind closed doors—we know that that accounts for about 90% of serious sexual assaults—and we already have the greatest difficulties in securing convictions in such cases. Rape Crisis has said that
“the motivation of hostility is much more likely to apply to stranger perpetrators, and here we see the hate crime framework as propping up harmful myths about violence against women .”
My second reason concerns causation. Many offences against women are not motivated by hatred. Subtle, insidious factors are often at play—power, control, obsession, revenge, jealousy—none of which would meet the threshold for hate crime, but which are no less toxic or deserving of criminal punishment. In fact, we as a Parliament have worked collectively in the last decade to see the treatment of women through a more expansive
lens. We recognised these complex causes when we passed the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, with its provisions on revenge porn and coercive control, and when we criminalised stalking in 2012. It is with that in mind that I am regretfully of the view that making misogyny a hate crime would be regressive rather than progressive, and would deliver less, not more, justice for female victims.