My Lords, I raised my opposition to a version of this amendment previously. For once, I was planning to keep out of the gender identity argument—although I agree with both the speech and the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes—but I feel I must make some response to the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, who said that the concept of gender is causing no problems in the law or among judges. I am delighted about that, but let me tell you that the concept of gender is causing a huge number of problems for many women.
The judge advises that we need to talk to young people who include trans people among their friends. I point out that I have trans people among my friends and spend a huge amount of time talking to young people. There is not just one view on this; there are lots of views. One of the problems we have to recognise is that open debate about gender and trans issues is often chilled, for fear of accusations of hate or bigotry—and, ironically, most of the misogynistic abuse that I and other women have received in recent months and years has been on this issue of being gender-critical.
I will now go back to what I was going to say. My opposition to this amendment is based on a key concern: the need to avoid fuelling a narrative of fear that posits the idea that terrible and unimaginably horrific, but rare, instances of sexual violence and murder are part of a continuum of widespread misogynistic attitudes. This can too easily align everything from online trolling and catcalling to rape and domestic abuse under the label of misogyny—hatred of women.
There is limited time because we have very major things to discuss, so I will focus my remarks. I appreciate that the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, explicitly distinguishes between sexual violence crimes and other forms of crime that may be motivated by misogynistic intent, and that it is not an attempt to create any new criminal offences, being more concerned with the police recording and reporting of the number of crimes motivated by hostility towards sex and, sometimes, gender. This, we are told, is crucial to identifying patterns of behaviour and targeting police resources, so that we can build a national picture of violence against women and girls. However, hate crime legislation generally, as echoed in this amendment, in fact means that the data collected is based almost entirely on subjective perceptions and will not allow an accurate picture to emerge.
The amendment talks of a reported crime in which
“(a) the victim or any other person perceived the alleged offender, at the time of or immediately before or after the offence, to demonstrate hostility or prejudice based on sex, or (b) the victim or any other person perceived the crime to be motivated (wholly or partly) by hostility or prejudice towards persons who are of a particular sex”.
So this amendment would not help us understand data as fact but more how victims—or any other third parties—subjectively see either the motivation of the alleged offenders or the crime. To compound the issue, there is no legal or formal definition of “hostility”, so the CPS suggests that we use the everyday understanding of the word, which includes ill will, spite, contempt, prejudice, unfriendliness, antagonism, resentment and
dislike. This can lead only to the possibility of an ever- widening set of crimes being badged as misogynistic, with the only evidence being subjective.
The practical outcomes could be severe and serious, as the amendment would alter sentencing. This means, essentially, that, if someone thinks or feels that someone else is being hateful towards them, and the hostility in carrying out the crime is based on sex and explains their offence, that is enough for that person to be locked up in prison for longer. There is also a more insidious punishment: this amendment might mean that more and more behaviour—we know that we mean especially that of men and boys—is deemed to be misogynistic, destroying the reputation of those people once they are labelled as bigots who hate women, according to this categorisation, without necessarily being branded as such in reality.
According to the campaign literature sent out ahead of this discussion, this label of hostility via sex can be used to imply far more than hostility. However minor the original crime, if it is labelled as sex-based hostility we are told that it is an almost inevitable slippery slope and that this is the kind of person who will carry out, if they are not stopped, the most heinous crimes, such as rape, sexual violence and murder. Meanwhile, HOPE not Hate sent round a missive saying that this kind of sex-hostility is a slip road to far-right extremism.
Finally, the Fawcett Society claims that this amendment will give women protection from crime and help ensure the safety of women and girls. I say that it will not: if anything, it could distract the police from the practical, difficult but essential work of on-the-ground patrolling of streets, painstaking investigations, and so on, and the courage to see through those investigations and prosecutions. It might take valuable resources for the police away from policing if they are tangled up in the reporting and monitoring of staff and data which I do not think, as I have shown, is reliable. Consider one of the most gross examples of the abuse of women and girls: the grooming gangs that operated in parts of the north-west of England. Those women and girls would not have been helped one iota had those crimes been called misogynistic. The shameful neglect in the investigation and prosecution of that incident was surely not about whether it was seen as being driven by hostility to sex. This amendment avoids the real problem, is tokenistic and will not help women at all.