Is making misogyny a hate crime really a victory for women?

Misogyny will now be recorded as a hate crime by police. But is this really the victory for women’s rights that campaigners are claiming it to be?

It’s absolutely right, of course, that the law is bolstered so that incidents against women are taken seriously by the police. But the wording of the policy is disappointingly woolly, relying heavily on what the victim perceives as the motivation for the crime. Speaking in the House of Lords, Home Office minister Baroness Williams said that from the Autumn: 

‘We will ask police forces to record and identify any crimes of violence against the person… where the victim perceives it to have been motivated by a hostility based on their sex.’

In the aftermath of the Sarah Everard case, Boris Johnson has talked about how women who bring serious complaints about violence to the police must be ‘properly heard’.