Susan Williams, conservative in the House of Lords and a junior minister in the Interior Ministry, said in Parliament on Wednesday that, on an experimental basis, the government “will ask police forces to identify and record any crimes of violence against the person, including harassment. and harassment, as well as sexual offenses when the victim realizes he was motivated by hostility based on his sex. ”
The change will not require a change in the law, as it is now possible to classify these crimes as hate crimes. Williams said the motive for the move was experimental because the UK Legal Commission said the designation would not guarantee greater effectiveness in bringing justice to offenders.
Several prominent campaign groups in the UK had been pushing for misogyny to be considered a hate crime for some time. However, the murder of Sarah Everard forced a national conversation about the violence, harassment and intimidation that women face.
The move to register misogyny as a hate crime was welcomed by activists. Citizens UK, an organization that brings together communities in the UK to campaign for social change across society, tweeted: “Incredible news! … Recording is a vital step – it goes beyond policing. With data, society and the state can now build on that and take over the #misogyny endemic in our culture. “But others were concerned that the change would not necessarily lead to more crimes against women being reported.
“We urgently need better data on the prevalence and scale of sexual harassment that women face on a daily basis. A new way of recording crimes on their own will not achieve this, unless it is accompanied by funding for training police officers and transport workers, ”he said. says Caroline Raised Perez, author of Invisible Women: exposing the bias of data in a world designed for men.
“One of the factors behind the data gap on sexual harassment is that women do not report – and they do not report because they do not know who to report or what they can report”.
The UN Women of the United Kingdom published a report last week that said that more than 95% of all women did not report their experiences of sexual harassment, with 98% of women aged 18 to 34 years old not reporting incidents of sexual harassment.
There is no fixed date for the entry into force of the new measures, but Williams told parliament that the government “will soon start consultations with the National Council of Chiefs of Police and undertakes to begin experimental data collection from this autumn.”