The great thing about online communication is that, if someone’s a prick to you, or even worse, you can screen grab what they’ve done. You’ve got a record of them doing it in a way that perhaps you don’t when you’re walking down a dark street and someone shouts something offensive at you.
Though social media companies have tried to make their platforms a bit nicer, the presumption is - to both perpetrators and victims - that our courts won’t take seriously any allegation of online hate crimes.
But that’s going to change. Alison Saunders, director of public prosecutions at Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), has announced that it ‘commits to treat online hate crimes as seriously as those committed face to face.’
Writing for the* Guardian*, Saunders explained that ‘we must remember the common thread that links online purveyors of hate with those who commit physical hate crimes. That is, the desire to undermine and instil fear in those they target, both individually and collectively.’
It’s great to hear that the CPS is taking seriously crimes that are targeting people on the basis of hostility or prejudice towards characteristics such as race, religion, sexuality or disability. After all, as Saunders explains, ‘left unchallenged, even low-level offending can subsequently fuel the kind of dangerous hostility that has been plastered across our media in recent days’ - meaning the atrocities in both Charlottesville and Barcelona, carried out by far-right and Islamist terrorists respectively.
However, there’s a bit of an omission here, affecting, well, 51% of the UK’s population. Though Saunders mentioned gender in her article, gender is not a protected identity under hate crime law. Though the Equality Act protects against, say, someone shouting homophobic, ableist, racist or anti-religious nonsense at you, it doesn’t protect against any form of gender hate, like someone repeatedly calling you a slag, or worse.
Jess Phillips, an MP who used to work in domestic violence charities, and has experienced no end of sexist hate online (see, people listing all the ways they wouldn’t rape her, as a way of describing violent acts with the childish caveat of ‘NOT!’), had this response to Saunders' article"
When it was pointed out that gender isn’t a protected status under the law, Phillips responded: ‘I know, this I will work on’.
Sophie Walker, leader of the Women’s Equality Party, also had this to say:
#hatecrimematters began trending on Twitter, promptly filling up with tweets including hate speech against Muslims and black people..
Hate crimes are abysmal and can have profound emotional impacts on the victims. That the internet will become more accountable, and, hopefully, in tandem, the authorities will become more aware of what the internet does and is capable of, is fantastic news.
But hate crime against women isn’t a myth, and the fact that Muslim women bear the brunt of Islamophobic hate crimes far more than their male counterparts shows that hate crimes against protected identities outside of gender can will and do affect women in different ways to men. While it’s great our legislators are thinking forward, how’s about patching up the oversights of the past at the same time?
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Women Tell Of Islamophobic Attacks As Hate Crime Numbers Leap
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.