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Originally Posted by Toy Soldier
True and that causes people to commit other crimes against minority groups that would not necessarily be classed as hate crimes... e.g. justifying robbing a shop or mugging someone because of their colour but the primary motivation being financial gain. It's different from a straight up "hate crime" because again, the motivation isn't purely to hurt someone for no reason other than that their very existence is offensive to you, such as a gay person being assaulted simply because "that's disgusting!", or an innocent person with middle-eastern appearance being assaulted "because Muslims are terrorists!"
The reason for identifying motivation / mindset isn't to excuse the crime or to make one crime less serious than another... it's to identify the causes and risk factors of crime with a view to reducing risk in future. It's important not to muddy definitions I guess  . Now, certainly, I'd say there's a probability that there ARE a few cases of men who are just very, very angry at women in general and attack someone innocent for that reason... and that WOULD be a hate crime... I just doubt it's the "usual" that male-on-female attacks are literal hate crimes. A hate crime isn't just "a crime that involves some element of hatred or dislike", it's a crime specifically motivated by hatred.
Of course people wrongly label things as "hate crimes" all the time... e.g. a white guy assaults a black guy on a train over some disagreement (unrelated to race) they're having and it's labelled a hate crime because they're different colours. |
Interesting points, I do see where you're coming from. Tackling the issue of why some men think women are less than them or why one race thinks another is less than them etc should be the way to go.
Going back to a point Brillo made earlier on about educating boys, I think this is the way to go but girls too and from a younger age so you never have to get to a point where it's necessary to tell people about consent etc. I think it's just as important to teach girls to expect to be treated with as much respect as boys (both by men and women) and that their input is as valid as boys etc from a young age (and also of course vice versa but I think its mainly an issue that girls get listened to less, get portrayed negatively when they display the same kind of traits that are seen as positives for boys (eg. girls are bossy/boys show good leadership skill. Girls are bitchy/Boys are behaving like girls....) Anyway I'm rambling a bit, basically I think all these tiny little things add up to girls being seen as less important and that leads to some men thinking they can do whatever they want because women are just playthings/objects for their amusement/not as important as men etc. And maybe if they grew up not thinking that it wouldn't be as big a problem in the future?