[Kizzy]

Originally Posted by Toy Soldier

To be fair though I still think it's different... my understanding of a hate crime is exactly as you say but what makes it a hate crime is that hatred of the group is the motivation for the crime... like there is literally no other reason for the attack than "I just hate Muslims" or whatever.

Attacks on women by men are different. They would usually have either a personal motivation or be a sexual assault... and it's not that they aren't driven by misogyny - it's just that misogyny is what makes the attack "psychologically permissible" to them (i.e. they see women as lesser, not deserving of respect, open to being made their victim... hating women allows them to feel like they "deserved it" etc.) but the motivation in itself is very rarely "I just randomly attack women because I hate women."... and groups of men aren't attacking women "because they hate women". They may well hate women of course, but their motivations tend to be "other".

I guess for that reason I find it slightly dangerous to start labelling them "hate crimes". Understanding the motivation behind crime is important to tackling it, and it seems that when asking "why did this happen", the answer "Oh he just hates women is all" would be falling well short of the mark there. Whereas with other actual hate crimes it literally can be as simple as "she hates black people" / "he hates gay people" etc.

I don't understand your logic here how can you apply reasoning to misogyny and not racism or homophobia?

'they see women as lesser, not deserving of respect, open to being made their victim.'

Are not the explanations for all three practically identical?

[user104658]

Originally Posted by Kizzy

I don't understand your logic here how can you apply reasoning to misogyny and not racism or homophobia?

'they see women as lesser, not deserving of respect, open to being made their victim.'

Are not the explanations for all three practically identical?

They're not, but I can't think of any way to explain it differently so .

IF a man were to attack a woman for NO other reason than that she's a woman... then that would be a hate crime. It's just very unusual for that to actually happen. The vast majority of male-on-female attacks are either domestic abuse related, or sexual in nature. Muggings are also not hate crimes, they are financially motivated crimes, but that point is largely moot here as men are actually far more likely to be victims of mugging than women.

It's a hate crime when hatred is the motivation. Whether that's against women or minorities. A group of guys jumping a gay man because they noticed a fat roll of £20's in his wallet and want to take them is not a hate crime. A group of guys jumping a gay man because they saw him kissing his boyfriend and it made them angry is a hate crime. Likewise, a man attacking women because he's been rejected or something and has now decided that he simply hates all women and simply wants to hurt them could be called a hate crime... but a man attacking a woman he knows in an argument (the most common type of assault) is very unlikely to be a hate crime, and a sexual assault is a sexual assault. They're not "less serious" offences - I think this seems to be what some people are getting worried about - it's just a definition of the type of crime. A hate crime could be something as simple as someone being spat at or destruction of property. A domestic incident can range all the way up to murder in terms of seriousness. It's not about "how bad it is", or throwing the word "HATE!" at it to make it seem "more bad".


Then again, people don't seem all that bothered about actual definitions these days and are happy to clutter up language with their own ideas. "I'm gonna call X, Z because I think that X is Z... even though X should only be X, and actually was Y all along, but I wanna call it Z so it's Z."

[Nicky91]

i also find our dutch crimewatch a bit racist tbh, cause they only show us crimes committed by people with middle-eastern, eastern-european, and caribbean backgrounds


like they want to say to us that the normal ''white'' dutch people do nothing wrong at all i find that such bullsh*t


everyone is equal to each other

[ChristmasNeeve]

I can see both your points on it tbh But if you see a person as "less than you" and therefore can be treated whatever way you want, how is that different from how racist people see black people for example, they think that black people are less than them so they can treat them whatever way they want

[user104658]

Originally Posted by Niamh.

I can see both your points on it tbh But if you see a person as "less than you" and therefore can be treated whatever way you want, how is that different from how racist people see black people for example, they think that black people are less than them so they can treat them whatever way they want

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.

[ChristmasNeeve]

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?

[Tom4784]

I'm all for the idea of preaching hatred or violence towards women being a hate crime, I'm all for violence towards a woman BECAUSE they are a woman being a hate crime but it's just the bringing of the sexual crimes under that umbrella that I take issue with, I think it has the inadvertent affect of potentially making male victims less likely to come forward when most male victims will rarely come forward in the first place.

[Jack_]

There are some really interesting reflections on the drawbacks of hate crime/anti-discrimination legislation in Dean Spade's Normal Life

Critical race theorists have developed analyses about the limitations of anti-discrimination law that are useful in understanding the ways these all reforms have and will continue to fail to deliver meaningful change to trans people. Alan Freeman's critique of what he terms the "perpetrator perspective" in discrimination law is particularly helpful in conceptualizing the limits of the common trans rights strategies. Freeman's work looks at laws that prohibit discrimination based on race. He exposes how and why anti-discrimination and hate crime statutes do not achieve their promises of equality and freedom for people targeted by discrimination and violence. Freeman argues that discrimination law misunderstands how racism works, which makes it fail to effectively address it.

Discrimination law primarily conceptualizes the harm of racism through the perpetrator/victim dyad, imagining that the fundamental scene is that of a perpetrator who irrationally hates people on the basis of their race and fires or denies service to or beats or kills the victim based on that hatred. The law's adoption of this conception of racism does several things that make it ineffective at eradicating racism and help it contribute to obscuring the actual operations of racism. First, it individualizes racism. It says that racism is about bad individuals who intentionally make discriminatory choices and must be punished. In this (mis)understanding, structural or systemic racism is rendered invisible. Through this function, the law can only attend to disparities that come from the behavior of a perpetrator who intentionally considered the category that must not be considered (e.g., race, gender, disability) in the decision she was making (e.g., hiring, firing, admission, expulsion). Conditions like living in a district with underfunded schools that "happens to be" 96 percent students of color, or having to take an admissions test that has been proven to predict race better than academic success or any of a number of disparities in life conditions (access to adequate food, health care, employment, housing, clean air and water) that we know stem from and reflect long-term patterns of exclusion and exploitation cannot be understood as "violations" under the discrimination principle, and thus remedies cannot be won. This narrow reading of what constitutes a violation and can be recognized as discrimination serves to naturalize and affirm the status quo of maldistribution. Anti-discrimination law seeks out aberrant individuals with overtly biased intentions. Meanwhile, all the daily disparities in life chances that shape our world along lines of race, class, indigeneity, disability, national origin, sex, and gender remain untouchable and affirmed as non-discriminatory or even as fair.

(pp. 83-85)

Hate crime laws are an even more direct example of the limitations of the perpetrator perspective's conception of oppression. Hate crime laws frame violence in terms of individual wrongdoers. These laws and their advocates portray violence through a lens that oversimplifies its operation and suggests that the criminal punishment system is the proper way to solve it. The violence targeted by hate crime laws is that of purportedly aberrant individuals who have committed acts of violence motivated by bias. Hate crime law advocacy advances the fallacy that such violence is especially reprehensible in the eyes of an equality-minded state, and thus must be punished with enhanced force. While it is no doubt true that violence of this kind is frequent and devastating, critics of hate crime legislation argue that hate crime laws are not the answer. First, as mentioned above, hate crime laws have no deterrent effect: people do not read law books before committing acts of violence and choose against bias-motivated violence because it carries a harsher sentence. Hate crime laws do not and cannot actually increase the life chances of the people they purportedly protect.

Second, hate crime laws strengthen and legitimize the criminal punishment system, a system that targets the very people these laws are supposedly passed to protect. The criminal punishment system was founded on and constantly reproduces the same biases (racism, sexism, homphobia, transphobia, ableism, xenophobia) that advocates of these laws want to eliminate. This is no small point, given the rapid growth of the US criminal punishment system in the last few decades, and the gender, race, and ability disparities in whom it targets. The United States now imprisons 25 percent of the world's prisoners although it has only 5 percent of the world's population. Imprisonment in the United States has quadrupled since the 1980s and continues to increase despite the fact that violent crime and property crime have declined since the 1990s. The United States has the highest documented rate of imprisonment per capita of any country. A 2008 report declared that the United States now imprisons one in every 100 adults. Significant racial, gender, ability, and national origin disparities exist in this imprisonment. One in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34 are imprisoned. While men still vastly outnumber women in prisons, the rate of imprisonment for women is growing far faster, largely the result of sentencing changes created as part of the War on Drugs, including the advent of mandatory minimum sentences for drug convictions. An estimated 27 percent of federal prisoners are noncitizens. While accurate estimates of rates of imprisonment for people with disabilities are difficult to obtain, it is clear that the combination of severe medical neglect of prisoners, deinstitutionalization of people with psychiatric disabilities without the provision of adequate community services, and the role of drug use in self-medicating account for high rates.

In a context of mass imprisonment and rapid prison growth targeting traditionally marginalized groups, what does it mean to use criminal punishment-enhancing laws to purportedly address violence against those groups?

(pp. 87-88)

https://biblio.csusm.edu/sites/defau...ith_rights.pdf

It's (that chapter especially) definitely worth a read

[In the Drunk Tank]

Spot the Sociology grad

[Jack_]

Not sure if sarcasm but

[In the Drunk Tank]

Yeah sorry that came across a bit rude lol, that's just some serious academic stuff

[Kizzy]

That's all we need 'gradsplaining'...
(Thanks for that Jack will read later)

[Alf]

Why are we looking for and creating reason's to lock everybody up?

What happened to freedom?

[montblanc]

we love a law