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Britain has been gripped by a national conversation about the scale of men’s violence against women since March, when Sarah Everard was abducted while walking home one night. 

At this week’s Conservative Party Conference, Home Secretary Priti Patel announced an inquiry into how serving police officer Wayne Couzens was able to abuse his position to seize, rape and murder the 33-year-old in a case that has sparked calls to unravel the culture of misogyny in the Metropolitan Police, and record misogyny as a hate crime across the UK. 

It’s a shock, then, to discover today that the Justice Secretary Dominic Raab has got completely the wrong end of the stick. 

During an interview on BBC Breakfast this morning, Dominic Raab stated that: ‘Misogyny is absolutely wrong whether it’s a man against a woman, or a woman against a man.’

Wait, what? 

Misogyny, to be clear, means hatred or contempt for women and girls. It doesn’t exist the other way around.

The Ministry of Justice is responsible for criminal justice, prison and probation services, civil courts, tribunals and family law hearings, safeguarding victims and regulating legal services. It’s a department of over 70,000 staff that also works to develop policy and deliver international justice. This considerable resource and powerful department is presided over by Raab. (For now.) 

In the UK a woman is killed by a man every three days, according to the Femicide Census. In the 28 weeks since Sarah Everard went missing there are some 81 cases where a woman has been killed and the suspect is a man. The same organisation has also found women have been killed by at least 15 serving or former police officers in the UK since 2009. Meanwhile, the Office for National Statistics estimates that 4.9million women have been victims of sexual assault in their lives, including 1.4 million who have been raped or faced attempted rape. 

Thus it would be not be an outlandish conclusion to suggest that a key part of the Justice Secretary’s job is to end men’s violence against women – a leading cause of premature death for women and a daily threat that forces women of all ages to adapt their behaviour. 

Raab simply cannot do the job that the public need him to do, with this level of disinterest and ineptitude

Add to the mix statistics that show less than 1.4 percent of alleged rapes are prosecuted and more that show men getting lenient sentences for murdering partners and girlfriends – such as Anthony Williams, recently found not guilty of murdering his wife because the pandemic contributed to him ‘flipping’; or Sam Pybus, given less than five years for choking his girlfriend because it was ‘rough sex’ and not murder – and you can see why some campaigners are calling this a national emergency. 

Unfortunately, you can’t respond to a national emergency if you don’t have the resources – of which comprehension of the emergency is, er, point one. 

In fact, given the scale of this emergency, not having the resources is making the situation much, much worse. It’s like calling the fire brigade and having them turn up with petrol in their hoses. 

Raab simply cannot do the job that the public need him to do, with this level of disinterest and ineptitude. 

There’s no such thing as women expressing misogyny against men. A good chunk of Twitter trolls advocate misandry as an equivalent – women’s dislike of men. But the whole point about misogyny is that it’s structural. It’s backed up by an economy, society and a political system that gives men preference.

Misogyny is supported, for example, by the pay gap – where women and mothers in particular are paid less because of their sex and are more likely to depend on welfare and experience poverty as a result. 

Misogyny is supported by a political system in which men outnumber women by two-thirds to a third, where women of colour, disabled women and working class women are barely represented, and in which some male MPs make policies based on their own experience and preferences. 

Meanwhile misogyny is supported by films, TV and advertising in which women exist as caricatures and stereotypes, there to be girlfriends and plot devices judged predominantly on their beauty and bodies while men lead and take action. 

Suggesting that we introduce misogyny as a hate crime is a suggestion that needs a big discussion, by people who understand what it means.

‘Hate’ in a criminal sense doesn’t mean arresting people for shouting disagreement at each other. It’s motivated by hatred of a particular characteristic. 

In my opinion, misogyny as a hate crime won’t work – because the problem is structural, and requires a detailed, consistent, unflagging and determined response in kind. 

It requires a rebalancing of our political system so that women’s voices and experiences are at the heart of our response. We can’t even start the conversation so long as we’re expecting women to report their experiences to a justice system run by a man who doesn’t know what we’re talking about. 

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