Last week, the Home Office announced their plans to treat extreme misogyny as a form of extremism, with Home Secretary Yvette Cooper ordering a review of the UK’s counter-extremism strategy. “For too long, governments have failed to address the rise in extremism, both online and on our streets, and we’ve seen the number of young people radicalised online grow. Hateful incitement of all kinds fractures and frays the very fabric of our communities and our democracy. Action against extremism has been badly hollowed out in recent years, just when it should have been needed most,” Cooper said in a statement.
As violence against women and girls has spiralled into an ever more urgent issue – so much so that police chiefs recently described the current situation as a “national emergency” – politicians have been periodically urged to keep women safe by creating new laws. But while the Conservatives took little concrete action to help stamp out violence against women and girls, it seems as though the new Labour government is already adopting a different approach. Alongside Home Secretary Cooper’s plans to expand the definition of ‘extremism’ to encompass extreme misogyny, in October 2023, Angela Rayner – now Deputy Prime Minister – pledged to make misogyny a hate crime if Labour were elected, while MP Sarah Jones reaffirmed this pledge during a TV debate in June.
For some, the signs that Labour are planning a more punitive approach to extreme misogyny is good news. But while these plans mark a welcome break from the Conservatives’ laissez-faire approach to the rise of extreme misogyny, will classing extreme misogyny as extremism really have a positive impact on women?
“An abolitionist, anti-carceral feminist response is the only one that recognises the importance of non-state solutions” – Dr Emily Hart
Dr Jilly Kay is Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media at Loughborough University. She says she feels “ambivalent” about the Home Secretary’s plans. “On the one hand, treating misogyny as a form of extremism under the law can be important in symbolic terms, recognising the depth and urgency of the problem, and sending a signal that it must be treated seriously. This is especially important in a context where it is often assumed that gender equality has long been won, and that misogyny and sexism are things of the past,” she says.
However, Dr Kay adds that she’s sceptical of the new government’s “law-and-order” approach to the rise of reactionary politics – an approach also taken in their response to the recent racist and Islamophobic riots. “This approach is problematic, because it treats racism and Islamophobia as anomalies, belonging only to fringe elements in our society,” she says. “But they are absolutely baked into the mainstream and normalised and legitimised in our mainstream culture and politics. In framing misogyny as a form of extremism practised only by the ‘radicalised’, the nature and extent of the problem is similarly obscured.” She adds that the government’s current plan “reveals a fundamental paucity of ambition in tackling misogyny.”
Dr Emily Hart is a Lecturer in Criminology at Leeds Beckett University and an anti-prison activist. She adds that she is unsurprised that the government is introducing plans of this kind. “It is the same brand of liberal carceral feminism that seeks to utilise state policies as a route to equality that has repeatedly failed to ensure the safety of women for decades,” she says. “It is a headline-grabbing manoeuvre designed to present the state as a caring and benign entity as opposed to a punitive and criminalising institution.”
Carceral feminism has to always allow itself the perspective that misogyny is somehow foreign to it (and our societies), external, an aberration. It sees the world as full of monsters who just have to be punished, and the world is somehow at peace. https://t.co/fDkWRzYmff
— Stipe Nogalo (@snogalo) August 18, 2024
In any case, there are already laws against abuse, rape, and murder, which evidently have done little to deter perpetrators of violence against women: according to the Ministry of Justice, only 15 per cent of people who experience sexual violence report it to the authorities – and of this small fraction, just 1.6 per cent result in a charge or summons. “Conviction rates are staggeringly and shockingly low. None of these [carceral] approaches tackle the root cause,” says Dr Hart.
The urge to create new laws to punish violent men is entirely understandable, especially as it’s tricky to see how else the issue of misogyny could be tackled. But, as aforementioned, it’s clear that if we’re serious about addressing misogyny then we need to try something altogether more radical instead of ramping up existing laws which already do little to stop gendered violence and abuse. “To meaningfully challenge misogyny would require things like significant investment in critical education at all levels,” Dr Kay says. “And given that the resurgence of misogyny is taking place through digital culture, it would also require an ambitious and radical plan to democratise the ownership of media, and to challenge the stranglehold that unaccountable tech giants and reactionary patriarchs like Elon Musk have over our digital culture.” She adds that it’s vital to provide “the material means” for women to leave abusive partners: “so adequate funding for housing, Legal Aid, and Rape Crisis centres would need to be restored.”
“These are things that could meaningfully challenge misogyny and its devastating impacts, but this government is not a feminist government,” says Dr Kay. “As socialist feminists have long argued, you cannot have meaningful gender equality under capitalism – and particularly this current form of capitalism in which growing precarity, alienation, and despair are leading to all kinds of intensified hatreds, as well as removing the means by which people could leave abusive situations.”
“As socialist feminists have long argued, you cannot have meaningful gender equality under capitalism” – Dr Jilly Kay
This chimes with Dr Hart. “An abolitionist, anti-carceral feminist response is the only one that recognises the importance of non-state solutions,” she says. “Rather than relying on institutions of state violence to address sexual violence and misogyny, abolitionists and anti-carceral feminists argue and understand that the two are effectively the same and advocate for the abolition of both. We need to radically rebuild and reassemble our communities, and now invest in non-carceral resources that strengthen these communities.”
To stamp out misogyny for good, it’s clear we need to address the issue at the root – which, in practice, is a lot more difficult than creating some snappy new laws. “We need to find ways of addressing the economic, social and cultural conditions that are leading to the resurgence of misogyny,” Dr Kay says. “Understanding it simply as an issue of extremism, to be cracked down upon through carceral means, is to divert us from the economic, social and cultural conditions within which it is flourishing, along with racism, Islamophobia, and transphobia. Misogyny absolutely must be taken on as part of the rise of reactionary politics – but it needs a response that is anti-fascist, not carceral.”
