Misogyny: a hate crime or a private affair? : A socio-cultural study of the intersection between hate crime legislation and men’s violence against women

Sammanfattning: Hate crime and men’s violence against women are two well-recognised and highly prioritised human rights phenomena in both international and local contexts. Yet, the idea of linking the two phenomena together has received very limited support. As a series of lethal acts of Incel- violence – violence characterised by misogynistic motives and an alt-right ideology of male supremacy – have taken place globally in recent years, a discussion on the region of the human rights spectrum where gendered violence and hate crime legislation overlap is more relevant than ever. Thus, this study’s overarching purpose is to – through a comparative analysis of studies on hate crime and men’s violence against women from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Sweden – investigate the definition of hate crime and its scope in relation to gendered violence with a primary objective of identifying factors that explain why violent crimes against women motivated by misogynistic principles are rarely, if ever, recognised as hate crimes. By drawing on explanatory models of normalisation and theories on power relations, the practice of othering, the male norm and the norm of masculinity, and gendered spheres, the study sets out to evaluate a thesis that suggests that the infrequent inclusion of violent crimes with female victims in the legal and general perception of hate crime can be at least partially explained with reference to the normalisation of male violence against women, and the traditional expectation and assumption that violence against women is rooted in personal, emotional conflicts rather than impersonal hate motives. The analysis initially explores how the gender category is positioned within the legal phenomenon of hate crime by looking at a generalised criteria for hate crime, the normative view on hate crime victims, the reporting and statistics of hate crime, and arguments for and against the inclusion of a gender category in legal statues on bias crimes. The analysis then moves on to analyse three different categories of violence against women – domestic abuse, sexual assault and rape, and Incel-violence – in relation to gendered power dynamics and norms. The study’s results show that even though motives of hate can be linked to different forms of gendered violence, the traditional understanding of what constitutes a hate crime and a hate crime victim along with stereotypical assumptions on what male-on-female violence looks like, makes men’s violence against women appear incompatible with the hate crime phenomenon even in situations when cases of gendered violence actually fit into the generalised hate crime criteria that legal authorities and the public accept as the definition of a hate crime.