Should Cat-Calling Be Classified as a Hate Crime?

On Wednesday, Grimsby’s Labour MP Melanie Onn made a speech in parliament calling on the government to classify catcalling and other forms of sexist abuse as hate crimes. “All forms of abuse are committed disproportionately against women and girls, and the perpetrators are usually men,” she told Westminster Hall. “Violence against women and girls is part of what is stopping women achieving equality,” Melanie said, explaining that lower-level misogynistic incidents are so ubiquitous – 90% of women have experienced street harassment before they are 17, and 85% of women aged 18-24 report receiving unwanted sexual attention – that it has “become the wallpaper of their lives”. And it isn’t simply that lower-level incidents are so pervasive, so quotidian; but that a clear link has been found to more serious offenses. Citing findings from a Nottinghamshire Police pilot that has investigated sexist abuse as hate crimes since 2016, Melanie told Parliament that it “found men who carried out more serious sexual assaults ‘took part in this kind of low-level targeting or harassment of women.’”

Since the aims of Melanie’s speech were reported in the press earlier this week, the MP says she has experienced a furious backlash, all before she even had the opportunity to make her case. “The fact that I have had the temerity to call for this debate -- this exploration of ideas -- has provoked a backlash of vile fury. I have been told that I am in some way a man-hater, that I have no sense of humour and that I should most certainly learn to take a compliment,” she explained. Saying she would continue to discuss the issue, because she is ”not a snowflake, as has been suggested,” Melanie added that the backlash only “highlights why women and girls are so often put off from directly challenging behaviour at the time the incidents occur. They are put off from even reporting them, given that the potential response is so aggressive.”

It is not the first time that classing misogyny as a hate crime has been mooted. Six years ago, on International Women’s Day 2012, then Prime Minister David Cameron (and coalition pal Nick Clegg) signed a European convention on violence against women. In doing so, they pledged to take “necessary legislative measures” against those who broke its clauses, which included making sexist comments and shouting or whistling at women in the street -- though Cameron’s official spokesperson sought to downplay the catcalling element, telling press at the time, “We have harassment laws in this country. We are not proposing to criminalise wolf-whistling.”

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