Hate Crime Legislation Review Consultation Response on behalf of Raise Your Voice
Below is the introduction to our submission on the Hate Crime Consultation - you can go to the button below to download the whole document. Please email us if you wish to use any part of the document for anything at contact@raiseyourvoice.community
Introduction
Raise Your Voice is a project designed to tackle sexual harassment and sexual violence in communities across Northern Ireland. It is a joint project bringing together the expertise of 4 different organisations, each with a wealth of experience in the women’s sector and in grassroots feminist campaigning in Northern Ireland; Women’s Resource & Development Agency (WRDA), Women’s Support Network (WSN), Northern Ireland Rural Women’s Network (NIRWN) Reclaim the Agenda (RTA) which includes a number of grassroots feminist groups including Belfast Feminist Network and Reclaim the Night Belfast.
Raise Your Voice also has a steering group consisting of representatives from numerous organisations from the voluntary and community sector, including youth organisations, LGBT+ organisations, Trade Unions, and beyond. As a project committed to fighting sexual harassment and sexual violence in Northern Ireland, part of our work is to hold workshops with women of all ages, all backgrounds, urban and rural, all across Northern Ireland. These workshops and the stories we are privileged to hear in them, form part of our knowledge base for this consultation response, alongside independent research.
One thing that has become apparent over the period of time we have been working on this project is the sheer scope and breath of the issue. One workshop participant described misogyny as something that is “spread over everything, like butter on warm toast”. This reality, recognised by so many women and apparently impossible to tackle issue-by-issue, is a part of the reason that we believe so passionately in the need to recognise misogyny as a form of hate crime.
In this consultation we will argue for gender to be a protected category, and we feel the need to stress again just how vital it is that we put this in the context of hate crime as a way of maintaining the hierarchies that exist in society already, of maintaining the status quo. As such misogyny is the issue, and this includes within it transmisogyny. It is difficult to overstate the degree to which misogyny impacts the lives of women and girls in Northern Ireland and indeed worldwide. The women that we speak to as part of this project tell us of the frequency of incidents of harassment and assault, the alarmingly young age at which it happens, the ways in which this changes their behaviours and their life choices from that moment forward, and the impacts that they carry throughout their lives. This is true worldwide, something that the #MeToo movement has highlighted for all of us, but it is true here too, and it is something that we have to begin to come to terms with if we are to tackle the epidemic of sexual violence and indeed domestic violence, harassment of public figures who are women, and indeed homophobia and transphobia. Northern Ireland is an especially patriarchal society by the standards of the day.
Still living in the shadow of a violent past, once described by Eileen Evason (quoting Cathy Harkin) as an “armed patriarchy”, the conflict here has left innumerable scars,one of which is the legacy of the violence carried out by men against women while the world was focused on the other kind of violence. Some of the women that we work with speak of the legacy of this violence. Others did not live through it, but they grew up in a society marred by violence and by silence and these unspoken wounds only reopen when something exposes them.The Raise Your Voice project was partially inspired by the “Rugby Rape Trial” in 2018, or more specifically by the reaction to it. The public conversation around it exposed such viciously misogynistic language and beliefs, such cruel double standards around sex, alcohol and what consequences people “deserve” for transgression. We wanted to speak to the people who can tell us directly about the impact these societal views have had on them as well as to speak to those who buy into them, and to dismantle them that way.