Hate Crime Law: Misogyny
House of Commons · Westminster Hall · 7 Sep 2026 · 28 speeches · Official Report
[Sir Edward Leigh in the Chair ]
I beg to move, That this House has considered e-petition 746640 relating to crimes motivated by misogyny and hate crime law. It is always a privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. In February, Amara Relf wrote an excellent blog post called “Students need misogyny to be recognised as a hate crime”. This is how the post starts: “When we began our roles as sabbatical officers, one priority was clear: improving student safety. Very quickly, it became apparent that while serious sexual offences can carry severe sentences, the everyday behaviours that shape women’s lives, catcalling, groping, sexually suggestive comments, and harassment, are too often minimised, overlooked, or left entirely unpunished. Sexual harassment, as its own category, is rarely criminalised in practice. As a result, many students are left asking a difficult question: why report something when it feels unlikely that anything will be done?” This lack of consequence not only enables harmful behaviour but also actively discourages reporting. This is why we-Lily, Amara, and Holly-have launched a petition calling for misogyny to be recognised as a hate crime.” I thank Amara, Lily and Holly for the petition, which has attracted 114,927 signatures, including 123 from my own constituency. Amara and her colleagues also commissioned a survey among Russell Group universities that found that 67% of students would be more likely to report their experiences if misogyny were treated as a hate crime. Amara...
I thank my hon. and learned Friend for making an excellent speech, which I agree with wholeheartedly. Before he finishes, does he agree that it is also important for us to reflect on the intersectional nature of hate crime? Women will experience hate crime for lots of different reasons, including being a woman who is gay or a woman who is black, Asian or minority ethnic. Would he say a little about that and its importance?
I defer to my hon. Friend and pay tribute to the work that she has done in this area over many years. It is important that she has raised that issue, because it is something that the petitioners wrote about in the article that led to the petition and this debate. The way that discrimination and prejudice operate is not compartmentalised by protected characteristics in the Equality Act 2010. Quite often, a number of those characteristics are present at the same time. It is important that we have a system that understands that first and foremost, so that we can ensure that the way that victims are dealt with actually takes account of those different needs. We will not necessarily treat everyone the same, but we will treat them in the way that they need to be treated, having regard to their protected characteristics. I thank my hon. Friend for raising that point. In her summing up speech, will the Minister address some particular questions? First, when will section 145 of the 2026 Act be commenced? I understand it is not yet in force. Secondly, what assessment have the Government made of the merits of introducing sex as an aggravating factor in respect of all offending, not just offences under the Crime and Disorder Act, which is the ask of the petitioners? Finally, do the Government have any plans to require existing police officers to undergo training on gender-based violence, given that it is currently only for those being brought into the system? I look forward to hearing...
It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Sir Edward. I congratulate the hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) on introducing the debate so thoughtfully. For months, I have been campaigning for legislation to combat the alarming trend of nightlife filming. Women are being filmed in public without their knowledge or consent, with the footage then shared online for millions to view. Collectively, such content has been viewed more than 3 billion times in just three years. Algorithms are not neutral; they elevate what captures attention, which is often what is extreme, polarising or degrading. Nightlife videos are accompanied by misogynistic comments and abuse, driving engagement and generating profits for the video creator. That means that misogynistic content is not just present; it is incentivised and rewarded. For victims, the impact is devastating. They are ridiculed and humiliated, they face reputational damage, and they are left fearing for their safety in public. Yet, once again, the law is scrambling to catch up with emerging forms of misogynistic abuse. I saw this during my campaign to make the disgusting act of upskirting a criminal offence, which led to the Voyeurism (Offences) Act 2019. At the time, there was a clear gap in the law and an urgent need to act, but even then it was obvious that we were responding to one manifestation of a much wider problem. Today, we are seeing increasingly sophisticated forms of online abuse, from...
My hon. Friend talks about co-ordinated campaigns and harassment. Over the weekend, I, like many people, saw the manhandling of a female protestor at the Reform conference and the horrendous comments made about that individual on social media. Does she agree that that was completely unacceptable, that we should condemn it and that it is shameful that Members from some other political parties are not here to talk about violence against women and girls and misogyny is all its forms?
I thank my hon. Friend for raising that disgusting footage and the events that led up to the video being made. All of that reinforces the message that people act with impunity because they think that is the way they can behave towards women. Making misogyny a hate crime would ultimately, at its root, stop that. It will not change everything, but it will at least challenge the attitudes that some members of the public still display towards women or minority groups. On sex-based harassment and violence, my hon. Friend is right, and I thank him for raising the matter. This is happening at a pace and scale that we have not seen before. Technology has made it easier to commit these acts, and social media platforms have made it easier for them to spread. However, the underlying issue has not changed: violence against women and girls is an epidemic in the UK and, to be honest, not just in the UK-it spans other countries and continents. One in four women in England and Wales will experience domestic abuse in their lifetime and one in four have been raped or sexually assaulted since the age of 16. Those are not isolated crimes; they are part of a wider pattern. We always use these numbers, but each instance is a tragedy-it is something that ruins a life. In December, the Government published their new violence against women and girls strategy. Its focus on prevention, education and early intervention is welcome and long overdue. The strategy must remain a priority for the new...
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I congratulate my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) on introducing the debate. I am grateful to the petitioners for bringing this important issue before the House, and to the more than 114,000 people who signed the petition, including over 100 from my constituency. Might I say, as a former sabbatical officer myself, that this is yet more evidence that the phrase “student politics” should be seen as a compliment in this place, rather than a criticism? Misogyny and violence against women and girls are not inevitable, and they should not be dismissed as something that women and girls simply have to put up with, whether on the street, in the workplace, in school or, increasingly, as the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) said, online. I have spoken in this place before about the scourge of deepfakes and AI-enabled abuse. In the spirit of cross-party collaboration, I also commend the work of Baroness Owen in this regard. I welcome the Government’s commitment to tackle violence against women and girls and halve it within a decade. Prevention, early intervention, relentless pursuit of the perpetrators and proper support for victims are the foundations that we absolutely need. We need to deal with the attitudes and behaviours that allow violence and abuse to develop in the first place. That is particularly important when we consider the growth of misogynistic material online....
I thank the hon. Member for mentioning women fleeing domestic abuse. Their recovery should be subject to a longer-term strategy; it is not just about finding crisis accommodation. Often, women face their abusers for many years and do not get any support. Does he agree that we need to look at the longer-term effects, too?
I absolutely agree, and I thank the hon. Member for making that point. That takes me to the next point I wanted to raise, from the second specialist organisation that I spoke to today. ARCH Teesside does vital work supporting victims and survivors of sexual violence and preventing harm before situations escalate; it puts wraparound support around an individual. It raised with me today a practical concern about what will happen to prevention funding, particularly when police and crime commissioners are abolished from 2028. They are often a main source of funding for local specialist violence against women and girls organisations. ARCH Teesside is concerned that the need for services will not change when the structures change, and it does not have certainty about the funding currently held by PCCs. Organisations such as ARCH need to be able to plan ahead, retain specialist staff and know what funding framework they will be working with. I will be grateful if the Minister can give some reassurance that specialist local services will not lose dedicated prevention funding as responsibilities move away from PCCs, and tell us a little about the clarity that organisations will receive about the future framework into which they will need to bid.
The hon. Gentleman makes a really important point about certainty of funding. Some of the organisations that I have spoken to in my Chelmsford constituency that deal with victims of domestic abuse point out to me that often the funding is project-based. It is not about what they have tried before, have proven to work and want to continue with; they find that people say, “Oh, yes, but we’re starting this new project now, so we’re only accepting bids for new projects and things that haven’t been done before,” and all the great work that has been done before is forgotten. Does he agree that we are always going to be chasing our tails in that way, and nobody will be well served by it, and that we need certainty of funding for things that are proven to work as well as for trialling new stuff?
I agree. This is slightly tangential to this debate-I apologise-but when I was in local government, we set up a specialist team to work with families and young people at risk of exploitation, and we gave them that sort of long-term focus and freedom to approach things in a range of different ways, rather than giving them time-limited funding, say for three months. Chopping and changing can be very disruptive for families, and it is exactly the same here. The petitioners are right to ask Parliament to take misogyny more seriously. The Government have taken some important steps, which I welcome, but I hope they will now build on that work, look carefully at the remaining gaps in the law and, above all, make sure that the ambition of halving violence against women and girls is matched by what women experience in communities such as mine.
It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Sir Edward. I want to thank everybody who signed the petition, as a number of Members have thanked those in their constituencies who signed it; it is incredibly important that we hear from them in this manner. I thank my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) for opening the debate and setting out so clearly the breadth of this issue and why it is so important. The Government’s landmark violence against women and girls strategy was published last December. It stressed a whole-of-society approach to prevention, in which all of us have a responsibility to call out harmful behaviours and to role-model positive behaviours. That responsibility cuts right across the public sphere: our shared spaces, our workplaces, our institutions and, of course, online. Online influencers hold a unique position in the public sphere, and their reach often goes further than that of our newspapers and broadcasters, yet their content is far less regulated. That is concerning given how social media platforms work: influencers profit financially from engagement, incentivising content that amplifies shocking images, awful videos and abuse, and that shapes the attitudes of impressionable young people. The platforms profit, too; they make huge sums of money from this. According to Government figures, in 2025, 95% of young people had heard of Andrew Tate. Ninety-five per cent-that is unbelievable. It gets worse, though,...
It is pretty clear that young people fall into all sorts of traps, and we do not want our prisons to be full of young offenders who have displayed misogynistic behaviours and attitudes, but sometimes the law can act as a regulator of this type of behaviour. Does the hon. Member agree, therefore, that changing the law is a powerful tool in our toolkit for changing behaviour altogether?
I absolutely agree, and I will go on to extol the virtues of what many people are calling for. It is imperative that there is real clarity on this, so that people take it more seriously than I think they do, and so that we are extremely clear about what is and is not accepted. There is this creep right across society whereby, as soon as you hear something online, it becomes okay, and therefore the more it is repeated. We really do have to make sure that the law reinforces that it is not okay and that we have to stop it happening. Many parents hope to instil in their children the values of a good society, but they cannot do that if they are constantly being undermined by all these posts and by individuals such as Andrew Tate. The law must recognise that disproportionate influence; if an individual or organisation profits from the engagement of a larger audience, they must fulfil a duty to that audience by making sure that their content is fully reflective of the law. I hope that when we change the law, content will have to change as a result. Classifying misogyny as a hate crime, as many Members might agree, would raise the degree of legal and social scrutiny of these influencers. To support that new framework, scrutiny must be proportionate to the size of somebody’s following, with influencers who have tens of thousands of followers given an enshrined duty of care for their audience. I advocate that even those with 500 or more followers are influential, and they need to...
It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Sir Edward. I thank those across the country who signed this petition to ensure that we had this really important debate. Violence against women and girls is a national emergency. As others have said before me, it is really important that we underline that: it is an emergency. This is affecting a whole generation, and I am terrified of what that means for society if we do not deal with it. Liberal Democrats have long called for misogyny to be made a hate crime so, while we very much welcome the Government’s amendment to extend the list of aggravated offences under hate crime legislation to cover sex or presumed sex, and while I was proud to sponsor the amendment that extended that to LGBT people and disabled people in the last parliamentary Session, my Liberal Democrat colleagues and I agree with the petitioners that Ministers should go further and amend the Sentencing Act to ensure that all crimes motivated by misogyny are classed as hate crimes. I also want to highlight that the extension of aggravated offences to cover sex, disability, sexual orientation and transgender identity has not yet been brought into force, so I hope to hear a timeline from the Minister on when that will be brought forward by the required secondary legislation. Hatred is just as unacceptable no matter its type; that means that there must be zero tolerance for misogyny. As the petitioners noted, misogyny can fuel crimes including sexual violence. The...
Thank you very much for chairing the debate, Sir Edward. I thank all hon. Members for their very good contributions and the petitioners for securing this important debate with so many signatures. The practice of misogyny-a hatred of or prejudicial attitude towards women-is one of the most disgusting behaviours in our society. As a member of a party that wants to treat people on the basis of their actions and decisions, I consider crimes committed against someone because of their sex to be clearly reprehensible; the people involved deserve to face the full weight of the law. Female hon. Members across the House will be acutely aware of the abuse and terrible attitudes directed towards women. Almost too many statistics could be used to illustrate how so many people experience abuse and crimes directed at them merely because they are women. Without pre-empting the Minister’s response, I am aware that the Government may point to the changes implemented through the amendment of the Crime and Policing Act that made changes to the Crime and Disorder Act. I noted that the Government’s response to the petition made it clear that they believe that that change responds to many of the concerns addressed, alongside other measures they are taking in their violence against women and girls strategy. In addition, I understand that the independent review of public order and hate crime legislation will feed into considerations of whether further steps are to be taken. Although there are...
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward, and I am grateful to my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) for opening this debate on behalf of the Petitions Committee. I pay tribute to the organisers of the petition, including several student unions, whose commitment and hard work have helped to ensure that this important issue receives the attention it deserves. Sadly, their report, which highlights the scale of the problem, is only reinforced by other surveys and research. We know that people aged between 16 and 24 are more likely to be victims of sexual assault, and that those aged 16 to 19 experience higher levels of harassment than any other age group. As has been mentioned, we also know that non-contact abuse strongly leads to contact abuse. In addition, we know that behind every statistic is a daughter, a niece, a friend, a colleague or another loved one. To the petition organisers, to those who have signed the petition, and to the women and girls whose experiences lie behind it, I want to be clear that misogyny, harassment and violence against women and girls have no place in our homes, on our streets, where we study, where we work or anywhere in our society, and that tackling this is and will remain a Government priority. My hon. and learned Friend has my personal commitment to the violence against women and girls strategy, and everything that it seeks to deliver. For me, it has a particular focus on...
The Minister is listing a series of measures, which we all welcome, but I do not hear her actually committing to making misogyny a hate crime. It does not sound like the Government are really considering that. Could she explain why?
As I said earlier, it is useful for Members to understand the context-what is already happening and how we built to that-before I directly address the call from the petition. To further support our collective efforts, our cross-Government violence against women and girls strategy was published in December 2025. Actions include making the UK one of the hardest places for children to access harmful online content and misogynistic influences. We are doing that through our online safety regime and by banning under-16s from major social media platforms, backed by one of the toughest enforcement regimes in the world. We will always seek to go further where we can, with a focus on preventing rather than just reacting. The Ministry of Justice will launch a call for evidence to better understand online misogynistic image-based abuse. In addition, the Department for Education has updated relationships, sex and health education curriculums, which now include teaching on online safety and awareness, healthy relationships and positive role models. Hon. Members talked about a whole societal shift. It is important that we focus on prevention, so I welcome that. Guidance and resources will be provided to support hard-working teachers to recognise the signs of ideologies so that we can intervene swiftly and effectively. The higher education regulator has introduced strict new requirements that will ensure that every university works to prevent, address and investigate any incidents of sexual...
I want to be absolutely clear, because the hon. Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Luke Myer) made an interesting point about the funding that organisations receive through their police and crime commissioner. Can the Minister confirm that, once police and crime commissioners disappear from our framework, the same funding-or more, perhaps -will be available to those organisations? If so, how will they receive that money?
As the Home Secretary said during her statement to the House last week, it will form part of the ongoing policing reform. That will naturally have an impact on how regional and local areas are funded, and that is right and proper.
PCCs will be abolished in 2028, but the reforms will take much longer than that. In many parts of the country the PCC role will easily transfer over to a mayoral role, but that will not be the case in Cleveland, where the boundary of the police is not coterminous with that of the combined authority. The Minister mentioned that one of my councils is very advanced in this work. Can she take away the proposals for some of the funding and powers to go straight to the local authority level in cases where there are such tensions between different government boundaries and bodies?
I am more than happy to arrange a meeting with the relevant policing Minister to ensure that that is explored fully. Before I conclude, I want to cover the other issues that have been raised. On data gaps and reporting, I want to highlight that the Enough campaign is bearing fruit, but it is obviously a big piece of work. Specialist VAWG teams are also going into local areas, and a part of their role is ensuring that local police forces work with local communities so that there is an uptick in reporting, which must be taken more seriously to help address data gaps, because we know that is an ongoing concern. I was asked about conversations with police forces, and those are ongoing. The hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Tom Gordon) has left the Chamber, but he mentioned what happened to the female protester at the Reform conference. That was disgusting and unacceptable, and I know that the police are encouraging the victim to come forward; I feel we should all do the same to ensure that justice is done.
I thank the Minister for her response, but I want to highlight the question asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Tamworth (Sarah Edwards) about cracking down on platforms that facilitate misogynistic abuse. Forgive me if the Minister has covered this, but Ofcom has come out with voluntary guidance that suggests various mechanisms for providers to follow. Ultimately, however, if they are not mandatory requirements in the same way as Ofcom’s amended codes of practice, how will that ever force these platforms to stop the monetisation of misogyny and the sorts of practices that are leading to the mass indoctrination of young people? Can she say something about how we might be tightening that up?
On online abuse and harm, it is right and fitting that we work with tech companies because, fundamentally, we all have a responsibility. Where they are failing to come forward, legislation must always be the backstop. Of course, legislation is not the solution and the answer to everything, and working proactively should always be the first step, but we must ensure that we use all possible levers. The VAWG strategy makes it absolutely clear that we will continue to do that. To conclude, I thank all Members who have participated today. The Government share the determination behind this petition. As I have set out, we have already taken significant action in this area through the Crime and Policing Act, and any further changes to hate crime legislation will be informed by the findings of Lord Macdonald’s independent review on public order and hate crime legislation. More broadly, our work to tackle violence against women and girls continues at pace. The VAWG strategy sets out a blueprint, and this Government are determined to deliver on our mission. Tackling violence against women and girls is everyone’s business, and it is one of the biggest challenges of our time. The Government recognise that it is far too serious and important an issue for us not to act firmly on it, and we will continue to do so until women and girls-whoever they are and wherever they live-feel safe and can live free from fear.
I thank Amara, Lily and Holly for creating the petition that resulted in this debate, and for the opportunity to ask the Minister a lot of important questions about this vital issue. I also thank the Members who spoke in the debate, all of whom supported tightening up the current laws through the amendment to the 2026 Act. The online dimension to this problem came across particularly strongly in Members’ contributions. On the one hand, the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) talked about the horrendous practice of nightlife videos; on the other, my hon. Friend the Member for Tamworth (Sarah Edwards) rightly underlined the critical importance of cracking down on platforms that facilitate and promote online misogyny. As the Minister said, non-contact abuse does lead to contact abuse, which is why it is particularly insidious. My hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Luke Myer) also rightly raised the important question of ensuring that support is available for victims as the systems change. I thank the Minister for all her remarks. The petitioners will have heard them: Lord Macdonald is a former Director of Public Prosecutions and he knows the system; I do not know what he has recommended, and neither does anyone else apart from the Minister, perhaps, but it will contain the answer to the petition regarding misogyny as an aggravating feature in all cases. As the Minister has said, it is important that changes to the law have the intended effect...
Sitting adjourned.