Misogyny – A Human Rights Issue: A Critique of Scotland’s War on the ‘Patriarchy’

On 8th March 2022, the Scottish government published Misogyny – A Human Rights Issue, a report by Hollyrood’s ‘independent’ special-purpose Working Group on Misogyny and Criminal Justice.

Upon reviewing the document, it appeared that the Working Group on Misogyny and Criminal Justice’s research is meant only to promote an ideological agenda based in its entirety on subjective experience. Its proposed legal changes, built around a vague definition of ‘misogyny’ predicated on normal and necessary human interaction, are not suitable to address or reduce criminality in Scotland. In effect, the Working Group’s recommendations are overtly discriminatory and would create a ‘two-tier’ criminal justice system divided by sex leading to the reinforcement of harmful gender stereotypes.

I. The Ideological Nature of the Report

The Working Group’s foundational argument for why only women should be protected under ‘Hate Crime’ legislation is that Scotland is a patriarchal society in which women (presumably including the First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon) are subordinated by men. For this charge, the report does not provide evidence or ample examples in highlighting the supposed patriarchal nature of Scottish society, yet it is awash with unsubstantiated assertions: 

“Misogyny is rife in our society. It is these attitudes—and the conduct which flows from them—which prevent us from achieving genuine equality … We relied upon a more general definition of misogyny which acknowledges the patriarchal nature of our society and the many ways in which women are subordinated: Misogyny is a way of thinking that upholds the primary status of men and a sense of male entitlement while subordinating women and limiting their power and freedom.“ 

It even admits within its own terms that women are not excluded from participation in any part of Scottish society:

“The definition [of misogyny] makes it clear that misogyny is not about seeking to exclude women from society; it is not about wanting to banish them from communities. Misogyny, as defined, allows for women’s inclusion, but on patriarchal terms.” 

The Working Group proceeds to elucidate the misandric view that all men are a representation of ‘patriarchy’, even if they are actively ‘fighting the patriarchy’. 

“On the other side are groups designed to provide a space for men to explore their own masculinity and to exchange ideas about how to ally with women in tackling patriarchy, sexism and misogyny. Men’s connections to patriarchy can mean that they are well placed to help undermine it from within.” 

“As Burrell’s (2020) work highlights, the efforts to reduce and prevent violence against women and girls can both challenge existing patriarchal structures and masculine norms while also reproducing male dominance within the same movement. Burrell argues for the need for men to avoid disassociation – whereby male allies construct themselves as being separate from patriarchal inequalities and therefore avoid acknowledging or confronting the ways in which they are implicated in their maintenance.”

Such dangerous rhetoric is akin to the religious concept of ‘original sin’, an ideological facet employed by critical race theorists in their commitment to the presupposition that ‘all white people are racist’, and that ‘being non-white means you cannot be racist’.

The ideological concept of patriarchy means that every man in a position of power is, by definition, upholding the patriarchy. Every boy or man who strives for success or excellence under this condition is a representation of the oppression of women, and an attempt by a man to talk to a woman is akin to sexual harassment. This is not hyperbolic. Nicola Sturgeon herself claimed that the world would be a much better place if it was run by women before nonchalantly stating that she “hopes she never has to shake another hand again, especially not a man’s.”

If men are a representation of patriarchy, and if the aim of the proposed Misogyny and Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act is to ‘fight the patriarchy’, then it becomes clear what this act is aiming at: all men. This also explains why many women’s organisations oppose the inclusion of ‘sex’ as a protected characteristic. Hate and discrimination towards men based on their sex is not seen as sexism, but as ‘anti-sexism’ and anti-patriarchial. This report is a case in point.

So is Scotland a Patriarchy? 

For the proposed ‘Misogyny and Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act’ to be considered, one must agree that Scottish women are oppressed by patriarchal structures. It is thus easy to understand why no examples were given as to how exactly women are oppressed in Scotland. In fact, they are by most measures faring better than their male counterparts. 

Here are some examples of the patriarchy and its effects on women in Scotland:

These numbers show that Scotland is in no way a society striving to subordinate women for the benefit of men. Rather, it is quite clear that the opposite is in practice, with philogyny and misandry prevailing. 

Basic Human Needs Are Not ‘Male Entitlement’

Since there are no real examples of ‘patriarchal oppression’ in Scotland, the working group had to be creative and label the basic human needs of men as part of ‘misogyny’. The working group refers in its definition of misogyny to “a sense of male entitlement,” which they claim “speaks not just to goods, property and sex, but to attention, to care and even to love.”

According to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the desires referred to by the working group as contributors to ‘male entitlement’ are basic human needs (some of them were not even denied to slaves). The Working Group is literally arguing that men are not entitled to basic human needs, because that would be ‘misogyny’. 

To deny half of the population these basic human needs speaks to a deep-rooted hatred of men expressed by the authors of the report. 

The Ideological Enemy – Incels as Scapegoats

The complete lack of compassion and understanding for the male gender is exemplified by the Working Group in its demonising portrayal of people who call themselves or are called ‘Incels’ (Involuntary Celibates). Incels, members of an online subculture of people who define themselves as unable to get a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one, are mentioned 34 times in the document and are used as justification to criminalise ‘Misogyny’. 

Incels, according to the report, “represent an extreme—and apparently rapidly growing—example of the entitlement that the Working Group’s definition of misogyny captures.” To bolster this perceived threat, the paper contends that there “has been a six-fold rise in UK web traffic to websites promoting ‘incel’ culture.” 

In reality, this increase appearedafter the media focussed its eye on Incels in their reporting. An increase in online traffic does not mean that there is an increase in ‘Incels’ or harmful views. The same is true regarding ‘suicide’ after a celebrity commits suicide, or ‘Putin’ after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

While it is true that there are radical and misogynistic views expressed by some Incels, to make loose claims that this group of people are “extremists, bound together by an ideology which preaches hatred of women” is not just wrong, but dangerous. The vast majority of Incels are on the autistic spectrum and suffer from often severe social anxiety. 

Certain Incels, like certain feminists and LGBT ideologues, are toxic. For the most part, however, members of the Incel community seek to support each other in dealing with the horrific effects of social isolation, bullying, and abuse. The intentional demonisation of this movement is comparable to calling all Muslims extremists or terrorists.

II. Redefining ‘Misogyny’ Because There Is No ‘Misogyny’

As I have established, the claim of a patriarchal modern Scotland is absurd. Surely, though, there must be enough real misogyny to justify a specific Act to tackle it? 

What does Baroness Helena Kennedy QC, the author of the report, write about misogyny?

“Misogyny is hard to define. And like many abstract concepts, whilst it may be difficult to define, many people feel they ‘know it when they see it’ (or hear it, or feel it). The classical definition of misogyny (from Greek misos ‘hatred’ + gunē ‘woman’) was inadequate for the task of the Working Group.” 

“Misogyny is prejudice, malice and/or contempt for women. Sadly, it is rife in our society. Literalists cling to the word’s origins and insist that misogyny means hatred of women, but it means more than that. The word has evolved to encompass the more widely held attitudes and behaviours that relegate women to a subordinate position and maintain the power imbalance which characterises male/female relations … in conducting this work we relied upon a more general definition of misogyny which acknowledges the patriarchal nature of our society and the many ways in which women are subordinated”

The report highlights different definitions of ‘misogyny that inspired the working group to create their own made-up definition which reads:

“Misogyny is a way of thinking that upholds the primary status of men and a sense of male entitlement, while subordinating women and limiting their power and freedom. Conduct based on this thinking can include a range of abusive and controlling behaviours including rape, sexual offences, harassment and bullying, and domestic abuse.”

While the criminal behaviours included in this definition are of course horrendous, they are not misogynistic by definition, which is evident by the large number of female domestic and male victims. 

The definition is based on the assumption that men hold a ‘primary status’ in society, which is unproven at best. 

The report gives us an idea of the diverse behaviours they consider’ misogynistic’, that the Act would cover:

These examples include many instances of normal human interaction and even positive behaviours. The report’s recommendations would make it impossible for any man to approach a woman both offline and online as such behaviours would be deemed misogynistic. It also makes it impossible for men to work with women, because professional disagreement can be seen as ‘the undermining of a woman in the public eye’. Many female politicians already use the term ‘misogyny’, every time they are professionally challenged. 

A great example of the all-encompassing definition of misogyny is: “behaviour that acts to limit the power and freedom of women—including their freedom to move through spaces—both physical spaces (parks, streets, educational and political institutions, workplaces) and digital spaces - with the same feelings of security and safety as men.”

Women, on average, score higher in areas of negative emotion such as anxiety (which stems from the biological need to protect their children, while men had to have low levels of anxiety to be able to hunt and fight). Women are less likely to be victims of violent crimes outside of the home, but feel far less safe. The same is true for the experience online. Men receive higher levels of threats and abuse online, but women feel less safe. The proposed misogyny legislation would only increase the false perception of our society being hostile towards women.  

And while real misogyny (hatred towards women) is almost non-existent (as the report itself states) real misandry, the expressed hate towards men, is unfortunately common. In 2020 the book ‘I hate men’ was released and celebrated, hashtags like #killallmen or #allmenarerapists and calls for the sterilisation of men and boys are common on social media, anti-male terms such as ‘toxic masculinity’, ‘manspreading’, ‘mansplaining’ and ‘straight white man’ are so normalised, they are even being used by politicians to silence their male colleagues. Baroness Jones suggested a curfew for men after the tragic death of Sarah Everard. And this expressed hate towards men has real-life consequences, as the tragic death of 18-year-old Conner Cowper shows, who was stabbed to death by then 17-year-old Jolene Doherty who reportedly said ‘that her hatred of men was the reason behind the slaying’. 

I illustrated that the working group failed to create a definition of misogyny that is workable, and with aims as vague and unachievable as “We want all women to be free to live their lives without worrying about their safety,” there can be no limit to what ‘misogyny’ would encompass. 

III. Gender Stereotypes

“By referring to violence as ‘gender based’ this definition highlights the need to understand violence within the context of women’s and girls’ subordinate status in society.”

While documents such as the ‘Istanbul Convention’, the national VAWG strategy and the proposed Scottish misogyny legislation claim to oppose ‘harmful gender stereotypes’, they are deeply rooted in these very stereotypes, promote the misogynistic narrative of all women being weak, inherently vulnerable and in need of 24/7 government protection while depicting all men as sole creators and upholders of society with the predatory aim to oppress women. 

I don’t agree that terms such as ‘the primary status of men’ and ‘women’s and girls’ subordinate status in society’ are a reflection of our modern society. According to the terms of the Report itself, the making of such assertions means that this Report itself is inherently ‘misogynistic’. The worldview promoted in the document portrays women and girls as a victim class while depicting men and boys as a perpetrator class. This is deeply harmful to both sexes.

The view that only women but not boys and men experience deep trauma in situations of sexual and domestic abuse is based on outdated, misogynistic thinking that keeps women unreasonably afraid and prevents boys and men from expressing their trauma and emotion. The notion that misogyny deeply affects all women, while the daily misandry in media, politics, service provision, education and relationships does not affect boys and men is clearly contradicted by the negative outcome that so many boys and men experience in our society, including suicide. 

IV. Biased Data

It might be understandable that a document exclusively focused on misogyny will have a certain bias and the blame should therefore not be put on the working group alone, but predominantly on the shoulders of the Scottish Government who created this group in the first place. The Scottish Government did not compare the experience of men with women at any point. The ‘Misogyny Working Group’ was populated with persons whose prior views should have excluded them from consideration, and it is not surprising that a handpicked group of feminists would support biased and discriminatory legislation: a position they had all already publicly advocated. 

Baroness Helena Kennedy, the chair of the group made a name for herself by defending several battered women who have killed their partners allegedly because of the domestic violence they suffered. Holyrood.com writes of an interview with her: “Her infamy in this field led to her being mentioned during an episode of Inspector Morse as someone who could get a woman off with murder. This is not an accusation that bothers her.”

She wrote the books Eve was Framed: Women and British Justice, 1993 and Eve Was Shamed: How British Justice Is Failing Women, 2018  in which she complains that women are sometimes judged similar to men, which she views as ‘inequality’. To highlight the absurdity of this statement, it should be said that women already receive 60 per cent shorter sentences compared with men for comparable crimes. But Kennedy said the trouble is there are “no separate sentencing guidelines for women offenders.”

She doubles down in her Holyrood.com interview: 

“I feel that there’s been a real failure to understand what equality means around that. And yet judges will often say the same sort of thing when they’ll say, ‘what sentence would I give a man, well, I’m going to give her the same because you women all wanted equality, so, I’m going to give you equality’ when they’re not taking into account the injustices about the particularities of a case.”

Eilidh Dickson works for the feminist, government-funded organisation EnGender, ‘Scotland's feminist policy & advocacy organisation’. Like Baroness Kennedy, Dickson supports laws that treat women and men differently: 

“Institutions themselves have to be designed to challenge the historic exclusion of women from public life Measures like mainstreaming duties, quotas and gender-budgeting all have a role to play in creating gender-sensitive law.”

Dr Chloë Kennedy, whose research focuses on law and gender and law and religion ran the ‘Scottish Feminist Judgments Project’. It is part of a global series that aims to imagine how legal cases might have been decided differently if the judge had adopted a feminist perspective.

Emma Ritch, a radical intersectional feminist was a member of the Scottish Government's First Minister's Advisory Council on Women & Girls, on the joint strategic board of Equally Safe,  and the advisory group of the Scottish Women’s Rights Center. She was a board member of the European Women's Lobby and chair of Rape Crisis Scotland. Ritch died during the course of the Working Group’s compilation of the report and was replaced by her colleague Eilidh Dickson.

All evidence used by these political activists had an exclusive focus on the experience of women, in many cases, this evidence had no academic basis and was not peer-reviewed. Often, the ‘evidence’ were opinion pieces from news outlets such as the BBC and the Guardian with non-academic titles such as ‘How Trump talks about women—and does it matter?’ BBC News; ‘Transcript: Donald Trump’s Taped Comments About Women’ (The New York Times), ‘Mansplaining explained: ‘Just ask an expert. Who is not a lady’ (The Guardian) and ‘Prince Harry says ‘Megxit’ is a misogynistic term aimed at his wife Meghan’. (The Guardian)

Even the more serious sources such as ‘Equally Safe: Scotlands strategy to eradicate violence against women and girls (gov.scot.)’, ‘The gender knot: Unraveling our patriarchal legacy, Johnson A. G. (2014) or ‘Girlguiding Research Briefing: Girls Experience of Sexual Harassment’ are so clearly one-sided and often created solely with the intent to support the pre-existing bias of the organisation responsible for the research/survey.  

No evidence was presented that would support that Scotland is a patriarchy, that women are oppressed or that male primacy exists. Yet, without evidence of these claims, the excuse for female-only legislation falls apart. 

The embarrassing argumentations presented in the document are beautifully exemplified in this passage: 

“It should be noted that often this stirring up of hatred presents as being hatred of a particular type of woman—a noisy woman, a successful woman, an opinionated woman. But the crime is about female identity. It is no defence to say ‘I only hate certain kinds of women—feminists, fat women or unfeminine women … As equal citizens women are entitled to hold views, present themselves as they like, enjoy their sexuality and should not be required to conform to a male-defined stereotype of womanhood. It cannot be for men to decide what is appropriate ‘womanhood’. Antagonism towards particular ‘kinds’ of women ultimately denies the humanity of women as a whole.”

V. Legal Gender Discrimination 

The working group created proposals to introduce discriminatory laws with full intent as Baroness Kennedy states here: 

“In general, the law prefers to operate on the basis of neutrality, meaning most laws must be available to men as well as women. However, we would argue that the prevailing belief that the law should be neutral with regard to sex and/or gender disguises the reality that there are particular kinds of behaviour which target women.”

There are no “particular kinds of behaviour which target women.” 

All behaviours covered under the ‘Violence Against Women and Girls’ umbrella also affect men in large numbers as stated in the document:‘Supporting male victims of crimes considered violence against women and girls’.

“The statement recognised the significant numbers of men and boys affected by these crimes…”

These numbers prove irrefutably that there are no “particular kinds of behaviour which target women.” Both men and women experience all forms of violence and abuse both by men and women. This is also the case online, where men experience higher levels of abuse and threats. It is also true that a high percentage of ‘gendered’ abuse directed at women comes from other women. 

Men already face ongoing and intentional discrimination in Scotland and the rest of the UK regarding service provision, best practices and legal definition/protections. 

Some examples:

These instances of direct discrimination combined with permanent attacks against men and masculinity by the media, politicians, and society as a whole create understandable resentment and a call for change. Angry voices from groups such as the Incel community are direct results of discrimination experienced by men and boys from an early age. 

These attacks need to stop and cannot be promoted and advocated for by the government. 

It is time to heal the tensions experienced in our society and segregation and discrimination can never be the way to reach more equality. I submit, therefore, that this report by the Working Group on Misogyny and Criminal Justice would itself meet the criteria of sex-based hate against men. Its proposal must be completely rejected and replaced with a strategy to improve mutual respect between the sexes.