I think this is going a bit far. Shouldn't existing legislation just cover abuse as a crime irrespective of the person being abused ? Do we really need a special law to protect Goths ?
Last month, it was announced that a review by the Law Commission would look at whether offences driven by misogyny - dislike, contempt or ingrained prejudice against women - should be treated as hate crimes. And now it's emerged the same review will also consider the opposite - crimes motivated by misandry - hostility towards men. Ageism and hatred of certain alternative cultures, such as Goths or punks, could also be included in future.
However, the BBC's home affairs correspondent Danny Shaw says widening the definition could lead to a feeling that the impact of such offences is trivialised or minimised because there are so many different categories. It also runs the risk, he points out, of sentence inflation because many crimes currently treated as public order offences would be reclassified as more serious - and so would attract longer jail terms.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-45870948
Dunno about the UK, but having multiple simultaneous charges is not necessarily superfluous.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that the logic/ social purpose of classifying something as a hate crime is to recognize when the objective is not simply to abuse a person but to use that abuse to intimidate the larger group to which the person belongs. I’m open to ideas about different ways to achieve that social purpose but seems like a reasonable purpose.
ReplyDeleteBupSahn
ReplyDeleteMost people have no idea what "critical theory" even means, so even bringing that up means you're suspect.