Excerpted: Violence Against Women as Bias Motivated Hate Crime: Defining the Issues, Center for Women Policy Studies
Why is it that most crimes involving physical harm to women appear to have no other motivation? According to the Uniform Crime Reports, 1990, the vast majority of male murder victims are likely to be murdered as a result of felonious activity or during an alcohol or drug-influenced brawl. Women on the other hand are most likely to be murdered by acquaintances, including 30% by husbands or boyfriends (FBI 1986), without apparent motivation.
Although women are victims of violence for the same reasons as men (robbery, burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft), they are also victims of violence simply because they are women. This continuum of hatred of women is expressed in forms ranging from sexist language (e.g., bitch, whore) and harassment, to violence such as assault and battery, rape, and murder. Although such violence is traditionally seen as "individual," it is much more.
This violence meets the widely accepted definitions of hate crimes, which are acts of terrorism directed not only at the individual victims but at their entire community. It is violence toward groups that generally suffer discrimination.
The most comprehensive hate crime statue was developed in California: A hate crime is any act of intimidation, harassment, physical force or threat of physical force directed against any person, or family, or their property or advocate, motivated . . . by hostility to their real or perceived race, ethnic background, national origin, religious belief, sex, age, disability, or sexual orientation, with the intention of causing fear or intimidation, or to deter the free exercise, or enjoyment of any rights or privileges secured by the Constitution. whether or not performed under color of law (California Department of Justice, 1986)
Factors to determine a Hate Crime
The guidelines adopted by the National Institute for Justice for identifying whether a crime is a hate crime include:
- Common sense (such as burning a cross on a lawn)
- Language used by the perpetrator (such as slurs)
- Severity of the attack (including mutilation)
- Lack of provocation
- Previous history of similar incidents in the same area
- Absence of other motive (e.g., battery without robbery)
Acts of violence against women -- from threatening obscene telephone calls to street harassment, from battering to rape to serial murders with mutilation -- clearly include many of the characteristics listed above.
Hate Language
The use of racial or ethnic slurs characterizes a verbal attack or defacement of property as a hate crime. Women, too, are subject to hate language -- sexual innuendos, catcalls, threats and other street harassment -- that is meant to intimidate, harass, and denigrate each woman (and all women). Such hate language often accompanies violent assaults on women.
Absence of Motive
Both media and police reports officially define virtually all serial murders of women and many individual murders of women as "motiveless crimes." The motive for rape is increasingly understood to be hatred of women or wanting to intimidate or control, rather than sexual desire. Wife abuse is clearly a motiveless crime of domination and control.
Excessive Violence/Lack of Provocation
Serial murders, which often involve torture, rape, and mutilation, are done to women (by men). Partner murders are also particularly violent (Mitchell, Clark, and Pharr, 1990). Wife abuse can also fit the criteria for hate crime. Indeed the murder of a woman that results from battery is not a domestic quarrel that "got out of hand," but the ultimate result of systematic violence. When a wife is killed, the murder is often preceded by multiple police calls over a period of time.
Violence against women in many of its forms meet the criteria outlined above for being hate crimes. It is time we began to think of gender as a target for hate crimes.