Why isn't rape a hate crime?

[grimbletart]

Just that really.
I was reading about the reported increase in hate crimes involving race, religion, disability, sexual orientation and transgenderism.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-34515763

To be a rapist you really have to hate or despise women or you couldn't inflict such pain and humiliation on them.

I'm sure plenty of posters will come along and say I'm impractical, wrong, daft or whatever, but to me, as well as issues such as control, entitlement etc. rape really is a crime of hate.

So why not?

If you start to treat everything as a "hate crime" then surely it becomes meaningless....

Who is talking about treating everything as a "hate crime"?

People are talking about treating an evil, violent, oppressive act as a hate crime. That's not everything. That's not even every crime.

treating an evil, violent, oppressive act as a hate crime.

But who gets to choose which evil, violent, oppressive acts are hate crimes?

Should we lump in Murder, abduction, GBH (acid in the face for example), child abuse - is Rape any worse than those?

I can punch a black man in the face - doesn't mean it's a hate crime, he may just have spilled my pint. It's possible for someone to murder or rape someone without it being a hate crime.

It's possible for someone to murder or rape someone without it being a hate crime.

That's the question isn't it. Are you explaining why you think this or are you asking me whether I think this? Or neither?

Are you explaining why you think this or are you asking me whether I think this

Neither, I'm stating a fact.

Both too drunk too consent? . Only one person in that scenario has the responsibility not to stick their dick in a woman. Are you suggesting they are too drunk to consent to raping someone? Just because someone is drunk it doesn't mean they suddenly acquire a sense of entitlement to penetrate someone who hasn't consented. That mindset is already there.

Maybe I should have said "too drunk to say no at the time, but with regrets the next day".

Still not a hate crime....

And yes, technically in the eyes of the law, if 2 teenagers are absolutely wrecked & have sex, one is deemed too drunk to have given consent.

And it's usually the girl/woman.

Being able to produce an erection isn't a sign of consent in that scenario either.

But I digress....

"too drunk to say no at the time, but with regrets the next day".

Rape myth.

Very probably.

Ignore me, woken with a head of feathers this morning, will put the keyboard down & drink more coffee...

Ettr, men can be raped too

Thanks binary.. point was already made, 4 posts in. Try RTFT?

I'm not an expert in this area of law but surely it's a public policy thing - a way of reflecting in the justice system that discrimination and bigotry are beyond the pale.

I was surprised to see that gender is not on the list of characteristics that are protected by the hate crime legislation. I can't think of a good reason why it shouldn't be there.

My two pennorth is that, while it's important that we send a clear message that rape and sexual assault are vile crime, I'm not sure what would be achieved by necessarily defining all instances as 'hate crime'. The specific subject matter of the law is that an otherwise equivalent crime is punished more harshly if motivated by hate and bigotry. If you say all rapes/sexual assaults are hate crimes you lose that, and the designation as such becomes mere rhetoric.

plays well, I must have opened this thread earlier then posted later. Whoops.

Point is, this is not a feminist issue.

By 'this' do you mean rape?

I don't have much to add - but been thinking about this a lot because it's a really, REALLY interesting question and the more I think about it, the more confused the state of the law seems to be. I suspect the answer is something connected with male sexuality as 'positive' desire and not 'negative' hatred. So that a rape would only be seen as a 'hate' crime if it had been conducted with some explicit and additional 'intent' to demean, rather than the basis of all rape being a view of women that is inherently hateful (because in claiming them sexually, it denies them agency, subjectivity, control, consent).

rape is not a hate crime, in the sense of it's "hating women".

It affects boys, girls, men and women, therefore cannot be defined as hating a particular group of people based on a common 'identity' such as sex, race, gender, religion, nationality, ethnicity etc.
At the moment hate crime is this:

"They say something is a hate incident if the victim or anyone else think it was motivated by hostility or prejudice based on one of the following things:

disability
race
religion
transgender identity
sexual orientation."

I'm not saying it is not a terrible thing nor a crime. Just not a "hate crime" imo.

Is that correct from upthread, that the rape of a transwoman can be a hate crime, but the rape of a woman (as in born female) cannot?

Oh my.

But I don't want to derail. I liked this from the lse article above "By including gender within hate crime legislation, many offences of rape would be understood, not just as acts of sexual abuse, but as acts of prejudice used against women to oppress, subordinate and control them. Such a reorientation of causation could help to diminish the perceived ‘responsibility’ of victims by shifting emphasis onto the offender’s wrongful, immoral and discriminatory conduct. There is the potential, therefore, for hate crime law to directly challenge those ‘rape myths’ that continue to undermine the effectiveness of sexual offences legislation...By focusing on the violent conduct of the offender and his motive – i.e. to penetrate the victim’s vagina, mouth or anus without her consent while demonstrating hostility against her gender – the legal system may well become less interested in the victim’s conduct and the artificial context of the relationship between rapist and victim. An important step would be to divorce sex from rape where possible and with it eradicating the myth that rape is the result of a misguided sexual desire".

They pick up on the difficulties of this approach when it comes to cases where the rape happens in a relationship - does that make a difference in that where there is certainly a desire from the rapist to punish and to hurt, is the desire only to punish and hurt that specific woman, rather than hurt and punish her as an interchangeable represetnative of Uppity Womankind? I'm not sure where I come out on this, I need to reflect a bit more. I can't put my finger on why it feels harder to think about it as a hate crime, but it does?

Is there any mileage in comparison with the growing acknowledgement that rape of women and girls is used as a weapon of war? As it occurred to me as I was thinking through this.

Is that correct from upthread, that the rape of a transwoman can be a hate crime, but the rape of a woman (as in born female) cannot?

Yes it can, if the rapist acted out of a hatred of black people or christians (assuming the victim fell into those categories)

Imo some rape is most definitely a hate crime. Read the link and what it says about Levi Bell field. Some (most?) men rape women because they hate women and that can be proven by their history, or the way they talk about women to their friends.

I think this is spot on. But crucially, it's some or most, but not all. And defining rape as a hate crime per se would limit the court's capacity to make that distinction, and sentence accordingly. As I say, I definitely think that crimes that are committed based on gender hatred should fall within the hate crime legislation