Does hate-crime deserve extra punishment?
Yesterday I cited this NY Times article on my blog about hate-crime against Sikhs in the United States. My question was:
The question is, should “hate-crime” based on a person’s race, sexuality or religion carry extra punishment? I’m not sure because on the one hand crime sentences should be uniformly addressed, on the other hand it looks like unless they are specifically addressed then the powers that be end up ignoring them.
In the comments below Dave Cole made a persuasive case for extra punishment:
Firstly, they have a pernicious effect on society, breeding mistrust, suspicion and hate beyond those immediately affected by the crime.
Secondly, they are more common than hate because on the basis of someone’s cardigan and are indicative of societal attitudes that must be challenged, morally and in a more utilitarian fashion, through the criminal justice system precisely because of the effects mentioned above.
Thirdly, as has been seen in many instances, hate crimes tend to lead to retaliation – they are a feature of group psychology – and so it is important to prevent cycles of retaliatory hate crimes both by presenting the stick and saying that the state is opposed to hate crimes.
(I’m going to ignore the right/conservatives here because while they pretend to be colour blind, articles like this illustrate they are anything but. Plus, on hate-crime legislation they seem mostly confused anyway.)
The left is rightly protective of (racial, religious, sexual) minorities when they are being demonised. But one of my editorial aims on LC is to bring more nuance to this debate since I think this protectiveness sometimes spills into covering up for malicious agendas by self-styled “community leaders”. David T’s exposé of Ken Livingstone’s apologia for the MCB is a good illustration of that.
There’s a point here about group identity that I think the liberal-left needs to come to grips with. One the one hand we should champion the need for people to live as equal citizens under the law. On the other we can also end up ignoring group dynamics that lead to tension and social disruption. In my article The sexual politics of Partition I showed how people have spread race/religion based rumours to fuel hatred and violence in the past.
More recently, the Hindu Forum of Britain has made allegations of Muslims forcibly converting Sikh/Hindu girls, repeated in the national press, without any actual evidence. To date the Met Police still has had no such cases come to light. They have the free speech to make such baseless allegations but what about the mistrust (and possible violence) it results in? I think this is the point that Dave Cole is making above; that extra punishment for hate-crime isn’t necessarily going to deter anyone but it may be a signal that there should be extra stigma attached to such kind of violence. Plus, as Unity points out, motives feature heavily into the length of sentencing and it’s clear that hate-crime is based on added maliciousness. What do you think?
What stings is justice
I’ve written a (typically) long dissection of Cameron’s speech on the subject of rape, which I’ve posted over at the Ministry (under a self imposed ‘rule’ of trying to keep the really long articles and occasional forays in swearblogging on my own turf), the short version being that Cameron’s proposals are nothing like what they’ve been cracked up to be in some quarters.
The article is what it is, judge it for yourself. That’s not what this post is about, rather its starting point is a couple of the comments I’ve received on that piece over the last day or so, for example:
6% of all rapes that go for trial are successful convictions.
That means the jury reject the evidence of 94% of women who make the allegations.
Looks as if the full circle has turned and justice has finally seen through the sexual fantasies of neurotic women.
And
However you waffle and weave your tissue of monstrous injustice what is being imposed is the refusal of justice to male defendants until “justice” is ensured for the the liberal media`s disgusting little constituency of drunken tarts who career about our city centres every weekend too pissed to stand up straight but with “100% recall” of events that can see some poor man banged up for years.
Nice, eh? Not to mention ignorant, antediluvian and just plain dumb.
Yeah, dumb. Dumb as in stupid, idiotic, moronic, couldn’t get the point if you stuck a pencil up their nose and wrote it on the base of their frontal lobe-type dumb.
One of the perennial causes of dispute between the genders whenever the issue of rape and the current, depressingly low, conviction rate raises its head is the fear that some men harbour that the price of securing more convictions will be the weakening of the presumption of innocence. Depending on the proposed solutions being floated – and ignoring the neurotic views of the usual coterie of out-and-out misogynists, of which you’ve just seen a couple of prime examples – there can be some justification for such anxieties.
The fact is that we already know what’s needed to raise conviction rates, significant medium-to-long investment in specialist rape investigation and prosecution services of the kind that in some US cities have succeed in raising conviction rates above 80%.
Such investment does not, however, come cheap, which is one reason why it isn’t happening (or being promised by Cameron) nor does it provide the kind of quick-fix, sound-bite driven, novelty headlines of which our current political classes and mainstream media are too much enamoured, which is the other. Long term investment in services of the kind that will deliver, but may take 3-5 years (or more) before their impact is fully reflected in conviction rates does not an eye-catching headline make, certainly not in Daily Mail/Daily Express/Sun* (delete as applicable) country. What does grab the headlines is promises of tougher sentences, ‘re-balancing’ the criminal justice system and, in the case of rape, tinkering with the legal basis of ‘consent’, which is nightmare whichever way to come at it, the very kind of thing that’s guaranteed to stoke up male anxieties about false accusations, wrongful convictions, and a judicial system that’s loaded against them.
What no one ever seems to get around to pointing out is that there is nothing quite so damaging to the interests of men than the current state of affairs, in which a mere 5.7% of reported rapes result in convictions. That men, as much as women, have a clear and vested interest is seeing conviction rates for rape rise to levels closer to those one finds in other offences (75-80%+).
It is, I would contend, a matter of fact that there are very few more damaging allegations that any (innocent) man could face than that of having committed rape – the only accusation that most would consider to be worse would be one relating to a sex offence against a child.
For all that rape is under-reported and subject to desperately poor conviction rates, there are cases in which mistakes (usually of identity) are made and there are, sadly, occasions on which men are subjected to false allegations, with the result that an innocent man stands accused not only before a court but before his friends, family, neighbours, colleagues and, if the case in question catches the eye of the media, before the usual tabloid media circus, with all the prurient interest in the minutiae of his life and the intrusions on privacy that entails.
You would, naturally, hope never to find yourself in that situation but if, by some mischance, you did you have no option but to place your trust and faith in judge and jury and hope that justice prevails and an acquittal follows.
And there you have a problem.
What value is there is being acquitted of an offence in which convictions rates are so poor that they create the impression that a significant number of those who are accused of rape are actually guilty as charged but getting away with it because of the failings of the system?
Justice is, and can only be properly served, if its understood by all that the criminal justice system works as it should in convicting the guilty and exonerating the innocent, that people can be confident that the system gets it right if not all the time – there will always be some mistakes and errors because nothing is ever perfect – at least on the vast majority of occasions; often enough for people to believe genuinely that mistakes are rare and occur only in exceptional circumstances.
Without that confidence, what can an acquittal really mean if not that there’s a possibility if not, with rape convictions at such a low level, even a likelihood that a ‘not guilty’ verdict may be tainted to point at which its rendered near meaningless.
To read/hear what some men have to say for themselves whenever rape rises up the political agenda, even those who can (and do) articulate their concerns reasonably and without recourse of misogynistic remarks, one might think that its absolutely against the interests of men, all men, to see conviction rates for rape improved and rapists placed where they should be – behind bars.
Nothing could be further from the truth, just as nothing could be more damaging to the interests an innocent man who finds themselves wrongly or erroneous accused of rape than the current situation in which conviction rates are so low that its impossible to see how anyone could think that justice is genuinely being done, for women or for men.
A Helping Hand
I’m in the process of working up a fisk of Cameron’s speech on rape from yesterday (to be posted at the the Ministry) and hacking through some the background information and while looking over the mid-term report on the Conservative’s Police Reform policy group I’ve found something we can all help them with.
They’ve found a bit of problem with the British Crime Survey, which you may all know is an annual questionnaire issued to about 24-25,000 people, which asks if they’ve been a victim of crime over the previous year. The information gathered by the BCS is used, along with police statistics to provide the government with its official crime statistics.
What the Tories have noticed is a bit of a gap in the BCS data:
The Government claims that crime measured by the British Crime Survey has fallen, yet the British Crime Survey massively underestimates crime. It covers only half of recorded crime and ignores murder…
To help correct this anomaly I thought we might carry out a bit of survey of our own, so I’d like to ask everyone to answer the following question as openly and truthfully as possible:
1. Have you been a victim of murder in the last year?
Thanks for your help and rest assured, we will be collating responses and forwarding them to the Police Reform policy group to help with their deliberations.
Looking into Cameron’s promises to tackle rape
Cartoon by Jacky Fleming
Teach children about consent in schools. Pour money into rape crisis centres. Overhaul sentencing of rapists. David Cameron’s speech today reads like a feminist wish list.
Speaking to the Conservative Women’s Organisation in London, Cameron outlined some statistics that those of us who are involved in feminist activism are all too familiar with:
- One in 20 women in the UK have been raped
- 75% of rapes are not reported to the police
- Of those that are reported, 5.7% result in conviction in England and Wales, (not mentioned by Cameron, this figure falls to 3.9% in Scotland)
This means, says Cameron, that of every 1,000 women raped, only 15 will see their rapist convicted. Or, to flip that around, for every 15 rapists that end up in jail, approximately 985 rapes are committed with absolutely no repercussions – for the rapist, that is.
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