The Misogyny-Islamophobia Paradox: Britain's Dangerous Dance with Definitions
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Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has ordered a review of Britain’s counter-extremism strategy, and is apparently considering treating extreme misogyny as terrorism for the first time.
There are far worse places to be a woman, but the UK still has a misogyny problem. From FGM to online pornography, violence to rape, the list is long and grim.
There were 145 newly recorded cases of FGM between October and December 2021. That’s not just a statistic - it's a damning indictment of our society's failure to protect women and girls. (NHS.)
Pornhub is the world’s and the UK’s most popular porn website and features some very disturbing content which I have no hesitation in calling misogynistic, before we even get to the illegal non-consensual, revenge porn and under-age content which the company has been slow to deal with.
Only 1.6% of rape cases recorded by police in England and Wales in 2020 resulted in a charge or summons. (Home Office.)
6.9% of women experienced domestic abuse in the year ending March 2022. (ONS.)
And let’s not forget the transgender elephant in the room. We're putting male sex offenders in women's prisons and letting biological males compete in women's sports.
However, these are just your common or garden misogyny problems — not terrorism or extremism per se — and there are already laws to deal with them.
One suspects this new expansion of extremism might be more about the online abuse which female MPs receive, or the febrile elitist panic about influencers such as Andrew Tate. As Home Office minister Jess Phillips said, ‘People can hold views about women all they like, but it’s not OK any more to ignore the massive growing threat caused by online hatred towards women and for us to ignore it because we’re worried about the line, rather than making sure the line is in the right place as we would do with any other extremist ideology.’ [my italics]
Actually, getting the line right is crucial — because how will treating extreme misogyny as terrorism square with the new proposal to define Islamophobia?