'Misogyny should be treated as a hate crime' says ex-policeman keeping MPs safe after Jo Cox murder

Philip Grindell, who headed up a specialist Parliamentary team dealing with threats, intimidation and abuse of MPs for three years before retiring from the Metropolitan Police in November to set up his own security consultancy company, said more action is needed on the issue.

“My personal view is misogyny should be a hate crime. Women are being targeted on the basis of their sex,” he told The Yorkshire Post. “We have a hate crime policy but it doesn’t include misogyny.”

In April 2016, Nottinghamshire Police became the first force in the UK to pilot recording public harassment of women - such as groping and use of explicit language - along with more serious offences such as assault as a misogyny hate crime.

University research into the policy from June 2018 found that although some initial media reporting had “trivialised” the move as a ban on wolf-whistling, 87 per cent of people surveyed back it continuing.

There were 174 reports of alleged misogyny hate crimes in Nottinghamshire between April 2016 and March 2018, with 73 classified as crimes but only one conviction.

In October 2018, Sara Thornton, the chair of the National Police Chiefs Council, said that with core policing duties being “seriously stretched”, forces did not have the resources to deal with misogyny as a hate crime.

A Government-ordered review by the Law Commission is currently considering whether misogyny should be classified as a hate crime.

Mr Grindell said today: “Too often it gets trivialised into a conversation about wolf-whistling but I’m talking about if somebody is sending malicious communications and using sexually violent language towards someone because they are female.

“I think there should be a national policy with a little bit more thought put into it. The evidence shows females are much more targeted online.”

Mr Grindell, who is a pro-bono security adviser for the Jo Cox Foundation and was involved in ensuring the safety of Rotherham MP Sarah Champion after she was subjected to death threats, said he had personally witnessed how abuse was affecting the ability of some MPs to do their jobs properly.

“There were numerous examples where we had female MPs in tears, feeling very scared about the abuse they were receiving and whether that would encourage other people to target them.

“We had MPs who were talking about how they were reluctant to raise controversial subjects they believed in. Brexit became particularly hostile and MPs would be saying ‘I’m worried about voting tonight because the results are published and I’m going to be abused and threatened’. It absolutely did have a democratic effect and the intimidation was for that purpose.”

He said he did not know whether it actually did lead to any MPs actually changing their votes. “They were talking about thinking about doing that but I never asked and wouldn’t ask how they are going to vote. But those conversations did happen.”

Mr Grindell says there are clear differences between the type of abuse directed towards men and women.

“Generally men are being told they are incompetent, while women would be targeted with sexually violent comments, very personal remarks about their attributes and their clothes that were very misogynistic.

A lot of them are targeted by men who feel inadequate and see powerful, successful women as something of a threat. At a very basic level, it comes down to bullying.”