Sex-motivated violence should be treated like a hate crime

Opinion

Canada recently introduced the Combatting Hate Act, legislation that will create three new criminal offences intended to strengthen protections against hate.

The first new offence targets hate crimes directly for the first time in Canada. The second targets intimidation and obstruction. The third expands an existing criminal law targeting wilful promotion of hatred.

Canada’s hate crime laws apply to acts of hatred toward identifiable groups, those distinguished by colour, race, religion, national or ethnic origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or mental or physical disability.

Hate crimes are under-reported, under-recorded and under-prosecuted in most jurisdictions where legislation exists.

Data from Statistics Canada shows that in 2019, nearly 250,000 people reported they were victims of hate-motivated incidents, but fewer than one per cent were investigated as hate crimes.

Sex-motivated violence is common in Canada

Acts of hatred toward women and girls regularly occur in Canada. Some involve violence. Femicide is defined as the killing of women and girls because of their sex or gender. However, sex-motivated violence is rarely treated as hate crime.

The Montreal Massacre is the best known example of sex-motivated killing in Canada. On Dec. 6, 1989, a lone white male, armed with a gun, entered École Polytechnique at the Université de Montréal and killed 14 women. He killed them because they were women and, in his view, feminists, toward whom he expressed hatred.

This mass femicide has never been officially recognized as a hate-motivated crime in Canada.

Other mass killings of women also reveal sex-motivated hatred. The Toronto van attack in 2018 was perpetrated by a male who admitted he drew inspiration from the so-called incel online subculture of men united by sexual frustration and a hatred of women.

The fact that the attack was motivated by hatred toward women does not appear to have been considered at sentencing.

Hatred based on sex

In June 2022, the Office of the Chief Coroner of Ontario held an inquest into one of the worst instances of intimate partner femicide in Canadian history. It involved the killings of three women by one man in eastern Ontario in 2015.

In that case, the sentencing judge said the perpetrator was “a violent, vindictive, calculating abuser of women” who “took his hatred to its ultimate climax and committed triple murders.”

Sex-motivated violence is not limited to mass killings. A woman or girl is killed every other day in Canada. A significant number of these deaths are also motivated by hatred based on sex.

In many cases, violence against women and girls is not only sex-motivated. It is well documented that many of the disappearances and deaths of Indigenous women and girls also involve racially motivated hatred as well as systemic misogyny and racism, particularly by police.

Sex-motivated violence not treated as hate

Yet our research has revealed that violence motivated by hatred of women and girls is relatively invisible in crime reporting data, sentencing and public discourse.

Sex-motivated violence against women and girls is seldom recorded as hate crime. Sex has never comprised more than three per cent of police-reported hate crime in Canada, despite self-reported data showing at least 22 per cent of Canadians — mostly women — have experienced hate.

Sex-motivated hate, in fact, was the most under-reported category of hate crime when comparing self-reported data to police data.

Neither is sex-motivated violence sentenced as a hate crime, despite the fact that the Criminal Code already provides for increased sentences when there is evidence an offence was motivated by hate.

Canada’s Department of Justice has found that sex-motivated hatred was one of the least commonly addressed grounds when applying hate as an aggravating factor at sentencing. Based on a review of more than 40 years of case law up to 2020, only seven cases were found to focus on sex. Two of these cases were unsuccessful.

Male violence against women, girls is hate

Hate-motivated crime is significant in Canada. In 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, overall hate crimes reported to police increased by 37 per cent compared to 2019.

The first pillar of Canada’s Action Plan on Combatting Hate is empowering communities to identify hate. That currently does not happen in cases of male violence against women, even though sex is an identified group in Canadian criminal laws targeting hate.

Here are three ways it could happen:

• Canada should enhance monitoring of hate-motivated gender-based violence.

• To increase responsiveness to sex-motivated violence, existing and proposed laws targeting sex-motivated hate must be implemented and enforced.

• Canada should promote an understanding of male violence against women and girls as a form of hate. The new laws and the focus they bring to this issue could help.

For hate crime legislation to be more than symbolic, crimes motivated by hatred must be reported, recorded, prosecuted and sentenced as hate crimes for all identifiable groups — not just some of them.

» Debra M. Haak is an assistant professor in the faculty of law at Queen’s University. Myrna Dawson is a professor and research leadership chair in sociology at the University of Guelph.

» This column was originally published at The Conversation Canada: theconversation.com/ca