Misogyny Hate Crime Evaluation Report - University of …

1 Misogyny Hate Crime Evaluation Report For Nottingham Women's Centre Funded by the Office of Nottinghamshire Police and Crime Commissioner Professor Louise Mullany and Dr. Loretta Trickett June 2018. Embargoed until 9th July 2018, 0:01. 1. Introduction This research Report details the findings of an Evaluation commissioned by the Office of the Nottinghamshire Police and Crime Commissioner and the Nottingham Women's Centre to assess the impact of the Misogyny Hate Crime policy, introduced by Nottinghamshire Police in April 2016.

2 In the two years that have passed since the policy's introduction, it is important and timely to assess the impact that the policy has had on the everyday lives of the general public living in Nottinghamshire, as well as the effect it has had on the police. It is also important to assess the current levels of street harassment and sexual harassment in public spaces in Nottinghamshire. Other police forces nationally have now started to introduce the policy, but Nottinghamshire remains the trailblazer. Evaluating what has happened as a consequence of the policy change in Nottinghamshire can therefore provide other forces with invaluable information, advice and resources and well as pointers for how to further improve practice in Nottinghamshire.

3 This research will provide guidance on the future direction of this work for Nottingham Women's Centre and their partners. This research is a collaborative project, bringing together researchers from Nottingham Trent University and the University of Nottingham. The research team is headed up by Professor Louise Mullany, a sociolinguist specialising in language and gender studies in the School of English at the University of Nottingham and Dr. Loretta Trickett, a criminologist in the School of Law at Nottingham Trent University .

4 Aims and objectives National and International To contribute to the national discussion about the value of rolling out Misogyny Hate Crime to all police forces in the country To contribute to the agenda of ending violence against women and girls in the UK. through influencing policy-makers To ensure that women's human rights are respected and upheld in our society and to contribute to the global agenda of bringing about Gender Equality', Goal 5. of the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals 2030.

5 To develop a sound methodology that can be replicated in research on this topic by other police forces and academics in the UK and beyond Local To understand where, when and how frequently harassment occurs in Nottinghamshire, following two years since the policy's implementation To understand who is experiencing the harassment , if experiences are different for different groups and what behavioural changes are made as a consequence of experiencing harassment To understand who the perpetrators are and what they say/do To measure levels of policy awareness in a sample of the general population of Nottinghamshire, both women and men To measure how popular the policy is with the general public To measure how much the general public evaluate the language of the policy, in particular relation to its 3 terms.

6 Misogyny ' hate' and Crime '. To discover whether the policy change has influenced the decision of women in Nottinghamshire to Report such incidents to the police To interview men in Nottinghamshire to find out what they think about this initiative, whether or not it has influenced their behaviour and whether they would engage in street harassment themselves 2. To find out about the experiences of women who have reported to Nottinghamshire Police: what happened to them, why they chose to Report , whether they were happy with the police response and whether they would choose to Report in the future To attempt to interview any perpetrators in Nottinghamshire to find out whether their experiences would influence their future choices to engage in this behaviour To find out whether the initiative has made the general public feel safer To find out about police experiences of training and dealing with this type of hate Crime To gather police opinions on the initiative in Nottinghamshire.

7 Including the language chosen to describe the policy: Misogyny ', hate' and Crime '. Research Methods In order to conduct the Misogyny Hate Crime Evaluation , a mixed-methods approach was deemed to be the most suitable in order to develop a robust, replicable method, which enabled a combination of both quantitative and qualitative data to be analysed. The research team combined online survey methods, which work to present an overall snapshot of how the policy is evaluated by the general population in Nottinghamshire.

8 The survey was open for a period of 14 weeks in total and 591 people successfully participated during this period. This was then combined with a series of focus groups and interviews with various stakeholders, in order to provide a much more detailed and nuanced picture of how Misogyny Hate Crime is evaluated in Nottinghamshire, two years after its inception. The groups were identified as follows: The Police, Victims, Perpetrators, Women, as Representative Members of the General Public, and Men, as Representative Members of the General Public.

9 We had a total of 88 people take part in the focus groups and interviews. With the survey and focus groups/interviews combined, we had 679 people participate in the Evaluation in total. 174 women have reported Misogyny Hate Crimes from April 2016-March 2018. 73 of these have been classified as crimes and 101 have been classified as incidents. However, the overall total number of perpetrators who have actually been convicted remains at 1, so despite the combined best efforts of the police and the research team, we were unable to access the direct perspectives of any perpetrators.

10 Out of a potential of 174. women who had reported, only 4 victims came forward to talk to us. The low number of victims willing to engage in this research is perhaps unsurprising, given the psychological difficulties associated with discussing a difficult and emotionally upsetting subject matter. However, we did manage to elicit a number of stories of incidents from women who had been victims in the Women's General Public dataset, as well as stories from men whose female partners, family members and colleagues had been victims of street harassment that would be classified as Misogyny Hate Crime by Nottinghamshire Police.