Labour will make misogyny a hate crime if it wins the next general election, deputy leader Angela Rayner said as she kicked off the party’s annual get-together on Saturday.
The party also promised to adopt a proactive policing approach of predicting and preventing violent crime against women using counter-terror style tactics, require political parties to publish diversity data, and require employers to prevent sexual harassment and support menopausal women.
In her speech at Labour Women’s Conference ahead of the main conference on Sunday, Ms. Rayner announced the party’s plan to introduce in law a “legal duty for employers to take all reasonable steps to stop sexual harassment before it starts.”
“But that’s not all. We will make misogyny a hate crime,” she said to an applauding audience.
“We'll toughen sentences for perpetrators of rape and stalking, and halve the level of violence against women and girls [VAWG],” Ms. Rayner added.
Also speaking at the conference, Labour Party chair and shadow women and equalities secretary Anneliese Dodds said the party will also seek to toughen sentences for so-called hate crimes against “LGBT+ and disabled women.”
She asserted that Labour is “the true party of women’s equality.”
Ms. Rayner and Ms. Dodds boasted having more female party members than males in Parliament, with the latter calling it “a great example of how positive action works.”
Ms. Dodds said Labour plans to force political parties to publish anonymised data on the diversity of their candidates “so that every party competing for elections to Westminster, to Holyrood, or to the Senedd has a duty to demonstrate progress.”
She also announced plans to require large employers to publish menopause action plans to support female employees and publish an official menopause workplace guidance for small and medium-sized businesses, saying it’s a “tragedy” that some menopausal-aged women leave their jobs or reduce their hours “due to the lack of support in the workplace.”
Ms. Dodds pledged to cut gynaecology waiting lists, deliver better access to mental health support for women, and improve maternity care, particularly for black women who have been “more likely to die while giving birth.”
Counter-Terror Style Policing
In a press release, Labour said it will set up a programme that will require police to proactively “identify, monitor, and target the most dangerous and prolific perpetrators of violence against women and girls” using “counter-terror style data analysis and tactics.”Under the plan, known suspects of rape, stalking, and domestic abuse will be ranked by the police using data and intelligence on them, and police forces will then monitor the high-risk suspects.
Labour said forces across England and Wales will “be capable of identifying 1000 of the most dangerous perpetrators in the country.”
“Smaller forces will be expected to work together on data collection and specialist capability, as they already do for the most serious crimes,” the party said.
The Metropolitan Police is already trialling a similar approach. According to Labour, “The Met say that until now, they have never been able to identify the tiny fraction of offenders who inflict the most extensive harm on victims, but that the 100 dangerous individuals identified in their V100 programme are 1,000 times more harmful than most other VAWG offenders.”
