They also highlighted Justice Secretary Dominic Raab’s confusion last month about the meaning of ‘misogny’, when he said ‘misogyny is absolutely wrong whether it’s a man against a woman or a woman against a man’.
The lecturers said the issue had reached ‘epidemic proportions’ and needed to be tackled ‘at its root. Social attitudes need to change about what’s acceptable and what’s not. And when people don’t want to listen, communication needs to be far, far smarter to get them to engage and have a hope of changing their minds’.
One example of smarter communication, they said, was Police Scotland’s ‘Don’t be that guy’ video, which had a lot of traction on social media and received praise for highlighting that men, rather than women, need to take action to call out bad behaviour.
Nottingham Law School developed a cartoon-style educational tool to tackle the harassment of women and girls last year, along with Nottingham Trent University and University of Nottingham. The online comic strip, ‘Changing Minds’, used story-telling techniques to convey the impact of harassment on girls and women, the frequency of such behaviour, and how it fuels fear, damages wellbeing and causes women and girls to withdraw from public space.
The comic strip can be read here.
Last year, the Law Commission proposed legislative reform to add ‘sex or gender’ to the protected characteristics for hate crime laws. The other characteristics are race, religion, sexual orientation, disability and transgender identity.
