The August 4 mass shooting of a women’s dance class in Collier, Pennsylvania, in which three women were killed and six others wounded, should be considered a bias motivated hate crime and should reinvigorate our work to end gender based violence. There is a tendency when hearing a story like this one—in which 48 year old George Sodini brought three guns into an LA Fitness Center, made his way to an aerobics room, turned off the lights and opened fire—to chalk it up to the work of a madman who could not be stopped. But Sodini kept a careful record of his hatred of women, his feelings of sexual frustration and of being sexually slighted by them, and of his desire to kill women—and more specifically the women at his health club; he blogged about it over the course of a year. His writing shows him to be obsessed with the idea that women did not pay attention to him and his related hatred towards them. He ranted at length about sex and relationships, expressing anger at all the women having sex when he was not, and jealousy of all the young men dating young women when he was not. His blog also contained racist comments, and if his shooting had been against the group that he had racially vilified in his writing, a strong legal case could be made that this was a hate crime under U.S. law.
Right now the U.S. Congress has an opportunity to change the way we classify and deal with gender motivated hate crimes such as this one, because after over a decade of efforts to amend U.S. hate crimes law to include additional categories such as gender, the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act—also known as the Matthew Shepard Act—has been passed by the House and by the Senate, and is awaiting finalization. If the Act—currently in the form of an amendment to another bill—can make it through conference, it could be a building block for changing the way American law enforcement deals with gender based violence and the way that the public perceives this violence.
Classifying gender based violence as a hate crime would have a substantial practical effect as well as being of major symbolic importance. From an operational point of view, the act would extend federal protections for hate crimes (protections currently limited to activities such as voting and attending school), and would codify and expand the funding of and investigative capabilities of federal officials for aiding local law enforcement in combating these crimes. The act authorizes the Attorney General and the Justice Department to investigate and to prosecute hate crimes based on gender, as well as sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability. This means that the full power of federal law can be brought to bear on gender based hate crimes, allowing federal authorities to take the lead on cases when local authorities are unwilling to do so or when state level hate crimes law does not include gender. This development could also spur an amendment to the Hate Crimes Statistics Act of 1990, meaning that we could finally be provided with information on gender motivated crimes that could help illuminate and combat the problem. Currently, the FBI only records statistics for hate crimes motivated by perceived race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or disability, but not for gender or gender identity. In short, the current act will greatly enhance law enforcement’s capabilities to combat gender motivated hate crimes.
More broadly speaking, this Act could have a significant impact in fighting gender based violence in that it could usher in a paradigm shift in how we classify and therefore address the problem. The omission of gender in current hate crime law renders women’s human rights separate from human rights as a whole, and removes from our consciousness the ability to recognize—and thus to fight—crimes committed against women and girls because they are women and girls. A hate crime is generally defined as a crime committed out of animosity towards the group to which the victim belongs, as opposed to the victim as an individual. The LA Fitness center shooting evidences exactly this type of motivation: Sodini opened fire upon this dance class because they were women, and because he hated women as a whole, not because he knew or disliked the victims on an individual level. We classify hate crimes as different than other crimes for a number of reasons, all of which apply to gender motivated violence. Statistically, hate crimes are more vicious and result in more fatalities, making them a greater threat. They have a community wide effect, causing fear, anxiety, and a lingering sense of vulnerability in those in the attacked community. Hate crimes send the message that the group under attack is not as safe as other groups in society, sewing division and creating stratification. Hate crimes happen to groups that already face discrimination, and hate crimes are in themselves an act of discrimination, assaulting not just individuals but global ideas of equality, human rights, and human dignity.
Unfortunately, the new law is not fully secured and could still falter in its final stages. The Act passed in the House, but after it stalled in the Senate it was passed as an Amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act. Because the House version of the Defense Authorization Act does not include an amendment to hate crime legislation, the differences between the House and Senate version must be reconciled in conference, which means that there is still some chance that it will not make it through and become part of federal law. Senator Jeff Sessions, who opposes the Act, has introduced an amendment to it that allows the death penalty as punishment, an element likely designed to create opposition by Democrats.
Without doubt the changes to federal hate crimes legislation should be pushed through conference, and soon. For years—as early as 1994 in terms of proposed federal legislation—women’s rights advocates have tried to add gender motivated violence to Federal hate crimes law. The Act in its current form was introduced in 2001 following the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard by people motivated by hatred of homosexuality and homosexuals, but did not receive sufficient Congressional support until now. It is more than time for crimes such as Sodini’s gender motivated mass shooting to be classified, and dealt with, as hate crimes deserving national protection and resources.
