This article appears as part of the Unspun: Scottish Politics newsletter.

The UK Government announced this week that they will class misogyny, the extreme hatred of women, as a type of extremism, as the ideology has gained more traction over the years.

The UK Government defines extremism as promoting an ideology based on violence or destroying others' freedoms and rights, to threaten the UK’s system of liberal democracy, or to intentionally create an environment that allows others to do this. This was explicitly defined by the former Tory government in March of this year, an update from previous years. So what has provoked this change?

Tackling violence against women and girls was included in both Labour and the Tories' 2024 manifestos, with Labour promising to fast track rape cases with specialist courts, and use tactics usually reserved for organised crime groups and terrorists to “relentlessly” target “the most prolific and harmful perpetrators”.

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The Tory manifesto included introducing a 25-year prison term for those that kill their domestic partners, but mainly focused on what the Tories had already done to “fix” this problem, such as their raise in the maximum penalty for harassment, and increasing rape prosecutions by 56%. But the ideology of misogyny and how it manifests, such as sexual harassment, hasn’t been tackled at all.

According to the Sexism In Schools Survey 2024, misogyny is “a major issue” in schools. The survey found that 25% of secondary school pupils had witnessed sexual harassment in schools in the last five years, with 10% of female staff in secondary schools reporting being sexually harassed. In many cases, this has been at the hands of male students.

Harsher sentences for those found guilty of the most extreme acts of misogyny are fantastic steps. So are Labour’s steps to catch predators that haven’t been caught yet. But prevention of these acts of woman-hating comes from addressing misogyny when the signs first pop up. Classing the ideology as misogyny aims to do that.

How the government aims to do that, no one knows. Classing misogyny as extremism just means, for the moment, that the rise of the harmful ideology will be examined alongside far-right and Islamist ideologies by the government.


More specifically, are these ideologies on the rise, and how can online radicalisation be prevented? One example of this includes the rise of Andrew Tate’s popularity in the UK. Tate is an online celebrity, and a self proclaimed misogynist, who provides a model for how his followers should live their lives.

A 2023 YouGov survey found that 35% of young British men agree with “the sort of things that Andrew Tate says”, 14% believing that a wife is her husband’s property, and shockingly, 7% agreeing with Tate’s belief that “it can be the woman's fault if she is raped or sexually assaulted”.

One teacher reported that: “Boys who frequently talk about or follow Andrew Tate seem more likely to call girls sexually offensive names. They’re more dismissive of teachers and of girls’ input in class”. Sexism is clearly being taught online to Britain’s boys and young men.

Critics have called this “an infringement on free speech”, but there’s a huge amount of misinformation circulating regarding this change. This doesn’t make everyone who makes a less than PC joke about women a terrorist. This change aims to prevent those few but lethal times that extreme misogynists do become terrorists.

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Whilst this may sound dramatic, men have committed acts of terror in the Western world, purely due to their hatred of women. Elliot Rodger, who killed six people in California in 2014, declared that women should not be allowed to pick their sexual partners, and that they were a “plague” on society.

Jake Davidson, who shot and killed five people in Plymouth in 2021, was described by a neighbour as a misogynist, and was linked to extreme misogynist circles online. The WhatsApp group that included the killer and rapist of Sarah Everard, Wayne Couzens, included violently misogynistic messages, such as: “DV (domestic violence) victims love it. That’s why they’re repeat victims more often than not”.

Classing misogyny as extremism aims to tackle the very idea that women are lesser people. It’s not coming after dark humour or forcing wokeness. It’s treating the hatred of women, which can manifest in murder, rape, and terrorist attacks, with the seriousness it needs.