I DON’T envy police Chief Constable Sara Thornton’s job. Right now when forces are suffering the brutal effects of austerity, making a call about the sorts of crimes we can fight and those which we cannot is no easy task. The fact that overstretched police forces are having to make such calculations is chilling, and a damning indictment of the stranglehold placed on them by the cumulative effect of year after year of cuts. “Forces are too stretched,” she says. “Forces do not have the resources to do everything.”

Misogyny, while a “worthy” cause, is not a priority. The focus, she believes, should be on core policing. Instead, the police should be spending their time and resource solving violent crimes. This statement seems to be echoed in practice here in Scotland, where earlier this year, a review of hate crime legislation in Scotland stopped short of including misogyny.

It’s hard to argue against the idea that police should be busy solving violent crimes. Of course, the police should be working to keep us as safe as possible and of course people want to see resource used on the crimes that have the most significant impact on victims. Violent crime rose 3.4% in Scotland from 2017 to 18. The number of robberies rose by 8.4%, there were 245 attempted murders and 55 murders. Sex offences rose by 12.2%, thought to be partly due to increased confidence in victims coming forward.

Sex offences are overwhelmingly committed by men against women and girls. It would be an egregious failure of the duty to protect the public if the latter were not taken seriously. If this were not classed as core policing, there would be uproar. You only have to look at the stats to realise the risk posed to Scotland’s women and girls. But treating the end result only does little to prevent this sort of crime occurring.

What concerns me most here given those statistics is how misogyny is regarded against this bigger picture of crime in Scotland and the rest of the UK. Misogyny is often erroneously considered a separate and unrelated entity, that has far more to do with individual sensitivity, perhaps even personal politics, than the ecosystem of crime. This is the mistake.

Misogyny is not peripheral and unrelated. Misogyny as it is understood by the women’s organisations that routinely pick up the pieces in the wake of sexual and violent crime, know that the two are not distinct and entirely separate phenomena. It is the root cause.

When you begin to understand that, how it operates and the role it plays in some of the most heinous of crimes, it is unconscionable to de-couple one from the other. The reporting of a comparatively low-level incident could be the red flag that prevents an individual from committing a horrendous act. It should be the red flag. Though we know that time and again women report being intimidated by partners, exes or stalkers, they’re repeatedly failed. According to an investigation by VICE, 49 women in the UK were murdered by men they’d previously reported to the police between 2015 and 2017. Every police force was contacted, not all of them responded. It’s likely the number is far higher.

There is a tendency to think of misogyny and sexism as interrelated terms and to think of both as a conscious hatred of women and firmly held belief that they are inferior. Conceived of this way, misogyny does not scale up credibly.

The number of men walking around, thinking, “I hate women” and being consciously motivated and driven to behave by that hatred, is not endemic. But misogyny as the words, behaviours and acts that put women in their place is.

To understand how insidious it truly is, it must be thought of as a social system. Cornell Professor, Kate Manne, author of Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, explains it as a means of upholding the societal arrangement by gender hierarchy.

Sexism is the ideology which buttresses this patriarchal structure – misogyny is the spectrum of behaviours that enforces that ideology, coming down on any woman who steps out of line.

When you consider that the society we live in still bears the hallmark of an ideology that expects one thing of men and another of women, you can begin to understand how misogynistic behaviour works diligently to maintain the status quo. On one side of the spectrum, you have a woman cat-called on the street, as a reminder of a place in the hierarchy. At the other end of the spectrum you have scores of dead women, murdered because they did not meet the expectations placed on them by the patriarchal system. To be loving, caring, or nurturing or silent, or compliant, or submissive, any other of the seemingly unending list of criteria women as expected to fulfil.

While Sarah Thornton is undoubtedly a committed officer who wants to keep our country as safe as possible, her stance on misogyny belies a worrying lack of understanding of violence against women and girls.

To take it off the policing menu, to dub it as a “nice to have” sends a message to the perpetrators that their actions are trivial in the grand scheme of things and will not be taken seriously.

More worryingly is the message that her words send to women and girls: That the quality of their lived experience does not matter, that their safety is not a priority.

This stance is a betrayal. The police have the opportunity to drive cultural change and to reduce the overall impact of violent crime against women. Treating misogyny as a hate crime is not “worthy” – it is a vital, life-saving intervention.

In deciding what hate crime is, Scotland had an opportunity to send a clear message about who and what matters. It’s a great shame that it too missed out on the chance to take action for lasting change.