The Law Grapples With Men Who Hate Women

First you see the guy in the T-shirt following the teenage girl in the store. She glances back at him and keeps going. He hustles up and shoves her, really hard, into a rack of shoes. When she looks to see what the hell happened, he’s glaring and ranting and coming at her as she backs off, and then he goes past her and out the door; it’s all there on the video from the security camera.

If this had happened only once, the charge would be a misdemeanor. But five times now, at the beach, in downtown San Diego, in stores, to five women, all strangers to the man in the T-shirt--as the San Diego County deputy district attorney sees it, that’s a string of felony hate crimes, committed because the victims were women. And he’s prosecuting the man in the T-shirt as the suspect in all of them.

We know what a hate crime is, don’t we?

It’s shooting up a community center because the sign out front says “Jewish.” It’s dragging a black man behind a truck until his head comes off. This week, we’re watching a jury being seated in Wyoming for the murder trial of one of the men who confessed to pummeling a gay college student into a coma before the victim was left hanging on a wooden fence to die.

And yet here is the San Diego case, filed under a rarely used 1992 state law that extends hate crime statutes to gender-provoked crimes. Even for Hector Jimenez, who prosecutes hate crimes for San Diego County, it’s a first, based on “the fact that [the suspect] is committing crimes somewhat randomly against women who don’t know him, with no provocation, no sexual desires or sexual motives, no financial motive. The motive seems to be to attack women.”

What is the standard of proof for a gender hate crime? Is it the difference between a thug snarling, “Shut up or I’ll pop you one,” or “Shut up or I’ll pop you one, bitch”? Does a gender hate crime require a pattern, or can it be a single incident, as one burning cross on a black family’s lawn can be sufficient evidence of hate?

The U.S. Supreme Court is even now considering the constitutionality of the 1994 federal Violence Against Women Act, which lets some battery and rape cases be categorized as hate crimes so the victims can sue their attackers.

And this year, in the sweaty heat of a Beltway August, a woman named Carole Carrington testified on Capitol Hill, asking Congress to shore up federal gender hate crime laws.

Her daughter, her granddaughter and a family friend were simply tourists visiting the winter beauties of Yosemite when they disappeared--spirited off and murdered. The man who confessed to killing them, Carrington testified shakily, “claims to have fantasized about killing women for the last 30 years.” They died, said their mother, grandmother, friend, “simply because they were women.”

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Put the lens of gender hate crime to your eye and history, recent and distant, takes on an altogether different cast.

The ancient Romans’ mass rape of the Sabine women--a favorite subject in classical art because it permitted painting naked women for aesthetic purposes--becomes a class-action hate crime. What of Bluebeard, or Henry VIII, who discarded or killed wives for not bringing forth sons (the Tudor monarch did not know, nor would he have likely believed, that sperm determines a fetus’ gender)?

Every mass murderer or serial killer with a “woman problem” could be shifted from mere “maniac” to the more sensible and comprehensible category of hate criminal: Jack the Ripper, Richard Speck, Ted Bundy.

There was more than murder afoot when a man burst into the engineering building at the University of Montreal 10 years ago, separated the students by gender, and opened fire on the women, screaming obscenities about “feminists.” He killed 14 women. When a Texas man opened fire in a cafeteria in 1991, he went table to table choosing females to shoot. Both men left behind letters telling how much they despised women.

The laws are so new that the standards are still in flux. Is it a law only for strangers? When do domestic crimes qualify as hate crimes? Is a man beating just his ex-wife, or is he beating every woman who ever stood him up? Is he killing a woman, or Women?

And where, the question must be asked, would the Y chromosome victim rank the male victims of the rare female serial killer?

A Justice Department attorney said last summer that the law would not mean the Feds would prosecute every rape and wife beating--only violent outrages with indisputable gender hatred at the core.

Still, some gaze on the expanding range of hate crimes and ask in dismay where it will all end. Their question should be asked not of the laws, but of the crimes that put them on the books in the first place.

Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.