Campaigners calling for an end to violence against women have expressed disappointment after an independent review of hate crime laws in Scotland stopped short of recommending a new offence of misogynistic harassment.

The retired judge Lord Bracadale, who was commissioned by the Scottish government to undertake a root and branch review of hate crime legislation at the end of 2016, has proposed that gender should be introduced for the first time in any part of the UK as an aggravation to existing offences, along with age.

Current hate crime laws in Scotland cover race, religion, disability, sexual orientation and transgender identity.

But Rape Crisis Scotland, Scottish Women’s Aid and feminist campaigners Engender called for a bolder approach, insisting that a standalone misogynistic hate crime was the only way of disrupting “epidemic levels of misogynistic hate in schools, in the workplace, on city streets and online”.

Referring to Amnesty International’s #ToxicTwitter report, which highlighted the scale of online misogyny, Bracadale said he hoped a new statutory aggravation of gender hostility, alongside the new offence of “stirring up hatred”, would create an effective system for prosecuting online hate crime and hate speech against women.

But the campaigners argued Bracadale had not paid enough attention to international experience. “Other nations and states have found that simply adding gender to a laundry list of groups protected by hate crime legislation leads to underreporting, under-investigation and under-prosecution. We don’t want a law that languishes unused, giving impunity to perpetrators,” they said in a joint statement.

Stating his desire for a “clear and simple scheme” that consolidated existing law, Bracadale proposed that the “stirring up hatred” offence be extended to all protected groups. He described the offence – which he noted was occurring increasingly online – as “a particularly serious and insidious crime”. Police Scotland warned recently that increasing numbers of recorded hate crime had an online element.

Giving the example of the recent “Punish a Muslim” online campaign, he added that a cover-all offence would not interfere with freedom of expression. “Rabble-rousing is not the same as robust debate. The kind of conduct that amounts to stirring up hatred will usually be obvious from the nature of the conduct, the context in which it happens and the kind of language that is used.”

For age-related hate crime, Brackadale said the evidence showed that much crime against the elderly was driven less by hostility and more by exploitation of the vulnerability associated with old age. He gave fraudulent telephone scams as an example.

“This is not a hate crime as such but I do consider it to be a serious problem. So I have also suggested to the Scottish ministers that they should introduce a separate aggravation where the offender exploits the victim’s vulnerability,” he said.

Bracadale also concluded that no further legislation was need to tackle offensive behaviour at Scottish football matches after the government’s law to tackle such crime was repealed by opposition MSPs earlier this year.

He also suggested that any redrafting of legislation should include “intersex” as a separate category, rather than a sub-category of transgender identity.

Holyrood’s minister for community safety, Annabelle Ewing, said the Scottish government agreed that the country’s hate crime laws should be consolidated into a single piece of legislation and would use the report as the basis for a wider consultation before bringing forward new legislation.