Hate speech: violence and racism
Define
- Abusive or threatening speech or writing that expresses prejudice against a particular group on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, national origin, ethnicity etc.
- Hate speech is any form of expression through which speakers intend to vilify, humiliate, or incite hatred against a group.
- Hate speech is often propagated by charismatic leaders who use their position and skills to convince large groups of the legitimacy of hatred towards certain groups or individuals. Hatred of Roma, of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community, of people with disabilities and beyond, is most often legitimized by the alleged danger these people pose to society.
Identify
- the use of an isolated negative behavior attributed to a person belonging to a certain group in order to generalize and extend that behavior to all persons belonging to that group; the narrative is to condemn the whole group for a behavior belonging to a single person;
- use of expressions that spread, incite, promote or justify racial hatred, xenophobia, anti-Semitism or other forms of hatred based on intolerance;
- speeches that incite violence against these groups;
Act
Activity 1: Speech card game
Participants: 20-30 people
Needs: video projector, 20 cards, 10 pens, 10 carioci, 10 sheets of A3 paper.
Aims: To be able to identify a hate speech, to understand the causes and effects and how we can fight hate speech online.
First watch a video that contains hate speech.
Whole group discussion: How do you perceive this video? Do you consider it a hate speech? What does hate speech mean? Can you identify elements of dicrimination and violence against specific groups?
After this discussion, through which we launch a little the topic in the debate, we divide the participants into 4 groups of 5-7 participants each. Each group will receive a few cards with a few short speeches, some of which will contain hate speech, some not. Each group will have to identify which cards contain hate speech and which do not. After that, also on the same groups, they will have to discuss and draw some conclusions on large sheets of paper answering a few questions:
- what are the causes of hate speech?
- what are or can be the effects?
- how do we identify a hate speech?
- What can we do to combat hate speech?
