Sexist hate speech and the development of alternative narratives
Inequality and misogyny is a worldwide problem. From women earning less than men to them being killed by those close to them, it is a fact that every person of any race gender, and sexuality can be a victim of sexist narratives and ideals. The Erasmus+ training course “Break the Cycle” tackled a very important issue. Hate speech in particular sexist hate speech.
In the first few days, we started by writing in groups our definition of sexism and then combined together our definitions to create a collective one. What we wrote was:
Sexism: Things we feel, think, and act upon that come from the idea that someone’s gender is better than the other.
After setting our definition we moved on to analyzing different kinds of sexism in small groups and writing examples for them. A nice example is for instance “Ambivalent sexism” which is the theory that sexism has two key components “hostile” and “benevolent”. Another kind of sexism for example, what my group had is “Digital Sexism” an issue seen everywhere lately, we had the chance to talk amongst our groups and point out examples that we might not even have connected with sexism otherwise. It was really eye-opening!
After having understood the concept of sexism and the ways it manifests itself in our daily lives we started speaking on hate speech, how to deconstruct a narrative, and how to respond to it constructively.
“Narrative is a logical and internally coherent report and interpretation of connected events and characters”
After understanding what a narrative is we started with the first step of our assessment of sexist hate speech.
The first step was to analyze the content, structure, and tone, then the intent, context, and the targets keeping always in mind the context of social relationships. So, once again we divided into small groups and worked on the analysis and the understanding of the narratives. We continued while also sharing content and conversing as a big group we kept working on the sexist narrative each smaller group chose.
We continued the assessment by analyzing the media distribution, and the temporal and geographical distribution, verifying and double-checking which parts of the narrative are facts and which are pure prejudice, verifying our sources and the narrative’s sources, and also analyzing the impact each sexist narrative had in the world.
After finishing our analysis, we started designing our counter-narratives. We once again followed the steps by defining our vision, our target audience, the content, and selecting our media outlet. It was emphasized by the trainers that in no way should we use hate speech against hate speech and that we should keep a human rights approach and that is what we tried to do.
After figuring out our alternative narrative which is an equal rights and respect narrative, we did step four which was the implementation of counter-alternative narratives. We prepared a launch plan and planned the ways in which we will be promoting our narrative.
Now, we are in the last step, the one of evaluation. After our narratives launch, we will be expected to analyze and evaluate the impact and the reach our narrative had.
Overall, this Erasmus+ training gave me the tools and steps to not just understand hate speech but to be able to respond with respect facts, and structure.
This experience gave me a lot of knowledge and skills and a lot to think about. A big thank you is due to the amazing people I met there and the organizations that gave us this opportunity!
