Hate speech and women's political participation

Hate speech against women, including online hate speech, is often directed at and about women in politics. Women politicians across the political spectrum have spoken openly about their many and varied experiences of communicative conduct that may reasonably be described as hate speech. This chapter considers this problem with reference to existing empirical work on the impact of hate speech against women on women’s political participation in Australia. It argues that hate speech silences women by preventing them from speaking, by marginalizing and devaluing their speech and in building structural constraints on their expression. The result is that even where women can and do speak, what they say is often unable to have its intended force. That is, hate speech against women functions, and is often intended, to exclude women from political participation. This is especially true of such speech that occurs in spaces, like online spaces, in which essential political communication also occurs. The chapter concludes by suggesting some ways forward, in the form of a holistic counter speech approach to addressing the harms to women and to democracy of hate speech against women.