This book presents a compilation of case studies from practitioners, educators, and researchers working in the area of digital violence, along with methodologies to prevent it using cyber security. The book contains three basic sections namely: the concept of digital violence in policy and practice; the impact of digital violence; and the implication of cyber security to curb such violence. The intention of this book is to equip researchers, practitioners, faculties, and students with critical, practical, and ethical resources to use cyber security and related technologies to help curb digital violence and to support victims. It brings about the needs of technological based education in order to combat gendered crimes like cyberbullying, body-shaming, and trolling that are a regular phenomenon on social media platforms. Topics include societal implications of cyber feminism; technology aided communication in education; cyber security and human rights; governance of cyber law throughinternational laws; and understanding digital violence.

Never in history have crises surrounding free speech raged with greater ferocity than we are witnessing today. This is the world's first book to gather detailed, country-by-country studies devoted entirely to the problem of hate speech, spanning more than twenty nations. The introductory chapter summarises various key concepts, followed by a composite of the questions that were originally put to each of the Special Rapporteurs. The chapters then provide the Rapporteurs' detailed analyses of each country, with several of the authors supplementing these with additional helpful insights. In particular, the abundance of case studies will help to dramatize the controversies that have been sparked by hateful expression in ways that continue to be relevant far beyond the borders of any one nation. The chapters explain national legislation and case law, tracking the challenges posed by growing extremism and social polarisation, which is now more acute than ever before in our age of electronic media. The authors also align these national developments with norms and procedures of leading international human rights bodies such as the UN Committee on Racial Discrimination, the UN Human Rights Committee, and the European Court of Human Rights. This collection will be invaluable for beginners, as no prior knowledge is required.

This thought-provoking book follows the EU's journey into the digital age, explaining how it uses legislation and policy to tackle challenges such as the abuse of market power by Big Tech companies and the spread of hate speech and disinformation. Werner Stengg draws on his extensive experience in shaping digital policy to expertly analyse the EU's ambitious legislative and innovation programme, which focuses on human rights and prioritises trustworthy, transparent, and accountable usage of digital technologies. Alongside this examination of legislation and policy, Stengg also outlines the EU's major investment agenda into the digital infrastructures required to become a global player in our data-driven and AI-powered economy. Ultimately, the book highlights that innovations in the digital sphere are essential not only for the global competitiveness of European companies, but also for Europe to safeguard its resilience, autonomy, and technological sovereignty at a time of mounting geopolitical tensions.

The edited volume explores the causes, forms, and cultures of gender-based violence in society, including how children are educated, how games, art and even language promote differences, stereotypes, neutrality between men and women. It is a place to reflect on the growing importance of tolerance, diversity and acceptance of others. The book focuses on many facets, whether in a confined or public space, with a series of empirical and theoretical chapters from around the world. The volume provides key contemporary commentary on the changing dynamics of gender-based violence. It unveils a range of contexts and spaces in which gender-based violence happens, showcasing its scale and impact worldwide.

This edited book explores how harmful speech works, how it can be used to change societies in bad ways and how we can defend against it. Harmful speech comes in a variety of forms, including hate speech, dehumanizing speech, misogynistic speech, derogatory speech, misgendering, marginalizing speech, and much more. What is common to all these types of speech is that they don't just offend but seek to harm members of vulnerable groups, so that they feel humiliated, attacked, denigrated, silenced, and dehumanised. These harms are not confined to the conversation in which such speech is used, but may involve various downstream effects such as moral, social, and epistemic harms. Harmful speech may also shift social norms by changing people's opinions and ultimately changing norms about how targets ought to be treated. Harmful speech uses this effect to establish and maintain oppressive norms, entrench hierarchies and shape power relations.

This edited book offers insight into the linguistic construction of prejudice and discrimination in social media. Drawing on the outputs of a three-year research project, NETLANG, involving scholars from five European countries (Portugal, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland and Poland), as well as on external contributions from participants in the project's final conference, the collection brings together a variety of linguistic approaches to the study of online hate speech, ranging from pragmatic to syntactic, morphological, and lexical analyses, with a considerable focus on Natural Language Processing and Corpus Linguistics. Data from English, Portuguese, Danish, Lithuanian, Persian, Polish, and Slovenian are examined, along with various geopolitical contexts for hate speech, especially anti-refugee and anti-immigrant discourse. The authors explore a continuum of overt to covert textual data, namely: (i) structural elements, such as syntactic and morphological patterns which recur throughout the texts; (ii) lexical and stylistic elements, revealing the often implicit ways in which vocabulary choices and rhetorical devices signal the expression of hate; and (iii) interactional elements, concerning the pragmatic relationships established in online communicative exchanges. The chapters cover numerous types of prejudice, such as sexism, racism, nationalism, antisemitism, religious intolerance, ageism, and homo/transphobia.

This edited volume explores the evolving role of visual and multimodal expressions in spreading hate ideologies within digital communication. In digital spaces, hate speech is increasingly conveyed through memes, images, and videos, blending textual and pictorial elements to perpetuate harmful stereotypes and other exclusionary narratives. While historical perspectives on hate imagery are well-documented, this collection emphasises the pressing need for contemporary analysis of visual and multimodal communication in digital environments. Featuring contributions from interdisciplinary experts, this volume investigates the content, structure, and dynamics of normalisation of visual hate speech. By examining memes, manipulated images, and other visual artifacts, it reveals how hateful content gains traction in digital public spheres, often blurring traditional boundaries of acceptability. Through rigorous case studies and theoretical insights, the anthology provides a comprehensive understanding of how multimodality shapes hate discourse and its societal impact.

This Commentary provides the first comprehensive and holistic analysis of the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence (the Istanbul Convention). It offers a complete article-by-article guide to the Convention with reference to the explanatory report, the findings of the monitoring body (GREVIO) and relevant State practice. Contributions from more than 50 leading international academics and practitioners in the field. A set of thematic chapters dwelling on crucial issues such as intersectionality, reproductive rights, and cyber violence. Analyses of the content of each article against the background of relevant international documents such as the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment, and Eradication of Violence against Women.

Providing an innovative approach to understanding and addressing anti-gender hate speech, this book focuses on its effects on everyday life, how it is handled within legal frameworks, and how it challenges democratic principles. Unlike previous research, which is often limited to currently regulated forms of hate speech, this book is focused on gender-based hate speech, demonstrating its broader social and ideological impacts. By contextualising freedom of expression within democratic values, it offers a new framework for addressing anti-gender hate speech as a threat to both individual dignity and societal diversity. Through this lens, the authors highlight how anti-gender hate speech represents not only a breach of individual rights but also a structural challenge to democracy, requiring responses that reflect these dual dimensions. The book provides a unique contribution to both legal scholarship and democratic theory by rethinking the balance between gender equality and freedom of expression as cooperative as well as inherently contextual and inclusive.

This handbook offers a comprehensive overview of research into discourses of disinformation, misinformation, post-truth, alternative facts, hate speech, conspiracy theories, and "fake news". Divided into two sections, it provides a detailed look at the methodological challenges and approaches for studying disinformation, along with a wide range of case studies covering everything from climate change denial to COVID-19 conspiracies. The studies address how discourses of disinformation are constructed and developed, what rhetorical and persuasive strategies they employ, how disinformation can be discerned from real news, and what steps we might take in order to create a more trustworthy news environment.

This book explores the social forces among and between online aggressors that affect the expression and perpetration of online hate. Its chapters illustrate how patterns of interactive social behavior reinforce, magnify, or modify this expression. It also considers the characteristics of social media that facilitate social interactions that promote hate and facilitate relationships among haters. Bringing together a range of international experts and covering an array of themes, including woman abuse, antisemitism, pornography, radicalization, and extreme political youth movements, this book examines the specific social factors and processes that facilitate these forms of hate and proposes new approaches for explaining them.

Violence is a multifaceted phenomenon that infiltrates various cultures and systems, necessitating a comprehensive understanding to enhance prevention and intervention strategies. This Special Issue reprint includes systematic and scoping reviews on diverse forms of violence, aiming for improved characterization. It highlights the growing focus of research on the urgent need for specific preventive measures against both traditional and emerging forms of violence. Additionally, the issue encompasses empirical, quantitative, and qualitative research aimed at deepening insights into the dynamics unique to various expressions of violence. These include offline (e.g., dating violence, sexual harassment, gender-based violence, and intimate partner violence) and online violence (e.g., cyber interpersonal violence), across different social and cultural contexts and among various population groups, including minorities and vulnerable groups (e.g., elderly women).

Find out an innovative exploration of online violence through this book, which is the result of an unprecedented collaboration between Bordeaux Montaigne University and the French National Police Service, within the “CyberNeTic” research project. It explores underlying cyberbullying practices and its violent mechanisms as it gets to the heart of communication and information sciences as well as cybercriminology. It can also provide a typology of over forty modes of operation. This approach offers a nuanced, multidisciplinary understanding of this modern scourge. Both academic and practical, this book focuses on a specific scientific definition of identified cyberbullying practices. Along with these online crime explorations, harrowing testimonial integrations and concrete examples presentations, it is in fact relying on the in-depth legal framework and providing scientific references that are essential for a better full apprehending of the issue.