#Recognize-Resist-Remedy: A research project to combat gender-based hate speech against women in Brazil and India
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Lead institution(s)
Summary
Neither India nor Brazil have laws that effectively respond to sexism in online hate speech, in part because hate speech classifications in the law fail to comprehensively cover sexist speech.Read more
Neither India nor Brazil have laws that effectively respond to sexism in online hate speech, in part because hate speech classifications in the law fail to comprehensively cover sexist speech. With only piecemeal legislation, the legal system ignores the violation of women’s dignity and the fault lines of class, ethnicity, race, and caste that lead to gender-based hate speech. There are also definitional and jurisdictional challenges in applying the law to the online environment.
#Recognize-Resist-Remedy will focus on institutional and individual transformation to combat sexist and misogynistic speech online in Brazil and India. This project will identify the main shortcomings that need to be addressed through legal reform. It will also harness the window of opportunity created by women speaking out in these environments to tackle the proliferation of sexist and misogynistic speech online. The aim of the project is to input recommendations into emerging policy processes, intermediary liability regimes, and governance frameworks for online content. The project will also work with young people to shift attitudes to demonstrate how deep change is possible.
IT for Change (India) and InternetLab (Brazil) will work together on the research in both countries using an interdisciplinary critical feminist framework. They will use a mixed methods approach incorporating legal and policy analysis, field research, case studies analysis, participatory action research, and validation through a global experts meeting.
Research outputs
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This is the final report of the “#Recognize-Resist-Remedy” project, a collaborative research endeavor between InternetLab and IT for Change. The project was initiated in 2019 with the objective of examining the manifestations of hate speech against women in online spaces. Over the course of four years (2019-2023), the project evolved and adapted to an extremely shifting social and political context, leading to the emergence of new inquiries and the adoption of methodologies that went beyond the original plan. This report refers to InternetLab’s part of the project.
We carried out an in-depth investigation of case laws in India in order to examine the challenges of obtaining access to justice in a context with no specific legal provision addressing sexist hate speech. Through a delimited key word search methodology, 95 cases of women seeking redress for various forms of online sexism, misogyny and gender-based violence were identified from online case law databases. These cases were zeroed upon through a systematic combing of online court records of the Supreme Court, 2 district courts, and 17 high courts between end November and early December 2021. The 95 shortlisted cases were then analysed in-depth for the following aspects: emerging typologies of violations in digital sociality, platform accountability considerations, gender sensitivity of legal readings, and challenges in obtaining evidence for the prosecution. Our study found that the lack of a specific legal provision addressing sexist hate speech made it very challenging to recognise gender-trolling as an emergent form of gender-based violence in the Indian context.
