Overview
Warm-up activity
This warm-up activity develops the SEL focus around self awareness. It begins by exploring positive and negative emotions, looking into how emotions may influence behaviour, and developing an initial vocabulary to describe and label emotions.
A well-developed emotional vocabulary is essential when describing how examples of hate speech might make you feel.
The activity does not directly link to the hate speech theme, but builds a foundation for later activities.
Main activity
Given the national variation in hate speech laws, it can be difficult to set one, European definition. This activity, therefore, guides you through the process of:
- placing hate speech in context.
- identifying and ranking the features of hate speech in terms of severity.
- using your understanding of hate speech to create your own working definition.
Recognising what constitutes hate speech and making judgments on the characteristics based on how they make you feel are key steps to understanding what hate speech is.
Prompt Questions
These questions are provided as examples to initiate and guide discussions around the topic in this focus area.
- What things online make you happy/feel positive?
- What things online make you feel upset/worried/sad/negative?
- What things online would you consider hateful?
- What do you think hate speech is?
- Who is it targeted at?
- Why might people behave in this way?
- How does it make you feel?
- How does it make the person/people targeted feel?
- How might it make the perpetrator feel?
- Do some forms of hate speech affect you more than others? Why?
- Is something still considered hate speech if the intended target isn’t affected by it? Why/why not?
- Is there a difference between being hateful/hurtful and hate speech online?
- Is there content online that can be misunderstood? (e.g. satire, parodies, irony, sarcasm, in-jokes, etc.)
- How do you decide if this type of content is hate speech?
- Can you always tell?
Warm Up Activity
The SELMA project short definition of hate speech is:
“Any online content targeting someone based on protected characteristics with the intent or likely effect of inciting, spreading or promoting hatred or other forms of discrimination.”
Naming and sorting emotions
When people ask us how we are, what is the most common response? “I’m fine!”
It doesn’t help the other person understand how you are really feeling. It is often hard to find the right words to describe how we are feeling or how something makes us feel, how intense that feeling is, and the effect it is having on our behaviour.
This warm-up exercise expands the range of words used to describe our own emotions and provide a way to rate how bad/good/intense that emotion might be. This work is based on some of the fundamental principles established by the RULER programme for SEL developed by the Yale Centre for Emotional Intelligence.
Introduce the quadrant contained in the slides and explain how the principles work; it can be described as a graph with its origin at the centre:
- Red is high energy negative.
- Yellow is high energy positive.
- Blue is low energy negative.
- Green is low energy positive.
Use the slide with the blank quadrant to estimate where each emotion word might fit on the grid. (You may want to use dictionaries to explain some of the more complex words or even adapt some of the words to fit your language, context or culture).
The final slide shows a RULER version of where the words fit. Use this and discuss to what extent the learner’s versions match.
Main Activity
The SELMA project short definition of hate speech is:
“Any online content targeting someone based on protected characteristics with the intent or likely effect of inciting, spreading or promoting hatred or other forms of discrimination.”
Matching emotions to hate speech
Xorg has just arrived from the planet Xenovia and has just created a new social media account. After introducing himself and posting a profile picture, he received a lot of messages some of which have made him quite upset. This is what he received:
- Pleased to meet you, glad you made the journey.
- You’ve come here with your three eyes and taken our jobs.
- OMG! You’re green, that’s GROSS.
- You’re here but you can’t even speak our language, make an effort.
- Why don’t you stick to your own kind?
- Are your kids as ugly as you?
- **** off back to where you came from!
- It’s aliens like you that are ruining our country.
- I’m gonna cum round your house and ruin you.
- I hope you get ill, and die.
- I’m gonna cum round ur house, tie you up and beat you till you die.
- #XenoviansOut
- Why do Xenovians always come to our country - Go Home!
- Xenovians are dogs.
- Xorg go home!
- How many aliens does it take to change a lightbulb? None, they just ***** glow.
- **** you, you ***** ****** ****** *****
- I hate all Xenovians.
- Your mum stinks, bet she eats slime for breakfast.
- I thought the government prevents you guys from coming here.
- Welcome Xorg, So when are you leaving?
- Oh it’s lovely to see people like you really trying to be one of us...
- You’re not going anywhere near my daughter, or my son…
- Will you be my friend?
- We love Xenovians!
- You are the best thing that has ever happened to the human race!
These may look humorous, but take some time to put yourself in Xorg’s position:
- What would you do?
- How would you feel?
- How might you respond?
- Who would you go to?
Use the slides to help you with this activity.
Divide the group of young people into pairs/small groups and give each group a quadrant and the statement bank.
Using the quadrant from the warm-up activity, ask participants to place each statement in the quadrant to match with what you think its emotional characteristics are.
For example: I hate all Xenovians might be medium energy negative (red) while Will you be my friend? could be low energy positive (green).
Once completed, allow each pair the opportunity to share and discuss thoughts with the wider group and reflect.
Next use the provided emotion word bank to attach a feeling to each statement in the quadrant.
Ask groups to feedback on their quadrants; is there any agreement across the groups as to which emotions some of the statements evoked?
Ask groups to explain the features of that content that evoked stronger emotions (e.g. it targeted a protected characteristic group, it intended to cause offense, it threatened physical violence, and so on).
Resources
Recognise hate speech, why it is hurtful and how it may make the recipient feel. Recognise ways in which hate speech can be made less offensive.
