Rethinking Online Anti-Gender Hate Speech: Legislation and Public Policy Making

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.

Rethinking Online Anti-Gender Hate Speech will be of great interest to students and scholars of Criminology, Law, Media and Communication, Sociology, and Women’s and Gender Studies.

Moa Bladini is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Law at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research fields are criminal law and criminal procedure law. In her previous research, Dr Bladini invesitgated the concept of truth, objectivity ideals and legitimization strategies in judicial activity. In her dissertation critical discourse analysis was a central method. Dr Bladini’s research mainly deals with the concept of truth, objectivity ideals and legitimization strategies in the legal judicial activity.

Eva-Maria Svensson is Professor in the Department of Law at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research is mainly concentrated on legal philosophy and theory, particularly in the field feminist/gender legal studies, gender equality law and policy, and freedom of speech. Professor Svensson also does research in the fields of ageing and capability, gender equality in the Arctic as well as Studies of Academic Knowledge in Law. She participates in several research networks, in jurisprudence, feminist/gender studies, socio-legal studies, critical legal studies, free speech issues, such as the international network on Gender Equality in the Arctic TUARQ, the Nordic Network in Women’s Law and Feminist/Gender Legal Studies, several International Network in Feminist and Feminist Legal Studies, Critical legal scholars, NORSIL (the Nordic Research Network for Sámi and Indigenous People’s Law), and the International Association for Legal Philosophy and Social Philosophy (IVR).