The Legal Treatment of Gendered Hate Speech in Australia

In her paper The Legal Treatment of Gendered Hate Speech in Australia, Kylie Weston-Scheuber examines the concept of hate speech as a harm against women and explores reasons for the invisibility of gendered hate speech in public and legal discourse. She analyses gendered hate speech as a form of both individual harm and harm that affects women as a group. Weston-Scheuber pays particular attention to the role of ideology in relation to gendered hate speech and hate crimes and the relationship between ideology in a gender context and ideology as understood in the context of terrorism offences and incitement of terrorist violence. The examination of gendered hate speech encompasses recent examples from the Australian and overseas contexts, including the recent rise of the so-called “Incel” movement and cyberbullying. She examines civil and criminal hate speech laws from various Australian jurisdictions, noting the almost universal absence of proscription of hate speech on the basis of gender. This includes an examination of various models of “hate crime”laws in Australia, and their capacity to encompass substantive crimes motivated by gender hatred or prejudice.