RESPECT IS THE GOAL, HATE SPEECH THREATENS SPORT INTEGRITY

RIGHTS


RIGHTS develops open educational resources, counter-narrative toolkits and awareness campaigns to tackle HATE-SPEECH in sport, both “online and onlife”, and contributes to E+ priority “Combat violence and tackle racism, discrimination and intolerance in sport”.SPORT is RIGHT and often it is considered the mirror of society. It is constantly calling to face societal challenges, particularly in this historical period in which sport arenas are stages for propaganda, racist and political extremism, hatred and discrimination, places of radicalization and violent behaviors.Hate speech is in opposition to the positive values of sport: respect/ tolerance, integrity, mutual understanding, fair play and friendship. BUT hate speech exists. It is considered to be worse in the lower leagues and could increase if youths, parents, athletes and fans are not educated to respect from the grassroots level. Combatting hate speech rather means verbal and no verbal communication among people, based on mutual respect despite different (ethnic, religious, sexual, political etc.) backgrounds. There is an urgent NEED to improve intercultural skills in sport, to develop capacities of coaches, sport managers, fans leaders to counteract the wave of offenses at the club and on media, and to raise awareness.RIGHTS adopts Intercultural and Cross-cultural Communication as main recipe to tackle hate speech, to educate to respect and promote integrity in sport ensuring own dignity to everybody.The project provides targets with: a knowledge framework on Hate Speech at grassroots and amateur levels, both at clubs and on media channels; educational resources and pedagogical materials to improve intercultural communication; awareness campaign toolkits including comics strip pack, cartoons, videos and a format to organize sport intercultural awareness events. All outputs are tested with selected participants and fine-tuned on the basis of the impacts produced, before being disseminated and exploited.