Nora Sánchez: “Faced with hate speech, we advocate mediation and nonviolent communication”

Hate speech does not only circulate on social media, but also reaches classrooms, youth leisure activities and other everyday settings where children and adolescents spend their time. This is a growing concern among teachers. According to a survey conducted by Projecte Abril involving 872 education professionals in Catalonia, 62% of the secondary school and upper secondary school teachers surveyed say they have noticed a clear increase in hate speech in recent years. So how can education help tackle this situation?

To address this challenge, Projecte Abril, an initiative launched by Fundació Neus Català, works to promote antifascist education among children and adolescents, while also involving teachers, families and organisations. Through workshops, educational resources and training, the initiative aims to provide tools to identify and address hate speech. We speak to its coordinator, Nora Sánchez Oussedik, who reflects on the challenges of addressing these narratives among young people and the educational and community-based strategies needed to tackle them.

What is Projecte Abril?

Projecte Abril is an antifascist education initiative that we have been running at Fundació Neus Català for nearly three years. We devoted the first year mainly to training ourselves, conducting research and learning about the organisations and individuals who had previously worked on these issues. The Fundació works to highlight the political activism of Neus Català's generation, which fought against fascism in the 20th century. Until then, we had focused mainly on historical memory, remembering the struggles of those women. But in 2023, when we publicly presented the Fundació, studies began to emerge warning of an ideological shift among younger people towards right-wing or far-right positions. The ideas that Neus Català and her generation had fought against were once again being trivialised and normalised.

How did you address this situation?

This made us reflect on how to update antifascist discourse for the 21st century and reach children and adolescents who were buying into these ideas. The work of historical memory organisations is closely linked to justice and reparation, which are very important issues, but their activities are mainly aimed at adults. We wondered how we could reach generations who had not experienced the dictatorship, whose parents had not experienced it either, and who might no longer have close relatives who had lived through it. How could we help them understand the seriousness of the times we are living in? We realised that we had to start with education, understood in its broadest sense.

So, not just in the classroom.

Exactly. It is not just about going into a third-year secondary school classroom, although that is part of it. It is also about talking to teachers, families, associations, youth leisure organisations and those involved in extracurricular activities and grassroots sports. In fact, sport is one of the settings where hate speech, such as sexism or racism, is most widely spread and normalised. In football, for example, we have unfortunately normalised many of these attitudes. This idea led us to create Projecte Abril, with the aim of bringing all these educational stakeholders together through an antifascist approach to education.

Based on your experience, how do you think hate speech and far-right ideas are gaining ground among young people?

Several factors are involved, which is why they are so difficult to stop. For us, the key lies in social fragmentation and worsening living conditions, including those affecting children and adolescents. When people are struggling, they look for someone to blame, and the far right offers simple explanations that point the finger at those around us rather than explaining more complex causes. These quick, emotionally charged narratives, which fuel fear, are easy for young people who are still developing their critical thinking skills to accept. All of this is happening against a backdrop of a housing crisis, a climate crisis and successive economic crises.

What other factors are involved?

Added to this is a change in communication codes that is disrupting contact between generations. Hate speech spreads mainly through social media, at a speed and through channels that adults often neither know about nor detect. Young people use forms of language that we do not understand, allowing ideas that we struggle to identify to proliferate. There are also the interests of the global far right, which has studied all of this very carefully. It is no coincidence that the major owners of social media platforms are generally aligned with far-right positions. Algorithms operate according to the logic of their owners.

How does this manifest itself in schools?

This breakdown becomes evident when these ideas reach the classroom. Many teachers have told us about secondary school students who suddenly stand up and shout ‘Viva Franco’. And you wonder where that comes from, because it does not come from their families, their friends or their schools, yet somehow these ideas have reached them. That is when all the alarm bells start ringing, because children and adolescents are being exposed to harmful content that we, as adults, do not know how to address.

These narratives also find their way in through humour.

Yes, humour is one of the mechanisms the far right uses to trivialise hate speech and discrimination. It then portrays itself as the victim, claiming that you can no longer say anything or laugh at anything. Of course we can laugh, but we must always examine the power relations behind every joke. Humour is a tool for the oppressed to laugh at their oppressors, for the poor to laugh at the rich. When someone in a position of power laughs at a vulnerable person, it is no longer humour. Reversing that relationship distorts something as powerful as humour, jokes and satire.

Among the tools you use are workshops and educational resources. How do you approach this work with young people?

The first thing we did was meet with organisations that contribute, in one way or another, to an antifascist perspective, such as feminist, antiracist and youth leisure organisations. For us, antifascism is the foundation of democracy, and any project that helps build community is also antifascist because it defends democracy. We collected the resources and workshops these organisations had already developed and brought them together in a resource bank on the Abril website, organised by age group, topic and links to school subjects. Since then, the Fundació has been supplementing these materials with its own proposals in areas where we felt more work was needed.

What has this work involved in practice?

Over the past two years, we have run classroom workshops on disinformation and fake news. We have also worked with Verificat, which does extremely valuable work, and drawn on its experience to develop activities with students. Another area is critical thinking, which for us is key. We cannot put a barrier between young people and the content they receive on their phones, but we can give them the tools to assess what they see, think for themselves and protect themselves from hate speech.

You also work on other issues.

We run workshops on feminism, LGBTI diversity and antiracism, because these are some of the main areas targeted by hate speech. We are also interested in addressing issues such as climate change denial, given the links we see with the global far right. We want to challenge the idea that fighting fascism is solely the responsibility of social science teachers or history lessons. Antifascist education must involve the entire teaching staff, every school and every subject, including science and mathematics.

What do you hope to achieve with the workshops you run in schools?

We do not want to limit ourselves to going into classrooms and delivering a one-off workshop. We see these sessions as an initial introduction, a way to identify concerned teachers and offer them resources and training. Our aim is to equip schools and organisations so that the people who interact with young people every day can carry out this ongoing work of antifascist education. Otherwise, a one-day workshop is just an isolated intervention.

And how do students respond during the workshops? Do you encounter resistance?

The truth is that we do encounter resistance. In our workshops, we find that part of the group, usually girls and gay boys, strongly connects with what we are proposing and expresses firm, outspoken views. By contrast, among the more conventional boys, so to speak, there are usually one or two who openly express hate speech and make their disagreement clear. There is also a sizeable group of boys who remain silent, do not take a position and are difficult to engage.

What have you learned from these experiences?

We have realised that it is not enough to walk into a classroom with a carefully developed argument full of facts and figures. That is why, on 19 November, we will present a guide on addressing hate speech, aimed at educators working in different settings, which we have developed with Mediam, an organisation specialising in conflict mediation. For example, Verificat systematically debunks the claim that increased immigration leads to more crime, yet this narrative continues to enjoy widespread social acceptance. If the person in front of you is unwilling to engage in discussion and reflection, you will not convince them.

We need to find other ways of addressing these narratives.

Yes, which is why we have worked with Mediam on conflict mediation and nonviolent communication strategies to engage with adolescents who are so defensive. It is about trying to understand what lies behind what they are saying. Why do they associate theft or crime with migrants? Is it because they feel unsafe in their neighbourhood, or because they do not feel cared for or supported? We need to try to approach these situations from that perspective. The guide offers guidelines for managing situations such as a student suddenly standing up in class and starting to sing ‘Cara al sol’.

So this approach may be more useful than directly confronting these narratives.

Exactly, although it depends on how serious the situation is. We work with adolescents who are still developing, who are highly susceptible to manipulation and exposed to harmful content. They need help, support and education. Teachers and educators cannot adopt an authoritarian approach if we are trying to combat authoritarian ideas. We need to understand what is happening to an adolescent that leads them to say these things, because there may be distress or vulnerability behind them. Of course, if an assault takes place, we must intervene and protect the person who has been attacked. We have encountered conflicts that escalate rapidly, and schools have protocols for responding. We are trying to promote mediation and nonviolent communication, which we believe are good strategies for dealing with these situations.

Beyond the classroom, what role can organisations, youth clubs and other community spaces play in combating hate speech?

We are working, for example, with AFAB, a family association, because we believe families have a very important role to play, not only in educating their children but also in identifying the channels through which hate speech reaches them. Teachers cannot monitor all the content that children and young people consume. That is why families need training to understand new communication codes and social media, so they can regulate how their children use them.

And beyond families?

We are also very interested in the world of youth leisure activities and extracurricular programmes. Youth leaders and sports coaches are important role models for young people, often with a closer relationship to them than teachers have in the classroom. In fact, organisations and federations of esplais and caus — youth leisure and scouting groups — are asking us for resources and training because they are also detecting hate speech in these settings. This sets off alarm bells for us, because esplais and caus in Catalonia have traditionally been very progressive spaces for educating and empowering young people. We are very concerned that these narratives are reaching them too.

How can this situation be addressed?

It is about building community and, above all, investing heavily in training. I cannot stress enough the importance of mediation and nonviolent communication, and of avoiding the trap of quick, easy arguments, which is exactly what the far right wants: to push critical thinking aside. Challenging these narratives takes time and community. There are no magic solutions.