Women are “four times more exposed than men to suffer some type of hate speech”, warned specialists and researchers who spoke on the second day of the first International Congress of the Argentine Association of Public Health (AASAP)and stressed the importance of “thinking about public health as something that is not an individual issue”, but rather a “field for building solidarity”.
Hate speech “exacerbates violence against those who are usually more exposed to violence due to historical, social, class, race, and gender issues, by trying to exclude them from public conversation,” the specialists pointed out in the framework of the meeting. , which takes place between this Wednesday and Friday at the Palais Rouge Convention Center located in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Palermo.
“There are studies that show perfectly well that more integrated societies have more years of life expectancy. The lack of social conflict decreases infant mortality”, exemplified Alejandra Sánchez Cabezas, vice director of AASAPto the TELAM news agency and added: “However, hate speech breaks social legitimacy and the bond of living in society.”
In this regard, hate speech can produce emotional conditions ranging from “anguish and anxiety” to self-mutilation practices such as “cutting” (cuts in the skin), explained the researcher. Micaela Cuestacoordinator of Laboratory of Studies on Democracy and Authoritarianism at the National University of San Martínwho participated in the panel together with Sanchez Cabezas and Juan Cannelamember of the Argentine Society of Anthropological Medicine.
“Hate speech exacerbates violence against those who are usually more exposed to violence due to historical-social, class, race, and gender issues, by trying to exclude them from public conversation. In this sense, the most vulnerable segment to this type of violence it is women, who are four times more exposed to hate speech than men, according to the survey we did in the laboratory,” Cuesta specified.
On the other hand, the researchers maintain: “Scientific advances are true, there are and there are many, but it is a lie that these advances bring improvements in people’s quality of life and more happiness. There has never been so much depression or so much consumption of psychotropic drugs as now, when we have science at its peak. “They promised us that progress was happiness and we are not happier. There is frustration, there is anger, there is discomfort. There are more fractured societies, so there is social disengagement. I have to blame someone, it doesn’t matter who,” they added.
“The way out is through the construction of other meanings that can produce sources of social transformation. This can be from these individual micro-powers and from public policies, such as the law on abortion, equal marriage, comprehensive sexual education, which provide the framework for these changes to be possible”, concluded, in dialogue with the agency, the speakers of the congress.
TELAM Source
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