Xenophobic and homophobic attitudes : national report for Malta.

Abstract

The present report summarises research carried out at the Institute of Linguistics and Language Technology of the University of Malta under the auspices of the EU co-funded C.O.N.T.A.C.T. project. Our study, which followed the common methodology of the C.O.N.T.A.C.T. consortium, focused on hate speech as a manifestation of hate crime in Malta. More specifically, through quantitative and qualitative analyses, we sought to identify the extent to which comments posted online in reaction to articles in local news portals can be found to encompass discriminatory attitudes towards two target minorities: migrants and members of the LGBTIQ community. The obtained results indicate that while both xenophobia and homophobia can be detected in some of the comments made by online users in local news portals, the former is a much more prevalent than the latter. In an attempt to further probe into the reasons for the emergence of such discriminatory discourse online, we then administered an online questionnaire and conducted focus group interviews, which provided us with some insights as to why discriminatory attitudes appear to have recently been on the rise in relation to migrants, and seem to have been correspondingly contained in the case of the LGBTIQ minority group.