A systematic review on hate speech among children and adolescents: Definitions, frequencies and overlap with bullying

Hate speech is unequivocally seen as harmful to individuals and communities (United Nations, 2019), but little is yet known about the current state of research on the frequency of hate speech among children and adolescents. Evidence suggests that definitional ambiguities of hate speech exist in academic research (e.g., Brown, 2017). But without a precise theoretical definition of hate speech, standardized assessment methods and the ability to soundly differentiate it from related phenomena, empirical research may lack validity and comparability. For research on children and adolescents in particular, hate speech needs to be differentiated from bullying (e.g., Lehmann, 2019). In a systematic review, we thus identified and systematized empirical studies on hate speech.