The Annual Internal Security Report (RASI) for the year 2025 presents data that allows us to say that Portugal is a safe country. There was a slight increase in general crime (3.1%), but the most serious crimes decreased by 1.6%. Domestic violence is the crime against people with the highest number of reports, although it has fallen by around 1.9%, although there are still almost 30,000 reports.
But there are two indicators that deserve particular attention and great concern. One has to do with the 6.7% increase in hate crimes, associated with the radicalization and recruitment of young people online; the other with the fact that the number of rape reports is the highest in the decade (578 cases, compared to 542 in 2024). Half of rapes occur within the family and in more than 90% of situations the victim is a woman, ranging from 21 to 40 years old.
In 2015, 19 incidents classified as hate crimes were recorded, in 2025 this number was 449, an increase of 2263%. In RASI, this increase is associated with the use of the internet (page 31: “there was an increase in the presence of Portuguese users, especially minors and young adults, in online groups with an accelerationist and neo-Nazi matrix, national or transnational in scope, as well as in satanic groups, incel and nihilists or post-ideological, who glorify violence and who, in many cases, are also related to the extreme right”) and the extreme right (page 30: “by disseminating propaganda and misinformation online, it continued to promote the normalization of public discourse of discrimination, hatred and anti-democratic ideas, contributing to triggering racist or xenophobic behavior, and radicalizing militants and sympathizers towards violent action”). especially men, Portuguese, increasingly younger.
Although there are no studies that directly link hate speech with sexual crimes, the truth is that it is directed against minorities – depending on nationality, race, religion or sexual orientation, but it also increasingly includes deeply misogynistic speech. The growth of content that promotes male superiority and “toxic masculinity”, associated with communities of “incels” (involuntary celibates) and aggressive influencers with millions of followers on social media who advocate female subjugation – and it recently became public that they have a presence in Portuguese schools – creates a favorable context for all forms of violence against women, including, naturally, sexual crimes.
These RASI data are alarming and demonstrate how, under the cover of a confusion purposely created by some between hate speech and freedom of expression, that crime is spreading. In addition to being a way of inciting the commission of other serious crimes, hate speech is the opposite of freedom of expression because it seeks to condition, through fear, the freedom and rights of victims of violence and discrimination that such speech entails.
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