Today, the last day of the 16 days of activism against gender-based violence, falls on International Human Rights Day. This is an important reminder that violence against women is a violation of our fundamental human rights.

Once again, we end the 16 days Take Back The Tech campaign with a call to populate wikipedia with women’s rights issues and integrate a gender perspective to its content.

By doing so, we’re doing our bit to ensure that this popular and important repository of information and documented living history does not neglect the specificity of perspectives and knowledge from women’s lives.

Wikipedia is one of the most exciting online collaborative information library in recent times. As a free online encyclopedia, it contains more than 2 million articles since it began in 2001 on a broad range of subjects, and has sparked off many local wikipedia sites in other languages.

Anyone can contribute to wikipedia, and add information or write articles about things that they know of. Because of the open nature of its content building, knowledge is something that is collectively owned, reviewed, and disseminated.

Take back the tech calls you to cast a feminist lens and engage with wikipedia!

• Go to wikipedia, and search for topics that you are well acquainted with
• In particular, go through the stubs on violence against women, and add information about your country.
• For example, under the rape article, create a section on the rape situation in your country, adding links to statistics, debates, legislation etc.
• Or create a whole new stub about “rape in [your country]”.
• Don’t forget to cite and add references to what you add.
• You can change and add to any articles found in Wikipedia when you click on “edit this page”.
• It’s fairly user-friendly, although you might have to play around with the syntax (language) to familiarise yourself with it.
• Try it out by using the sandbox
• You can find out how to add content to wikipedia on the editing tutorial page.
• You can also create an account to better protect your privacy and gain access to various other functions.
• Get together with a group of friends, and turn this into a collective initiative.

If you’re feminist-ing wikipedia, leave a comment to start a discussion and help each other out on this action.

Let's keep the activism going strong!

Information and communication technologies (ICT) allow the user to speak to many people at the same time, and to repeatedly transmit the same information. For example, the same email or SMS message can be sent to multiple recipients over and over again.

It also enables the user to occupy several spaces at the same moment. When you are sitting in front of your computer, you are in a physical space as well as a digital one. The physical space could be a private space - such as your bedroom, and the digital space could be a public space – such as a forum or chatroom.

Digital spaces blur the boundary between the private and the public in interesting ways. But it can also potentially lead to risks in safety.

Commercially available spy software such as Spy Agent can be purchased an installed on a home computer, which can enable another person to log all keystrokes. This includes email correspondence, password, surfing activity etc. For a domestic violence survivor, this could mean that searching for information is particularly precarious.

It is also increasingly common to have video recording and camera functions on mobile phones. While this means that access to such technologies and their benefits becomes more affordable (instead of buying three equipment, you only buy one), it also means that users have to be more conscious of where these images will eventually end up.

A lot of internet services also requests for personal information such as name, age, location, sex etc upon subscription. Sometimes, it is really not necessary to disclose these information willingly, as the networked nature of the internet means that your information on one space can easily disseminated to others, and that your activities and identity can be tracked.

Our right to privacy is especially important in an age of ICT development and emphasis. They have countless transformative potential, but to better explore and affect their possibilities, we need to be smart about their risks.

Take back the tech! Empower yourself with information and knowledge on secure online communications.

• Do a web search on yourself. This is a good way to find out what kind of information about your is available online, or if someone is pretending to be you and posting personal information on different online spaces.
• Make up an identity. You don’t always have to completely disclose your full identity just to get a free email service. Try submitting a form with a pseudonym, invented address and age. The only probably harm is that some market research company will get their data wrong. Weigh that against your own right to privacy.
• Install programmes like Spybot – Search & Destroy, that can detect spyware in your computer hard disk and registry.
• Check out the “tech tips & tools” section for more handy information on how to better protect your security and privacy when communicating online.
• Download and use the Take Back The Tech Portable Apps, especially if you share a computer. It has a collection of software designed to make your online communication safer.

In the fight to end violence against women, men’s contributions are often neglected. Usually, they are identified as perpetrators and abusers, mainly because, this is an overwhelming fact.

But there is nothing inevitable or ‘natural’ about the prescription of men as violators and women as victims/survivors. Spousal abuse and domestic violence also happens in diverse forms of relationships, albeit in different ways, between men and men, women and women, women against men, and so on.

Violence against women is about unequal power relations. Since men as a whole have more power than women in almost all areas of life – economic, epistemic, cultural, sexual, political and social – we have a reality where systemic abuse and violence disproportionately affects women, and are predominantly committed by men.

In order to disrupt this normality of violence against women, everyone has a critical duty to intervene and transform the world that we live in: men and boys, grrls and women, and more.

So it’s great news that more boys and men are joining the movement to end this global crisis, and taking action to stop violence against women.

Take Back The Tech calls all men and boys to name your intervention! Share your story. Speak your strategy. Provoke some action. Let’s make the fact that all of us need to take responsibility and action to stop VAW a little more normal ;)

• Say it. Ka-BLOG for today, and tell the world how you stopped, interfered and interrupted a situation of violence against women. Or make a postcard.
  * Name it. Title your story as “The day I stopped violence against women”.
• Share it. Tag your post as “takebackthetech”. Or submit your postcard to our digital postcards gallery so it can be sent and disseminated to others.
• Mark it. Proclaim your stand by putting up a Take Back The Tech banner on your blog.
• Name him. If you know of a male feminist who’s done his part in ending VAW, tell his story!

The internet has been a great platform for interaction and engagement. More and more development on applications and tools are geared towards facilitating users to respond, share content and make decisions about what they would like to see online.

Take back the tech invites you to talk back!

We’re going to get quite geeky today, and play with a really cool open source tool: ShiftSpace

The idea is simple. By using the tool, you can add “notes” onto any webpage – just like post-it notes. Pages that have notes will be visible to any users who have ShiftSpace installed. This way, you get to add information and knowledge to what’s available on any site, and find out more from reading other people’s notes.

So add what you know onto this site, and have some fun by finding out more about what you can do online.

How to Shift+Space?

1) Install Firefox

• First, you need to install Firefox.
• Don’t be nervous if you’ve only ever used Internet Explorer your entire computing life. There are actually lots of options you can choose from, depending on what your needs are.
• Firefox is a free internet browser that is really easy to use, and has lots of other advantages as well.
• To install it, just go the Firefox page, and click on “Download Firefox – Free” button.

2) Install Greasemonkey

• One of the wonderful things about Firefox is the browser extensions.
• These extensions, also known as add-ons, are basically applications that are integrated into your browser. They add functions to your online experience, from simple toolbars, to enhancing your security and more.
• Once you have Firefox, you can go to their Add-on page and start browsing for stuff that you find useful.
• For now, we need Greasemonkey.
• Just click on the big green “install now” button. Click “install” on the pop up window. After it’s done, click the “restart firefox” button.
• You now have greasemonkey on your browser.

3) Install Shift+Space

• Go to shiftspace.org, and click on the “Install ShiftSpace” button on the top left of the page.
• Follow the simple instructions. You’ll be skipping a few steps because you’ve already installed Firefox and Greasemonkey.
• Then, press on the “shift” button and "space bar" on your keyboard.
• You’ll see a ShiftSpace icon on the bottom left of your browser. Click on it, and sign up.
• Test the application click. Press the “shift” button on your keyboard for about 2 seconds. You’ll see a small “+” icon on the left of your cursor. Move your mouse over it, and hover over the icons. Click on “leave a note”, and start typing on the yellow area on the website. When you’re done, click “save”.
• Once you’ve written a note, it’s saved and you can see it by pressing “shift” and “space” to bring up the console.

Talk back to Take Back The Tech!

• Come back to this site, press down your “shift” button for a few seconds, hover over the “+” icon, and add your notes.
• Translate “Take Back The Tech!” into your own language.
• Go to “what’s the issue”, and put up what you know about the situation of violence against women in your country.
• We’ll check out your notes and update our content from your input.

The best way to find out what you can do with ICT is to experiment and play. So have fun & shape this campaign :)

The internet is a massive repository of information, with more than 100 million distinct websites, and still counting.

There is also a general acknowledgement on the importance of information and communications technology (ICT) in enabling economic, social, cultural and political development, by providing opportunities and facilitating dialogue.

As ICT becomes more and more relevant in our daily lives, what kinds of content do we have access to online? How do they represent women, and how does this representation impact on the prevalence of violence against women?

Assess the internet. Take back the tech by reviewing the kinds of content currently available, and have your say.

Capture it:

• Have you come across websites or pages that made you annoyed, angry, inspired, amused or empowered because of the way they represent women?
• Do a print screen of that webpage and share it here.
• Press ctrl + printscreen, then paste the image in a word document, or save it as an image (jpeg or gif).

Assess it:

• In what way does it reinforce ideas about women that are harmful?
• State your thoughts! Write it on the word doc, or across the image.

Share it:

• Let others know what you think. Find out what others have to say.
• Email it to us: ideas AT takebackthetech DOT net, and we’ll publish it here, or
• If you have a flickr account, join the takebackthetech flickr group and submit your screen captures there.

Strengthen the connection between what happens on digital spaces, and the physical spaces we occupy. Take your activism everywhere you go. Circulate the call to take back the tech, and the demand for a reality that is free from violence against women both online and offline.

Create mobile stencils!

Continuing from yesterday’s action, take your stencil designs from Day 10, and transmit the message. Start a conversation on how to take back the tech and let it travel.

• Instead of t-shirts, stencil the “Take Back The Tech” designs on envelopes or pieces of paper
• Write a message about creating spaces free from violence against women
• Add this instruction: “Pass this on”
• Stick them onto spaces where people travel – e.g. public transport like bus stops, lamp posts, traffic lights, streets, walls, anywhere.
• Post the stencil design on your blog, website, email (don’t forget to tag it), and ask the recipient to pass it on.

Keep the message going, and move our activism from space to space. Happy stenciling :)

Take your activism offline.

Developments in information and communications technology, especially the internet, has meant that those who are connected can find out what is happening in different parts of the world and take action a lot quicker and easier than before. With a click of the mouse, we can sign a petition, endorse our name in support of a cause or create content to further amplify an issue.

It’s important to augment online activism with action and all other spaces that we occupy. For example, although the internet was crucial in rendering the issue of Korean comfort women widely visible, it was primarily the physical pickets and demonstrations outside of the Japanese Embassy every Wednesday since 1992 that succeeded in putting the issue in textbooks.

Use our bodies to state a stand. What we wearcan be a useful way to say something to people that we encounter everywhere we go. Stenciling is one of the oldest and cheapest methods of printmaking. By
cutting out a design on a piece of cardboard, you can repeatedly print
the same message on different surfaces.

Instead of advertising brands of manufacturers, challenge your world to Take Back The Tech.

What you need:

• A plain cotton t-shirt (light colours would work better), or any other cotton item of clothing that you’d like to use.
• An A4 sheet of paper or manila cardboard (quite a thin piece of cardboard)
• A can of aerosol spray paint, fabric paint or acrylic paint (you can get these at a hardware store or stationary shop) & brushes
• Cellophane, masking or any kind of light sticky tape
• Old newspapers
• A blade

How to stencil a Take Back The Tech t-shirt

• Click on the choices of images below, and save the design you want:

• • Stencil 01: dominemos la tecnología (jpg, pdf)
  • Stencil 01: take back the tech (jpg, pdf)
  • Stencil 01: retome a tecnologia ( jpg, pdf)
  • Stencil 01: réapproprie-toi la technologie ( jpg, pdf)
  • Stencil 01: blank – insert your own language ( jpg, pdf)
  • Stencil 02: reclaiming technology to end violence against women ( jpg, pdf )
  • Stencil 02: blank – put in your own message ( jpg, pdf)

• Print it out the image on a sheet of A4 paper. Copy the image with a pen and paper if you don’t have access to a printer.
• Skip this step if you copied the image on paper, or plan to use the stencil only once. Otherwise, paste the paper on a sheet of manila cardboard with a thin layer of glue. Keep the image side up. Make sure that the whole under surface of the paper is completely glued onto the cardboard. Wait for it to dry.
• Carefully cut out the dark parts of the design with a blade. Make sure the connectors (the white parts) are not severed.
• When you’re done, place the stencil design on your t-shirt (or any other surface you’re thinking of stenciling)
• Hold it in place by sticking the edges of the paper on your t-shirt with the tape
• Cover the sides with the old newspapers so you won’t overspray/paint.
• Spray paint: hold the aerosol can about 6 inches away from the t-shirt and spray on. Make sure you’re doing this outside as too much exposure is toxic. Wear a mask if you’ve got one. Spray on two coats to make sure that the colour is really dark.
• Fabric or acrylic paint: dab your paintbrush onto your palette, and apply the paint evenly. Make sure your paint is not too wet.
• Wait for a few minutes, and then carefully remove the stencil and old newspapers.

That’s it :)

Don’t forget to wear your t-shirt to the next demonstration. If you’ve snapped pictures of where you’ve stenciled this, or came up with your own designs, share them!

• Upload it to the Take Back The Tech flickr group, or
• Email them to ideas AT gejala DOT org, or
• Create an account on this website and upload it (create content > images)

Happy stencilling!

There are many motivations that drive the development of information and communication technologies (ICT); whether it’s to increase productivity, efficiency, profits, or the capacity to transcend physical, cultural and social boundaries, and so on.

However, existing gender disparity in this field – especially at higher and decision making levels – means that evolution of tools, platforms and paradigms pays lesser attention to the specificity of women’s lives, especially women who occupy multiple marginalised positions in society.

For example, while global positioning system (GPS) devices can help us to find our way in strange city by telling us exactly where we are on a map through satellite technology, it can also help domestic violence abusers to track and monitor their partners. At the same time, there have been legislative proposals for domestic violence offenders to wear GPS tracking devices if they violate restraining orders. What would it take for GPS to be useful without neglecting its vulnerability to abuse?

We need to actively engage in this field to know what advancements in technologies are, what their potential impact may be, and to inflect and affect their development and subsequent use.

It might not be easy at first to swim through the technical jargon and try to understand what some of these things might be, but it can also be incredibly empowering.

• Design your dream of an ICT tool, device, platform or gadget that would keep you safe.
• Spend 15 to 30 minutes browsing through online magazines, journals, encyclopedia or the technology section of your local newspaper.
• When something strikes your interest, spend some time thinking about what its potential impact could be on women and grrls, especially in relation to VAW.
• Think of alternative ways that it could be developed, or a totally different tool that can address the risk that you’ve discovered.
• Be creative, rowdy and outrageous in your thoughts. Let imagination break through the constraints of reality. Anti-rape umbrellas, wifi dildos, stalker-recognition software, anything goes!
• Doodle it, write a description, share your vision.
• Leave a comment, or make it into a postcard.

Take back the tech. Have fun and play. Dream of technology that is transformative for everyone.

How does history remember women? Think of an inventor of a modern appliance, what’s the first name that comes to your mind? Is she a woman, or a man?

Those who have access to power are the ones who write history. This is how colonial explorers are able to claim that they ‘discovered’ lands long inhabited by indigenous populations, and how male academic and surgeon, Matteo Realdo Colombo, was able to declare that he ‘discovered’ the clitoris (!)

The field of science and technology is particularly steeped in the culture of elevating ‘father figures’. Think of all the notable names in computing, and chances are, you’ll come up with Bill Gates, Richard Stallman, Steve Jobs, Charles Babbage, Alan Turing etc. It’s less likely for us to know names of women such as Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, Betty Holberton, Kathleen Antonelli and more, who also played critical roles in the expansion of knowledge and innovation in this field. Even Alan Turing, who contributed much to development of modern computers, faced heavy censure including surveillance, being labeled as a ‘security risk’ and undergoing hormonal treatments because he openly acknowledged his homosexuality at the later part of his career. He died soon after.

There is a different way to look at how knowledge is gained and utility created. Instead of attributing genesis to a single source and investing him with godlike powers, creation is the result of input, contribution and effort by collectives, all working together and our own ways, to build from what we know. The problem is, many of the people within collectives and teams occupy relatively less powerful positions than the person who gets the final credit. They are the invisible thinkers, innovators and workers.

Shake away from this tiresome understanding of how things are made. Take a day to acknowledge and celebrate the diverse contributions by unnamed and unrecognised women and men in the development of ICT.

• Find out the communities that developed applications that you use all the time – facebook widgets, microsoft applications, free and open source softwares, gmail etc.
• Note their names, acknowledge their contribution
• If there’s a woman involved, we’d especially like to celebrate her for today. Simply because we know it’s particularly hard for anyone with a ‘Ms’ to overcome multiple forms of discrimination to gain access and recognition in the field of science and technology.
• Share it with others!
  • Send a “Did you know…” email to 10 people
  • Add it to the comment section of this site, and we’ll highlight it on the campaign website
  • Blog about it (tag “takebackthetech” to your post)
  • Write it on the walls

Name them, honor them, party in their name. Celebrate the diversity that comes with creation.

HIV/AIDS is surrounded with prejudice and misunderstanding. When it initially gained public notice in the 1980s, HIV/AIDS was thought to be something that only affected homosexual men. Much effort have been put into raising awareness on the complex reality of HIV/AIDS over the decades, precisely because it is the stigma that results in greater vulnerability and the expansion of this global pandemic.

The specificity of women and girls has only recently been highlighted in HIV/AIDS policy, research, programmes and resource allocation. Women make up nearly half of the 40 million people living with HIV worldwide, and the rate of infection in women are increasing. Women, especially young women and grrls, are vulnerable due to gender inequality, social and cultural norms, poverty, biology, and in particular, violence against women.

Women living in situations of domestic violence are much more likely to become infected by HIV than women who live in non-violent households. It is also difficult for women and young grrls to negotiate condom use and safer sex with their partners, a recognised method to reduce the likelihood of HIV infection.

Female sexuality is often constructed in as passive and lacking. Men and boys on the other hand, are understood to possess active sexual agency, and are expected to initiate the first move in sexual interaction. As such, women who take control of their sexuality fall outside of what is ‘normal’, and are easily hailed as being ‘over eager’ or ‘shameless’.

The majority of sexually explicit content available on the internet supports this construction of female/male sexuality. At the same time, the internet has also become a critical space for the expression of women’s desires and sexual rights, especially women of diverse sexualities. We need to be able to control our own bodies, and articulate our own sexual desires and rights, according to our own terms. Not only is this crucial to help mitigate the rate of HIV infections amongst women and girls, it is part of our fundamental human rights.

Take back our bodies. Let’s talk about sex!

• How do you negotiate your own sexuality in your relationships with your partner, peers, family and society?
• What are the kinds of challenges you face, and how do you deal with them?
• Share a story on how you’ve negotiated safer sex with a partner, and stamp out the shame.
• Just click on comment, and speak your sexual rights.
• Or if you’re blogging, write a post (don’t forget to tag it)

Increase the volume and help prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS!

Are you part of the growing movement to end violence against women? You don’t need to be part of an organisation, a member of a large coalition, or working full time at a crisis centre to be an activist against VAW.

Every action you have taken to counter unequal power relations between women and men, each time you’ve written, commented or spoke up against VAW, every time you have paused, considered and responded to this phenomenon – they all contribute towards a movement by people from all parts of the world to call for an end to violence against women.

Map your resistance! Visualise the strength of our collective fight against VAW with your activism.

• Go to “map it”
• After the map loads, click on the marker on the top left corner
• A layer will pop up on the screen.
• Drag and drop the marker to where you are. If this will be a threat to your personal safety - some authorities are not too happy about activism on women's rights or sexuality - drop the marker somewhere in the region.
• Click "add this location"
• Add your activism.
• You can also add images of your activism if you've got any (e.g. printscreens, an photo of a flyer etc)
• Add tags, which are basically keywords if you want to (e.g. location, organisation name, type of action etc)
• Select "TBTT action"
• Finally save, & your activism is marked as part of this movement against VAW.

Click on markers near where you live. You might be able to find someone that you can collaborate with, or at least, draw some inspiration :)

If you can't load the map, then just submit a comment, and we'll add it in for you.

Developments in information and communications technology have blurred the boundaries between information user, creator and disseminator. If you happen to be in a space where electricity is reliable, and internet connectivity is affordable and accessible, you can be a powerful node of knowledge production. Certain barriers to traditional forms of media like television, radio and print publications like cost, editorial monopoly and sometimes, restrictive media environments can be overcome.

There is already an existing disparity between women and men when it comes to traditional mass media – in terms of representation, newsworthiness, access to decision making positions and so on. As such, online publishing can be a critical space to document histories and realities that are lived at the margins of society.

Be a viral node if you’re one of the lucky ones with good internet connectivity, and can access video sharing platforms. Help spread content that challenges unequal gender relations and counter violence against women.

Video sharing services like YouTube and Google video, allow registered users to upload video clips to an internet website. Other users can search and play the video directly from the website, and sometimes, can remotely embed them on their own web pages (for example, embedding a video with a player onto their blogs)
They contain billions of short video clips uploaded by users as diverse as normal people who upload amateur video clips captured on mobile phones, to large human rights organisations to professional film studios and more.

• For one day, disseminate and broadcast video clips and shorts that focus on ending violence against women.

• Browse these sites for videos that you think are worth disseminating, or if you already have a favourite, look for it.
• Embed it on your blog by cutting and pasting the video code (don’t forget to tag your post), or
• Send 10 people a link to the video, or
• Share it with Take Back The Tech campaigners on this site:
  • Create a user account, click ‘create account’ on the bottom of the right navigation bar
  • Click ‘create content’, then ‘video’
  • Put in the title of the video & the URL
  • In the description, add a few words on what you think of the video

If you read the newspaper, you’d notice that there will be a story about rape and sexual assault almost every other day. Not surprising, since 1 out of 3 women have experienced rape worldwide. But there is something very disturbing and fictional about these accounts.

Emphasis is placed on sensationalism, the sexual history of rape survivors, and on stranger rape. The fact that most rapists are people known to the survivor – spouse, intimate partners, friends, family members – becomes obscured in the popular understanding of rape.

Rape is understood in sexual terms, whether titillating, entertaining or transgressive. The fact that it stems from unequal power relations in terms of sexuality and gender is rarely reflected in the report.

Survivors are often represented as voiceless victims, with everyone else speaking on her behalf. Instead of survival, the narratives often prompt us to feel shame, pity or outrage for a nameless woman with no capacity for self determination.

Sensationalism reduces rape to another form of information as entertainment. When news reports about rape selectively present sexist ideas about power, women and sexuality, they skew our understanding of what rape is really about, and in turn, how to counter it.

Cut it out. Rape is not for mere reading pleasure.

• Scan your newspaper for a news report about rape or sexual assault.
• Read the article critically.
• Think about how it presents rape, and what you actually know about rape.
• Cut out the language, sentence or section that you find problematic with a pair of scissors.
• Turn it into a postcard.
  • Stick it on a piece of paper
  • Add the name of newspaper, the title of the report, and the date of publication.
  • Say something about what you think.
• Scan it and send the postcard to this campaign website. You can either:
  • Email it to jac AT apcwomen DOT org, or
  • Create an account on this site (click on “create account”, verify the account, click on “create content”, then “images”, and follow the simple instructions)
  • Put it up on your blog, or flickr account if you have one, and tag it as “takebackthetech”
• Or simply, add a comment on this website with
• The name of the newspaper
• The date of publication
• The title of the news report
• The language, section or sentence that you find problematic

End sexist representations of sexual violence.

Violence against women is a systemic form of abuse that pervades our reality. Speak to any woman and chances are, she would have a story of her experience that she could share. Whether it’s an unwelcome grope in a crowd, a strip down by a man’s presumptuous gaze, someone close – perhaps herself – who has been sexually assaulted by another person, equally close, and more.

What is the impact of this violent normality that we move within everyday? What does it mean for us to live in a world where at least one out of every three woman worldwide has been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime, often by her husband or someone in her family? How do we rationalise rape of women as something that simply exists, whether at times of conflict, disaster, crisis or abundance?

Violence against women has a distinct cost that comes in many forms: health, productivity, mobility, participation in social and political life, loss of life, loss of imagination. While some are measurable, others are invisible.

What’s your take? How do you think violence against women affects us? What is the impact of violence against women as a persistent reality we have to contend with?

• Make a postcard & share your thoughts on the impact of VAW
• Postcards can be made of anything: word document, paper, photograph, doodle, image, etc
• Use any language or image that you are comfortable with
• If possible, submit the postcard in PDF, JPEG or GIF format, no less than 500 x 350 pixels
• Email it to ideas AT takebackthetech DOT net, or
• Submit it directly by registering in this website. Click “create account” on the bottom right hand corner, and after you have verified your account, click on “Create content” > “Image”, and submit a postcard.

Postcard submissions are welcomed throughout the 16 days and after. Check back and send a postcard. Move someone you know into action.

Grrls are taught to speak softly, keep our knees together, avoid direct gazes and generally be as absent as possible with our presence.

But women & grrls all over the world have struggled and fought for decades to access different public spaces; from streets to schools, the workplace, museums, hospitals, Parliament and more. The ability to enter, engage and participate in these spaces is integral to our rights as citizens and actors in civil society.

Digital spaces are becoming increasingly important for ordinary people to find out what’s happening, enter into conversations and discussion, and state our opinions. This is especially in contexts where access to traditional mass media like print, radio and television are inhibited with restrictive laws and regulation, cost or cultural norms.

What spaces do you currently have access to? And how are you using them to end violence against women?

State your thoughts. Rape, sexual harassment, domestic violence, ‘honour killings’, disregard for women’s rights to make decisions about her own body and other countless forms of gender-based violence should not be a reality we have to live with.

Occupy all spaces and spread the word:

• Leave a comment at blogs, forums or website guestbooks that you frequently visit.
• Raise violence against women as an issue. Or simply lead them to this campaign site.
• Send someone a take back the tech postcard
• Change your email signature for 16 days to: “End violence against women – Take Back The Tech! www.takebackthetech.net”, or something similar
• Change your online messenger status for 16 days to www.takebackthetech.net
• Call in to your local morning radio programme and raise violence against women as a critical issue
• Start a conversation with your local sundry shop owner
• More!

Uncross your legs, lift up your elbows & raise your voice. Ripple the world with your vocal stand to end violence against women.

We only look for help when we need them. But sometimes, it’s useful to carry around numbers for helplines and crisis centres. One, because we always imagine violence to be someone else’s reality until it happens to us. And second, it’s good to be able to help another person who might need it without us knowing.

It doesn’t take a lot to find out what they are, and less to help spread the word. These services are usually non-profit, so we can help with a little ‘free’ advertising today ;)

• Find out the contact number and details of your nearest domestic violence and sexual assault support centre or legal aid clinic.
• Go to “map it!”, and share them with other Take Back The Tech campaigners
• Click on the marker icon on the top left corner, then click on your location
• Put in the details: phone number, opening times, website etc.

Keep spreading these numbers. Send them to 10 friends through SMS. Chalk them on the pavements, streets and walkways near your home. Stick them on your family fridge. Find numbers on the map that you didn't know about and share those.

While you're at it, wish the reader a great start to 16 days of activism against gender-based violence. Happy activism on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women!