Every year, the world celebrates International Human Rights Day on 10 December. This annual celebration commemorates resilience and the day when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights came into effect. It paved the way for international human rights instruments, and was an important document in the modern journey to uphold human rights globally.The introduction in the United Nations’ website…
Take Back the Tech! is proud to present this overview paper regarding non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) by Rohini Lakshané. It unpacks definitions, the impact on survivors/victims, how morality and victim-blaming is often interwoven in responses, the difficulty of action, types of legislation (and limits) to address it, and, importantly, resources for take-down and coping with NCII.As noted…
As various technologies and Big Tech become a part of our lives, what we often trade in for connection, support and advice is privacy and the constant monitoring of our behaviours. Digital information includes search histories, the advertisements we click on, texts, emails, location tracking, and so much more.Such sensitive information, in the wrong hands, can be used to criminalise bodies and…
Online gender-based violence, including gendered disinformation, uses gender as the main axis for their attacks against a target (or targets). But it’s not the only identity they use. Attackers often also use various other marginalised identities their target(s) may have in their attacks to demean and invalidate women and queer persons.One of these identities is disability. Although disability-…
Online gender-based violence in general, and the phenomenon of gendered disinformation in particular, are not only affected by gender. They are exacerbated by all forms of hierarchy.So what is gendered disinformation? Gendered disinformation is a strategy to silence women and queer folks that “uses false or misleading gender and sex-based narratives against women, often with some degree of…
Women Human Rights Defenders — which includes queer and non-binary defenders — have been fighting and advocating for environmental and climate justice in a number of ways, supported by strong relationships with their communities and territories.From a push for policies and laws — both locally and internationally — and direct action (for example: protests and blockades) to research, analysis and…
Women human rights defenders (WHRDs) — women and girls working on any human rights issue, or people of any gender(s) working to promote gender equality (which might also include civil society actors who work in non-traditional fields such as journalists, health workers and private actors) — are an integral part of communities around the world.They play a critical role in upholding the human…
Gendered disinformation falls under online gender-based violence (OGBV), and uses false and misleading narratives (with malign intent) against women and queer persons that use their gender as the focus of attacks. Shaming, intimidation and using threats of violence are three common strategies within it, and they often overlap with each other.[1]Here’s what gendered disinformation is: A strategy…
Online gender-based violence (OGBV) is now a widely accepted term used to name the behaviours that harass and target women and gender-marginalised people on the internet. A much lesser known term — a subset of OGBV — is gendered disinformation, an evergrowing concern today.So what is gendered disinformation?Gendered disinformation is a strategy to silence women and queer folks that “uses false or…
In December 2023, we spoke to activists in Brazil, Guatemala, Bolivia, Uganda, and Kenya about gender-targeted disinformation. In these conversations, the main goal was listening to lived experiences and possible practices to fight against mis and disinformation. Women human rights defenders (WHRD) Andrea Ixchiu, Lori Regattieri, Raisa Valda, Sandra Kwikiriza and Thina Lopez participated in the…
Image via The Self-Training Guide: How can we carry-out cyberfeminst workshops?Recently, I published, in Hiperderecho, The Self-Training Guide: How can we carry-out cyberfeminst workshops? This material is the result of the efforts, the learning and the sistematization of many Latin-American experiences. It includes the issues of care and digital security in the discussions for women and…
In the context of creating feminist infrastructures, a call from the feminist collective Numun Fund sparked the creation of a workshop “Talking heads: creative translation of images for a feminist internet”, a space guided by feminist exploration that sought to make the internet more inclusive and focuses on the needs of people living with vision disabilities. In this article, we summarise the…
This piece is a part of a series of blogs to share experiences of various projects that came out of the All Women Count-Take Back the Tech! (AWC–TBTT) grants. This project was born out of the grant awarded to WOUGNET in 2020.
This piece is a part of a series of blogs to share experiences of various projects that came out of the All Women Count-Take Back the Tech! (AWC–TBTT) grants. Love, Sex and Tech was one such project born out of the grant awarded to Indu Harikumar in 2020.
Fighting patriarchy and ableism through pleasure work. Defining what pleasure is. Compiling Online Gender Based Violence (OGBV) research. Being kinky, queer and vulnerable online. Interviewing sex workers, coaches writers, researchers and artists. Embracing queer identity in the face of online violence. Understanding the experiences of African women who had faced various consequences due to OGBV…
Twenty projects from Africa and Asia and the diaspora received small grants in 2020 from the All Women Count - Take Back the Tech! initiative.All Women Count-Take Back the Tech! is a four-year project from 2017 to 2020 being coordinated by APC’s Women's Rights Programme (WRP) under the All Women Count consortium. The consortium’s concern is violence against women, in particular violence…
Graphic by Ousainou Jonga, copyright Equals Now.This is the first organisation in The Gambia to implement a project focused on online gender-based violence (OGBV) and start a national conversation about it. OGBV, particularly in The Gambia, targets feminists and activists who use online advocacy to work toward a better country for women. Having found that this important aspect of gender-based…
Image via Pollicy’s artworks Research is an important tool which can be used to engage and empower people, but if it is difficult to understand or inaccessible, it can be seen as daunting by the people it should be helping and reaching. Pollicy aimed to break down this barrier and utilise more creative ways of sharing the data that they collect from their research. Neema Iyer is the founder and…
Image via Hacking systems of oppression and protecting our vital strengths: A feminist framework for self-defence by Anirban Ghosh (illustrator, designer).Self-defence and body-awareness training found me. Due to my own experiences of sexual assault, it bothered me that the majority of self-defence classes in South Africa – mostly aimed at women – were reduced to sequences of (sometimes…
Sodfa Daaji is a Tunisian-Italian feminist-abolitionist engaged in Europe and Africa. She advocates for women’s rights, and her activism focuses particularly on how culture, tradition and religion affect the achievement of women’s rights. She is also the founder and executive director of the African Legal Think Tank on Women’s Rights (ALTOWR) and the project lead for the Handbook. ALTOWR is a…
