Resources

During the Interactive Dialogue with the Special Rapporteur on violence against women at the 29th Regular Session of the UN Human Rights Council, Chat Garcia Ramilo delivered an oral statement on behalf of the Association for Progressive Communications calling on all States to develop effective responses to technology-related violence against women as a matter of urgency as part of their existing obligations to uphold women’s human rights rights.

The Foundation for Media Alternatives (FMA) prepared this country report as part of the broader study conducted by the Association for Progressive Communications on "End violence: Women’s rights and safety online," which involve seven different countries. It looks into the existing legal remedies and corporate policies in the Philippines as they relate to technology-related violence against women (VAW).

Does social media enable forming networks of solidarity between different marginalised groups? Is there a space for non-normative discourses such as the discourse on pleasure? Does digital technology aid in the construction of feminist counter-publics? These are some of the questions explored in this paper. Power relations that operate through social media, including forms of gendered and sexualised violence, are also discussed.

Technology based violence is exposing women to the entire spectrum of conceivable harms in Pakistan. Victims of technology based violence have suffered physical violence ranging from rape to attempted assassination, psycho-social harms and loss of development opportunities. This was revealed in a research report launched by Bytes for All, Pakistan in Islamabad.

The emergent information or network society context offers a range of opportunities for women and girls to enhance their participation across economic, socio-cultural and public-political realms of life, as well as the scope for enhancing their individual freedoms. The Post-2015 agenda therefore, both in terms of goals and related targets and indicators, has to promote and measure women's participation in the information society and their access to and effective use of the internet and ICTs.

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are the constitutive technologies of our times – they have transformed, enriched, and become an integral part of almost everything we do The intertwining of ICTs in all spheres of daily life has changed the way we live, love, play and work - creating a digitally re-constituted life-world with a new sociological syntax and demanding a new ethics. The past few years have thus seen intense deliberation towards the refurbishment of existing legal and juridical frameworks at global, regional and national levels.

This report was produced at the request of Women, Action, and the Media (WAM!). From November 6–26 2014, WAM! took in reports of Twitter-based harassment, assessed them, and escalated reports as necessary to Twitter for special attention. This document presents fidings from this three-week project; it draws on both quantitative and qualitative methods.

These agreed conclusions produced by the 57th session of the Commission on the Status of Women strongly condemn all forms of violence against women and girls and urge States to recognize that sexual and gender-based violence affects victims and survivors, families, communities and societies.

This publication, which is especially useful for women’s rights and ICT for development organisations, UN agencies, health providers, legislators, policy makers and justice enforcement bodies, gathers the learnings and challenges identified by all of the actors involved in APC and AZUR Development’s project “Holding government accountable to gender-based violence in the Republic of Congo”.