| APrIGF 2022 Session Proposal Submission Form | |||||||||||
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| Part 1 - Lead Organizer | |||||||||||
| Contact Person | |||||||||||
| Ms. Srujana Bej | |||||||||||
| Organization / Affiliation (Please state "Individual" if appropriate) * | |||||||||||
| The Bachchao Project | |||||||||||
| Designation | |||||||||||
| Researcher | |||||||||||
| Gender | |||||||||||
| Cis woman | |||||||||||
| Economy of Residence | |||||||||||
| India | |||||||||||
| Primary Stakeholder Group | |||||||||||
| Civil Society | |||||||||||
| List Your Organizing Partners (if any) | |||||||||||
| - | |||||||||||
| Part 2 - Session Proposal | |||||||||||
| Session Title | |||||||||||
| Tackling online violence in South Asia by supporting women organizers in the online civic space | |||||||||||
| Session Format | |||||||||||
| Fireside Chat | |||||||||||
| Where do you plan to organize your session? | |||||||||||
| Online only (with onsite facilitator who will help with questions or comments from the floor) | |||||||||||
| Specific Issues for Discussion | |||||||||||
| Feminist organizers belonging to marginalized communities in South Asia are participating in online civic spaces to challenge and build resistance against oppressive social orders at great personal risks and costs. For instance, women organizers in India who belong to marginalized caste groups and religious or gender minorities face disproportionate abuse in the form of online gender-based violence, identity-based delegitimization, state or platform censorship etc. A limited number of research studies highlight the severity and adverse impacts of such online ‘hate’. Civil society is primarily focused on critiquing legal frameworks, content moderation policies and processes. This session seeks to critique the homogenized discourse of online gender based violence and spotlight an immediate gap in South Asian civil society: the need for building and providing systematic and comprehensive support for women organizers online, particularly women belonging to marginalized communities. The session will focus on the following 4 discussion issues - 1) Why is there a need for systematic, comprehensive documentation of abuse which is disaggregated for the experiences of women from different groups? How can civil society institute measures for disaggregated and comprehensive abuse documentation? 2) What are the measures for understanding and mitigating the disaggregated and longitudinal vulnerabilities and risks to women organizers? 3) How can we build diverse networks of support that provide personal safety, legal, medical and technological support to the different groups of marginalized women who are online? How can such networks help challenge the existing power hierarchies in the online civic space? 4) Through which analytical frameworks must we revisit and add to the existing discourse on platform governance and regulation, so that it may provide women organizers a safe space online? |
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| Describe the Relevance of Your Session to APrIGF | |||||||||||
| Studies show that women organizers online face censorship, mental and emotional abuse, sexual harassment, violence, unauthorized use of their personal information and other risks to their safety, health and professional lives. Furthermore, there is wide consensus that existing content moderation processes are failing to curb online violence. First, these processes are primarily concerned with violent speech or harassment (neglecting other forms of violence) and incompetent to recognize localized hate in diverse cultural contexts. Second, the processes are opaque, lack fairness and can be influenced or weaponized by powerful political groups. Third, the processes do not include mitigating or penalising the algorithmic and technological catalysts of violence. Consequently, women organisers, particularly women belonging to marginalized groups, have reported self-censorship and partial or complete withdrawals from the online civic space. Present checks to curb online violence are inadequate; more importantly, they do not offer support or redressal for dealing with the impacts from the harms of online violence. Online redressal has largely been framed as removing the existence of the wrong. Such framing fails to center the individuals who suffer harms and it also does not include measures to help remedy the harms and their embodied impacts. This strikes at the very premise of trust and inclusion in a community-led internet, where withdrawals and exclusions are increasingly compelled or imposed on women who challenge oppressive social orders. This session focuses on discussing the role that civil society, a key and prominent social actor in democracies, plays in marshaling safety, trust and inclusion in the internet for women organizers. We seek to discuss the practical means by which civil society must make efforts to both mitigate and redress online violence against women organizers. |
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| Methodology / Agenda (Please add rows by clicking "+" on the right) | |||||||||||
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| Moderators & Speakers Info (Please complete where possible) | |||||||||||
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| Please explain the rationale for choosing each of the above contributors to the session. | |||||||||||
| The moderator and speakers are all women who have been chosen for their expertise, active engagement on the subject and diverse experiences. Viboo Balakrishnan is a security trainer in Sri Lanka who has previously worked with Safe Sisters, Sri Lanka. Ayesha Sinha is the Executive Director of Talash society which designs, develops and deepens the practices of personal safety (including online safety) and well-being education for at-risk adolescent girls and youth in India. Divya Srinivasan is a human rights lawyer from India whose work focuses on gender, free speech and digital rights. Nadika Nadja is a trans organiser and anti-caste ally. Srujana Bej is a human rights researcher and organiser who has studied the experiences of marginalised women organisers in India's online civic space. Ayesha Minhaz is an independent journalist, Chevening scholar and has also studied the experiences of marginalised women organisers in India's online civic space. | |||||||||||
| If you need assistance to find a suitable speaker to contribute to your session, or an onsite facilitator for your online-only session, please specify your request with details of what you are looking for. | |||||||||||
| We need assistance to find suitable speakers for our session. Specifically, 3 of the 4 proposed speakers in our session reside in India. We would be grateful for help in identifying speakers who reside in, or can speak on movement building in the online civic space, in other regions of South Asia. | |||||||||||
| Please declare if you have any potential conflict of interest with the Program Committee 2022. | |||||||||||
| No | |||||||||||
| Are you or other session contributors planning to apply for the APrIGF Fellowship Program 2022? | |||||||||||
| No | |||||||||||
| APrIGF offers live transcript in English for all sessions. Do you need any other translation support or any disability related requests for your session? APrIGF makes every effort to be a fully inclusive and accessible event, and will do the best to fulfill your needs. | |||||||||||
| None yet. | |||||||||||
| Number of Attendees (Please fill in numbers) | |||||||||||
| Consent | |||||||||||
 I agree that my data can be submitted to forms.for.asia and processed by APrIGF organizers for the program selection of APrIGF 2022. |
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