online violence against women

2022

We are excited to publish a brand new issue paper under our collaborative Feminist Digital Justice project with DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era).

Read it here!

The seventh issue paper, authored by Kumudini Samuel, Florencia Partenio, and Cai Yiping from DAWN, explores feminist digital activism in the Global…

2021

This is an electronic interview conducted between Anita Gurumurthy and The Quint, India on cybercrime in India and its larger cause in the wake of the 'bulli bai' app incident in January, 2022.

Q. How do the digital spaces become a readymade tool for people to harass and humiliate women? Does the anonymity on offer on these platforms…
2020

Disasters are gendered. They play out differently for men, women, and gender non-conforming people. So also the COVID-19 pandemic. In the domestic-private spaces, an incredulous increase in levels of violence against women during these weeks, a “shadow pandemic” — as the UN Under-Secretary-General referred to it — has laid bare the patriarchal…

2020

IT for Change is engaged in a project that addresses gender-based hate speech in the online public sphere. Supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada, the project responds to the current reality in India where women are not only speaking up against patriarchy, but also claiming public-political space despite…

2020

IT for Change's Nandini Chami appeared on BBC Newshour on the 31st birthday of the World Wide Web to talk about the scale of online gender-based violence and the ways in which the web seems to be failing women and girls. The highlights of the discussion were as follows:

As IT for Change's previous research has already demonstrated, women…
2019

Every once in a while, there is the high optics drama about a woman celebrity or public persona who has been trolled, and then, predictably, the dust settles. But make no mistake. This is but the proverbial tip of an iceberg that is ballooning.

The internet-mediated world presents a contradiction of a magnitude and complexity that…

2019

In this article published in the Economic & Political Weekly (12 January 2019), Amrita Vasudevan revisits current debates on the liability of internet intermediaries in India, in the context of violence against women online. 

Read the paper here.

2018

This discussion paper argues that the omnipresence of the digital demands a re-evaluation of legal-institutional response to violence against women. The networked logic of the Internet, and social media platforms that overrun it bank upon virality, effectively rendering ineffectual notions of ‘consent’. The paper attempts to posit a feminist…

2018

Anita Gurumurthy was invited to participate in the Conference for Promotion of Policing Standards (COPPS) 2018 hosted by the Bureau of Police Research and Development and the Indian Police Foundation at BPR&D Conference Hall, New Delhi in May. The conference focused on the future of policing in the digital age. Anita made a presentation on…

2018

Anita Gurumurthy was invited to participate in the Conference for Promotion of Policing Standards (COPPS) 2018 hosted by the Bureau of Police Research and Development and the Indian Police Foundation at BPR&D Conference Hall, New Delhi in May. The conference focused on the future of policing in the digital age. Anita made a presentation on…