e-VAW

World-over, technology-mediated violence against women is growing to be a serious social problem. Women’s full and free participation in digital spaces presupposes a safe online environment, but going online seem to be fraught with the risk of violence for women. Governments, especially in countries in the global South, are yet to bring their…

Anita Gurumurthy, Executive Director, IT for Change was invited to be part of a committee to make recommendations to the Government of Karnataka on the issue of violence against women for a 10 point strategy that the state proposes to adopt. As follow up to the meeting, IT for Change made a submission, focussed mainly on the…

Our discussion paper on the issue of technology-mediated violence against women analyses the adequacy of the current legal and institutional frameworks in India and proposes alternate models that need to be debated and analysed. The paper raises a series of questions on overhauling the existing legal framework, effectively addressing…

IT for Change made a submission to the Call for Comments on the draft update of General Recommendation No.19 (1992) on gender based violence against women, issued by the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. Our suggestions stress the need to account for the equivalence of the effects of offline and technology-mediated…

On 10 December 2010, IT for Change was part of the panel on 'Logging into (in)security: a seminar on ICT and gender violence' which was held in Chennai (India) and closed Prajnya's 16-day campaign against gender violence. Chloé Zollman spoke about how, beyond narratives of fear, ICTs could be empowering tools to build…

This article, published in the Economic and Political Weekly  (3 October 2009), is a report of the consultation on the 'Misuse of Communication Technology and Its Linkages with Violence against Women' held in Trivandrum (India) in March 2009. The article advocates that policy choices  need to avoid narratives of fear around…

This three-day event, called ‘The Daughters of Fire’, was organised by Vimochana and the Asian women’s Human Rights Council in July 2009 at Christ University, Bengaluru (India). The presentation focused on the theoretical framework examining media-related constructs and critiques of the 'new' public sphere through the lens of…

Anita Gurumurthy wrote a note for the Sakhi-Jagori Consultation on 'New technologies and new forms of violence against women and girls' that took place in Trivandrum (Kerala, India) on 27-28 March 2009. The note identifies emerging debates around personhood and privacy, on the one hand, and normative structures in emerging…

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…