Online gender-based violence

As the UN Secretary-General observed in 2023, the crisis of information integrity on digital platforms cannot be addressed without effectively tackling the role of platforms in spreading “gender-based hate speech and disinformation that seek to systematically subjugate women by silencing them and pushing them out of the public sphere.” The…

In the May 2023 meeting of the Regulatory Working Group of the Coalition against Online Violence, Malavika Rajkumar and Merrin Muhammed Ashraf presented comments on the 2018 UNHRC Resolution on Violence against Women and Girls in the Digital Contexts, highlighting certain gaps and deficits in the objective and language of the Resolution that…

As part of our engagement with the Women’s Right Online Network (WRO), we are happy to have partnered with the Tech Policy Design Lab of the World Wide Web Foundation for building a webpage dedicated to mapping the state of online gender-based violence (OGBV) across the globe.

IT for Change undertook a research study of hateful, abusive and problematic speech on Twitter directed at 20 Indian women in public-political life. The mixed-method inquiry set out to investigate not only the scale, but also the nature of such pervasive online gendered violence.

You can also peruse…

IT for Change and InternetLab are co-organizing a roundtable on April 19th and 20th to catalyze a productive debate revolving around the central question: what new imaginaries of social media governance will be adequate to eradicate the unfreedoms arising from misogyny in online communications agora?

Through this roundtable, the…

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.

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…

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:

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…

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…