Questions raised - VAW & ICTs: strategies for change

Drawing for further discussion from suggestions that surfaced at the discussions in the previous theme:

• To understand better how ICTs play a role and impact on VAW. What suggestions do you have for this? Sharing of case-studies, workshops, conferences, researches, forums, a longer term mailing list?
• To publicise this issue. Is this necessary? To whom? In what sort of spaces and formats? What would be some of the challenges and some suggestions to overcome them?
• Using ICTs more in our advocacy against VAW. Are we already doing so? Can we share some strategies in this space? What are some of the limitations in this? How can we try and utilise ICTs more in our work? What sort of support would we need, particularly from the State, and how can we raise this as a critical need (if we agree that this is so?)
• Developing a specific women’s human rights framework for Internet/cyber spaces. How would this look like? Is this necessary or can we attempt to reinterprete existing human rights instruments to surface the urgency to look at VAW & ICTs?
• How can we utilise the WSIS platform that is currently underway to try and push for this, at least from a VAW perspective? Apart from Margarita, is anyone else in this mailing list involved in the WSIS process and can inform us about spaces that we can intervene, and methods? What other platforms can we use? CEDAW? MDGs?
• Holding the private sector accountable. Since they are recognised (for the first time I believe in international platforms) as important stakeholders, how can we shift our understanding of human rights instruments and mechanisms to hold them accountable? Or perhaps to move away from these spaces into forms of strategies that anti-capitalism, anti-globalisation activists are more familiar with like boycotts and so on? How can we evidence multi-national corporations' investment in methods of using ICTs in ways that harm women (like video games, pornographic sites etc)?
  
  
• How about the formation of an international, independent, self-regulating body to assess and make enforceable decisions on VAW & ICTs? I'm not sure how this would look like, but perhaps something approximating a tribunal or ombudsman on a national level for trust and fraud cases? Or playing an advisory and regulatory role for existing committees and mechanisms?