Introduction
STATT, a Hong-Kong-based network of practitioners working on global development and security issues, has been running Afghanistan’s first toll-free family support hotline since January 2013, with support from the Government of Canada. One of the main objectives of this project is to provide support for victims and survivors of gender-based violence.
Gender-based and violence against women are often used interchangeably, because most violence is perpetrated by men against women. For the purposes of this paper, we use gender-based violence (GBV). While the majority of organisations featured in this report are primarily focused on tackling violence against women, although some have also provided support and advice to a minority of male survivors of violence.
A growing body of literature supports STATT’s experience that technology-based solutions can have a positive impact in addressing GBV, but also points to a number of challenges associated with the use of such interventions. The organisation commissioned this report to contribute to the available literature and deepen understanding of how organisations working in conflict-affected and fragile contexts are using mobile and internet technology to prevent or respond to gender-based violence.
Specifically, STATT wished to explore, through the collection and analysis of a series of case studies, key lessons learned around the:
• Effectiveness and impact of these new technologies in the prevention and response to gender-based violence;
• Costs, financial backing for, sustainability and scalability of such projects;
• Relationship between the technology and ‘traditional’ work to tackle gender-based violence;
• Challenges and advantages associated with using these technologies in interventions to address gender-based violence.
The resulting report is organised in five sections: introduction, methodology, overview, case studies, and main findings and recommendations. The overview sets out the main findings from an initial literature review; the section on case studies outlines the approaches and learning from seven technology-based solutions developed and implemented in very different contexts in Africa, Asia and Latin America; and the final section analyses and reflects on the implications of the learning from the literature review and case studies for further work in this area. It is hoped that policymakers, practitioners and advocates of high quality and responsive GBV initiatives will find the results presented in this report relevant to their work.
Methodology
This desk-based research took place between mid-January and early-March 2014. It involved a review of the available literature and semi-structured interviews with 12 representatives of organisations who have used mobile and internet technologies in their interventions to tackle gender-based violence; several representatives of donor institutions (USAID, World Bank and UN Women); and Coordinators of global organisations working to promote the use of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) for sustainable development and social justice purposes (World Pulse and Association for Progressive Communications).
Limitations
The report does not purport to provide a comprehensive overview of all aspects of the use of mobile and internet technology in GBV interventions. Rather it is an attempt to better understand how a handful of organisations have applied internet and mobile technology as part of gender- based violence interventions in specific contexts and the challenges and opportunities they have encountered. Nevertheless, it is hoped that the learning from these projects will have further relevance for other organisations keen to harness the power of these technological advances in their work.
Overview
There is growing interest in the myriad of ways in which new technologies are being leveraged to support the work of individuals and organisations in tackling GBV. Increasingly, as these technologies become more available around the world, including to diverse users in the global south, they are being deployed in a range of innovative ways to prevent and respond to violence.
The mobile and internet-technology based interventions featured in this report make use of applications that combine a number of different objectives, from mapping violence to gathering data, using data gathered to advocate for change and providing survivors with access to essential information and support. More broadly, ICTs are also being used to access support from a community of peers, raise awareness of the violence faced by women and girls amongst their families and communities, use entertainment and social media forums, and monitor and evaluate interventions and measure their impact.
Mobile technologies have further been used to improve standard study methodologies that evaluate interventions and measure impact. For instance, a number of randomised control trials (although not of gender-based violence programmes) have been conducted remotely, reducing the cost of the trials and enabling people to participate that would not have previously been able.
Experts say it is possible to group technology-based interventions into four broad categories – tools for victims and survivors, tools for advocates, tools to provide voice and empowerment, and tools to crowdsource, map, and share information – although in practice many of them cut across these categories.
Opportunities and challenges
The advent of technology-based solutions in this field brings with it both opportunities and challenges. On the one hand, technology has the potential to play a key role in transforming gender inequality and unequal social relations. A 2010 survey by the GSMA Development Fund and the Cherie Blair Foundation found that extending the benefits of mobile phone ownership to women can transform the lives of women in the global south.3 Of the more than 2,000 women surveyed from four low- to middle-income countries (Bolivia, Egypt, India, and Kenya,) 41% of women reported increased income or professional opportunities as a result of owning a mobile, 85% reported higher independence, and 93% reported feeling safer because of mobile phone ownership.
Unequal access
However, marginalised groups, and poor women in particular, still face significant barriers in access to ICTs. Challenges include cost, literacy, cultural norms, safety, and a lack of understanding of potential applications.
A feasibility study on ICT for Peace and Women’s Rights conducted by Kvinna till Kvinna highlighted a number of challenges around ICT access and use experienced by its partner organisations in conflict or fragile states, including problems with telephone lines, poor internet connection and irregular electricity supplies. The costs of purchasing and maintaining hardware, connecting to the internet, software licensing and phone bills were also prohibitive for many organisations.
A 2012 report by Intel Corporation and Dahlberg Global Development Advisers found that women in low and middle-income countries are up to 37% less likely to own a mobile phone than men. Furthermore, compared with men in these countries, 25% fewer women use the internet.
Projects such as GSMA Foundation’s mWomen are working to bridge this gap by encouraging the mobile technology industry to serve resource-poor women and to promote solutions to women’s barriers to usage, 7 but there is still a long way to go with a reported 300 million women missing out on the benefits of mobile phone access.
Uneven geographical uptake
Adoption of these new technologies in addressing gender-based violence specifically is uneven. Despite having the highest rates of violence against women in the world, and faster mobile growth than any other region, the deployment of these technologies in Africa is underdeveloped. Exceptions include South Africa and Egypt, where mobile and internet-based apps, such as HarassMap in Egypt, have surged in the wake of rampant sexual harassment and assaults.
Additionally, many of the interventions rely on access to the internet or are designed for smartphones, which are not necessarily widespread. For example, there are now a whole raft of safety applications, such as FightBack, bSafe and StreetSafe, that incorporate functions such as panic buttons and alerts to notify friends and emergency services when someone is being attacked or abused, but most of these are currently only available on smartphones. The low smartphone penetration in low and middle-income countries, at 22% globally, 19% in India (2013), and only 4% (2012) in sub-Saharan Africa, limits their availability and use considerably. Similarly, it seems that many mobile apps are not being developed with the end user in mind; the technology may not be user-friendly (for instance, using SMS messaging for a primarily illiterate audience) or the content and mode of delivery do not address users’ experience or realities.
Response versus prevention
While a comprehensive mapping of the myriad of projects was beyond the scope of this research, it appears that many of the existing interventions are currently focused on responses to violence against women, rather than prevention efforts.
Effective responses to existing violence against women and girls are critical as a fundamental ‘building block’ for prevention, but have only a limited impact on reducing the number of new incidences of violence. Ideally, prevention and response strategies would be developed and implemented in a holistic and integrated way. Awareness raising and community mobilisation are important components of prevention efforts, but governments also play a key role in creating ‘enabling environments’ through undertaking policy, legislative and budgetary reform to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment and address intersecting forms of discrimination that place women and girls at risk of violence.
Double-edged sword
ICTs can be a double-edged sword for women; they are changing the ways in which women respond to violence, but they are also changing the ways in which they experience violence.10 Violence against women, which takes place in the home or on the street, is now taking new forms and occurring in online spaces whereby women become targets of cyber-stalking or digital voyeurism.
Images of women are being posted on the internet without their knowledge or consent and, in the hands of tech-savvy domestic violence abusers. Spyware and GPS are also being used to track and control women’s mobility.11 Very often offline violence escalates into online violence and abuse and may continue even after the victim has separated from the perpetrator. Sometimes the violence starts online and transfers to offline spaces.
Initiatives such as Take Back the Tech! are seeking to reclaim these technologies for the fight in violence against women by strengthening the ICT capacity of women’s rights advocates and building a community of organisations challenging violence against women through digital platforms.13 Work is further underway to explore to what extent existing domestic and global remedies are able to provide access to justice for survivors of online violence and to look at the responsibilities of internet intermediaries, whose sites are often implicated in cases of tech-related violence.
Lack of evidence
Given the speed with which these technologies are developing, it is perhaps unsurprising that there is little evidence regarding their effectiveness. Research led by Nancy Glass, Associate Director of the John Hopkins Centre for Global Health in the U.S, found that no one has ever formally evaluated the effectiveness of internet-based support tools for gender-based violence victims.14 She is now in the fourth year of a five-year randomised trial to evaluate the effectiveness of an internet- based safety decision aid. The aid, which is designed to assist victims of intimate partner violence in making an informed decision with regards to their relationship, is being evaluated against four outcomes including improving survivor mental health.
Qualitative assessments conducted to date show that women feel ‘more support’ using the aid and are ‘less conflicted about decision making.’16 Glass believes there is much potential to adapt the safety decision aid for low and middle-income countries, but says it is essential to have a better understanding of what safety looks like in these contexts before conducting similar studies. For instance, women may be less likely to be able to leave a relationship for economic reasons so more emphasis would need to be placed on engaging religious leaders to challenge inappropriate and violent behaviour.
Table of contents
INTRODUCTION …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 4
METHODOLOGY………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………4
OVERVIEW ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..5
CASE STUDIES…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………8
Providing advice and support to women and children survivors of violence in occupied Palestine ……………………………………….9
Connecting women in rural Sierra Leone with information about gender-based violence ……………………………………………………….12
Providing counselling and support to families in Afghanistan …………………………………………….15
Holding governments accountable for gender-based violence in Cambodia and the Republic of Congo ……………………………18
Challenging the social acceptability of sexual harassment in Egypt ……………………………………. 22
Harnessing Mobile Technology to Prevent Sexual Assault in India ……………………………………… 25
Building technology solutions to address the challenge of domestic violence in Central America and Nepal ………………………….. 27
KEY FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS …………………………………………………………………………… 30
STATT, a Hong-Kong-based network of practitioners working on global development and security issues, has been running Afghanistan’s first toll-free family support hotline since January 2013, with support from the Government of Canada. One of the main objectives of this project is to provide support for victims and survivors of gender-based violence.
Gender-based and violence against women are often used interchangeably, because most violence is perpetrated by men against women. For the purposes of this paper, we use gender-based violence (GBV). While the majority of organisations featured in this report are primarily focused on tackling violence against women, although some have also provided support and advice to a minority of male survivors of violence.
A growing body of literature supports STATT’s experience that technology-based solutions can have a positive impact in addressing GBV, but also points to a number of challenges associated with the use of such interventions. The organisation commissioned this report to contribute to the available literature and deepen understanding of how organisations working in conflict-affected and fragile contexts are using mobile and internet technology to prevent or respond to gender-based violence.
Specifically, STATT wished to explore, through the collection and analysis of a series of case studies, key lessons learned around the:
• Effectiveness and impact of these new technologies in the prevention and response to gender-based violence;
• Costs, financial backing for, sustainability and scalability of such projects;
• Relationship between the technology and ‘traditional’ work to tackle gender-based violence;
• Challenges and advantages associated with using these technologies in interventions to address gender-based violence.
The resulting report is organised in five sections: introduction, methodology, overview, case studies, and main findings and recommendations. The overview sets out the main findings from an initial literature review; the section on case studies outlines the approaches and learning from seven technology-based solutions developed and implemented in very different contexts in Africa, Asia and Latin America; and the final section analyses and reflects on the implications of the learning from the literature review and case studies for further work in this area. It is hoped that policymakers, practitioners and advocates of high quality and responsive GBV initiatives will find the results presented in this report relevant to their work.
Methodology
This desk-based research took place between mid-January and early-March 2014. It involved a review of the available literature and semi-structured interviews with 12 representatives of organisations who have used mobile and internet technologies in their interventions to tackle gender-based violence; several representatives of donor institutions (USAID, World Bank and UN Women); and Coordinators of global organisations working to promote the use of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) for sustainable development and social justice purposes (World Pulse and Association for Progressive Communications).
Limitations
The report does not purport to provide a comprehensive overview of all aspects of the use of mobile and internet technology in GBV interventions. Rather it is an attempt to better understand how a handful of organisations have applied internet and mobile technology as part of gender- based violence interventions in specific contexts and the challenges and opportunities they have encountered. Nevertheless, it is hoped that the learning from these projects will have further relevance for other organisations keen to harness the power of these technological advances in their work.
Overview
There is growing interest in the myriad of ways in which new technologies are being leveraged to support the work of individuals and organisations in tackling GBV. Increasingly, as these technologies become more available around the world, including to diverse users in the global south, they are being deployed in a range of innovative ways to prevent and respond to violence.
The mobile and internet-technology based interventions featured in this report make use of applications that combine a number of different objectives, from mapping violence to gathering data, using data gathered to advocate for change and providing survivors with access to essential information and support. More broadly, ICTs are also being used to access support from a community of peers, raise awareness of the violence faced by women and girls amongst their families and communities, use entertainment and social media forums, and monitor and evaluate interventions and measure their impact.
Mobile technologies have further been used to improve standard study methodologies that evaluate interventions and measure impact. For instance, a number of randomised control trials (although not of gender-based violence programmes) have been conducted remotely, reducing the cost of the trials and enabling people to participate that would not have previously been able.
Experts say it is possible to group technology-based interventions into four broad categories – tools for victims and survivors, tools for advocates, tools to provide voice and empowerment, and tools to crowdsource, map, and share information – although in practice many of them cut across these categories.
Opportunities and challenges
The advent of technology-based solutions in this field brings with it both opportunities and challenges. On the one hand, technology has the potential to play a key role in transforming gender inequality and unequal social relations. A 2010 survey by the GSMA Development Fund and the Cherie Blair Foundation found that extending the benefits of mobile phone ownership to women can transform the lives of women in the global south.3 Of the more than 2,000 women surveyed from four low- to middle-income countries (Bolivia, Egypt, India, and Kenya,) 41% of women reported increased income or professional opportunities as a result of owning a mobile, 85% reported higher independence, and 93% reported feeling safer because of mobile phone ownership.
Unequal access
However, marginalised groups, and poor women in particular, still face significant barriers in access to ICTs. Challenges include cost, literacy, cultural norms, safety, and a lack of understanding of potential applications.
A feasibility study on ICT for Peace and Women’s Rights conducted by Kvinna till Kvinna highlighted a number of challenges around ICT access and use experienced by its partner organisations in conflict or fragile states, including problems with telephone lines, poor internet connection and irregular electricity supplies. The costs of purchasing and maintaining hardware, connecting to the internet, software licensing and phone bills were also prohibitive for many organisations.
A 2012 report by Intel Corporation and Dahlberg Global Development Advisers found that women in low and middle-income countries are up to 37% less likely to own a mobile phone than men. Furthermore, compared with men in these countries, 25% fewer women use the internet.
Projects such as GSMA Foundation’s mWomen are working to bridge this gap by encouraging the mobile technology industry to serve resource-poor women and to promote solutions to women’s barriers to usage, 7 but there is still a long way to go with a reported 300 million women missing out on the benefits of mobile phone access.
Uneven geographical uptake
Adoption of these new technologies in addressing gender-based violence specifically is uneven. Despite having the highest rates of violence against women in the world, and faster mobile growth than any other region, the deployment of these technologies in Africa is underdeveloped. Exceptions include South Africa and Egypt, where mobile and internet-based apps, such as HarassMap in Egypt, have surged in the wake of rampant sexual harassment and assaults.
Additionally, many of the interventions rely on access to the internet or are designed for smartphones, which are not necessarily widespread. For example, there are now a whole raft of safety applications, such as FightBack, bSafe and StreetSafe, that incorporate functions such as panic buttons and alerts to notify friends and emergency services when someone is being attacked or abused, but most of these are currently only available on smartphones. The low smartphone penetration in low and middle-income countries, at 22% globally, 19% in India (2013), and only 4% (2012) in sub-Saharan Africa, limits their availability and use considerably. Similarly, it seems that many mobile apps are not being developed with the end user in mind; the technology may not be user-friendly (for instance, using SMS messaging for a primarily illiterate audience) or the content and mode of delivery do not address users’ experience or realities.
Response versus prevention
While a comprehensive mapping of the myriad of projects was beyond the scope of this research, it appears that many of the existing interventions are currently focused on responses to violence against women, rather than prevention efforts.
Effective responses to existing violence against women and girls are critical as a fundamental ‘building block’ for prevention, but have only a limited impact on reducing the number of new incidences of violence. Ideally, prevention and response strategies would be developed and implemented in a holistic and integrated way. Awareness raising and community mobilisation are important components of prevention efforts, but governments also play a key role in creating ‘enabling environments’ through undertaking policy, legislative and budgetary reform to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment and address intersecting forms of discrimination that place women and girls at risk of violence.
Double-edged sword
ICTs can be a double-edged sword for women; they are changing the ways in which women respond to violence, but they are also changing the ways in which they experience violence.10 Violence against women, which takes place in the home or on the street, is now taking new forms and occurring in online spaces whereby women become targets of cyber-stalking or digital voyeurism.
Images of women are being posted on the internet without their knowledge or consent and, in the hands of tech-savvy domestic violence abusers. Spyware and GPS are also being used to track and control women’s mobility.11 Very often offline violence escalates into online violence and abuse and may continue even after the victim has separated from the perpetrator. Sometimes the violence starts online and transfers to offline spaces.
Initiatives such as Take Back the Tech! are seeking to reclaim these technologies for the fight in violence against women by strengthening the ICT capacity of women’s rights advocates and building a community of organisations challenging violence against women through digital platforms.13 Work is further underway to explore to what extent existing domestic and global remedies are able to provide access to justice for survivors of online violence and to look at the responsibilities of internet intermediaries, whose sites are often implicated in cases of tech-related violence.
Lack of evidence
Given the speed with which these technologies are developing, it is perhaps unsurprising that there is little evidence regarding their effectiveness. Research led by Nancy Glass, Associate Director of the John Hopkins Centre for Global Health in the U.S, found that no one has ever formally evaluated the effectiveness of internet-based support tools for gender-based violence victims.14 She is now in the fourth year of a five-year randomised trial to evaluate the effectiveness of an internet- based safety decision aid. The aid, which is designed to assist victims of intimate partner violence in making an informed decision with regards to their relationship, is being evaluated against four outcomes including improving survivor mental health.
Qualitative assessments conducted to date show that women feel ‘more support’ using the aid and are ‘less conflicted about decision making.’16 Glass believes there is much potential to adapt the safety decision aid for low and middle-income countries, but says it is essential to have a better understanding of what safety looks like in these contexts before conducting similar studies. For instance, women may be less likely to be able to leave a relationship for economic reasons so more emphasis would need to be placed on engaging religious leaders to challenge inappropriate and violent behaviour.
Table of contents
INTRODUCTION …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 4
METHODOLOGY………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………4
OVERVIEW ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..5
CASE STUDIES…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………8
Providing advice and support to women and children survivors of violence in occupied Palestine ……………………………………….9
Connecting women in rural Sierra Leone with information about gender-based violence ……………………………………………………….12
Providing counselling and support to families in Afghanistan …………………………………………….15
Holding governments accountable for gender-based violence in Cambodia and the Republic of Congo ……………………………18
Challenging the social acceptability of sexual harassment in Egypt ……………………………………. 22
Harnessing Mobile Technology to Prevent Sexual Assault in India ……………………………………… 25
Building technology solutions to address the challenge of domestic violence in Central America and Nepal ………………………….. 27
KEY FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS …………………………………………………………………………… 30
Year of publication
2014
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