violence against women

The APC Women’s Rights Programme will be present at the 58th session of the Commission on the Status of Women, which will take place in New York on 10-21 March 2014. This year's priority theme is “Challenges and achievements in the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals for women and girls”. Women's and girls' access to and participation in education, training, science and technology…

Point of View and CREA held “Tangled, Like Wool” a day-long meeting of activists, NGOs, researchers, bloggers, media persons and other stakeholders for exploring the links between pornography, gender, sexuality and the freedom of speech, held on January 28, 2014 at New Delhi. It was the second meeting of the second phase of the EROTICS India project, the first being held in Mumbai in November…

Kenya has been one of the first African countries to adopt and innovate ICTs. With this have come both benefits, but also a rise in cybercrime and technology-based violence. A recent study by the Kenya ICT Action Network (KICTANET) on women and cyber crime in Kenya explores this violence. To unpack the findings of this study, Naomi Kamau spoke to the team behind the study: Alice Munyua, an…

APC’s Women’s Rights Programme convened a meeting on feminism, sexuality, technology and violence at Rutgers University Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights in the United States in November. The three-day meeting ranged from setting out definitions to practical concerns and future collaboration. The meeting grew out of the Exploratory Research Online (EROTICS) undertaken in 2008 with…

Social networks are increasingly being used as a tool for identity theft, stalking, harassment, invasion of privacy, and other forms of violence. Sexual predators are also using these tools to their advantage. With increased penetration of the internet and mobile telephony, Pakistan is no different in this respect, with the role of these technologies being used for purposes of crime and violence…

The technology-related violence on women research meeting took place in Bali, Indonesia from 19th to 21st October 2013. The meeting was organized by the Association for Progressive Communication (APC), as part of the “ending violence: Women’s rights and safety online” project with support from the Dutch government’s Funding Leadership and Opportunities for Women (FLOW) programme.

With increased internet penetration in Pakistan, the youth of the country has taken enthusiastically to connecting and socializing via social media networks. It has allowed expression and surfacing of youth voices like never before. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Thumblr, Blogsphere etc. have offered convenient public forums for a large number of people to interact, to…

Nora Quebral (2012) - who is credited with coming up with the concept of 'development communication' in the early 70s - argued recently in an account of Asian domestic workers in the Middle East, and the right-to-drive protest by women in Saudi Arabia, that any analysis of rights is necessarily deeply contextual: “A tough question to answer would be: in which [of these two societies] do women…

A key pillar of the internet freedom movement is the concept that internet intermediaries should be immune from liability for any content hosted on their sites. Yet there is a clear and important need for intermediaries to play a more active role in ensuring that they are not complicit in incitement to violence against women. This article is *third* of the series that will explore the…

International human rights law provides for a strong right to free expression that must be tempered by the need to protect against hate speech, or speech that incites violence, including violence against women. However, the existence of exceptions to the right to freedom of expression does not, however, mean that the prohibition against hate speech and incitement to hatred is a straight forward…