A safe internet starts with respect for women

Ah, the internet. How to live without it? And, most importantly: how to live well with it?

Many of us are living most of our lives on the internet, especially on social media.

+ 3 out of 4 Brazilians access the internet, which is equivalent to 134 million people. Although the number of users and the online services accessed has been increasing, differences in income, gender, race, and region persist. Read in Agência Brasil.

Just like the streets and cities, the internet is a violent place, especially for people who are more at risk outside the virtual: black and LGBTQI people, and women. That’s why I want to share some initiatives aimed at digital protection from an anti-racist feminist perspective.

Worldwide, 73% of online women have already been exposed to some form of online violence, according to a report released by the UN Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development in 2015. Youths between 18 and 24 years old are the biggest victims of harassment and persecution on online networks, and many suffer physical threats.

“Online gender violence impacts women’s lives from an early age. In Brazil, 77% of girls and young people have experienced online harassment, according to a survey by Plan International. Harassment situations end up becoming one of the main barriers for women and girls to fully exercise their freedoms of expression, movement, and participation on the internet ”, reports InternetLab.

“The internet is wonderful, we won’t be able to, nor do we want to curb it, but we need to be able to intervene in the internet space. We need to think of virtual space as our new streets and our new homes and think about what needs to be done to keep women safe, particularly girls. This presents new challenges for all of us, not just in our analysis of different violence sites, but crucially around our approach to prevention, crisis resolution, and ongoing support”, said Marai Larasi, executive director of the British NGO End Violence Against Women Coalition in an interview for the Dossier violence against Women of the Patrícia Galvão Institute, which has a chapter focused on violence on the internet.

Data from the NGO SaferNet shows that cyber-crimes of violence against women had an increase of 1,600% from 2017 to 2018.

Social isolation has intensified these attacks. The most common is the non-consensual dissemination of intimate images, the so-called porn revenge. The penalty for this type of crime ranges from 5 to 8 years in prison in Brazil.

Safernet has received more than 2 million complaints of hate speech, which include apology and incitement to crimes against life, racism, religious intolerance, neo-Nazism, xenophobia, homophobia and violence or discrimination against women. All of these types of discourse have very clear targets: LGBT people, women and black people.

+ 81% of victims of racism speeches on Facebook are black women aged 20 to 35.

+ Access also the study “Dyke Visibility in the networks: between violence and solidarity” by Coding Rights (an intersectional feminist organization that defends human rights in the development, regulation and use of technologies).

+ Women journalists have been particularly affected: “In Brazil, the harassment of Patricia Campos Mello, a leading investigative reporter for the Folha de São Paulo newspaper, was organized at the highest state level. After she reported that businessmen had illegally funded a WhatsApp disinformation campaign designed to get Brazilians to vote for Jair Bolsonaro in the 2018 presidential election, President Bolsonaro and his sons accused her of having “extracted” this information in exchange for sexual favours. The accusation was followed by such a violent cyber-harassment campaign that Mello was forced to have a bodyguard”. Read more at “Sexism’s toll on journalism”, by Reporters Without Borders.

Two necessary paths — that must be combined:

1) Making visible and disseminating the support and digital protection tools that organizations committed to rights have been developing.

- MariaLab created several manuals with tips and guidelines, such as “Barricades, strategies and collectivity: a digital security guide for organizations” and “Practical guide to strategies and tactics for feminist digital security.”. They are all available here.

- PEN America launched the Virtual Harassment Field Manual with practical tools and tips to defend against hatred and virtual harassment. PEN describes the manual as “a center for advice, guidance and resources on cyber-stalking, doxing (private data dissemination practice), hate speech and other forms of digital harassment”.

- Check out 8 tips to prevent your nude from being shared without consent, by SaferNet

2) Strengthening the presence of women in technology.

Despite being the majority in the population and in Higher Education, Brazilian women represent only 13.3% of the Computer Science and ICT classes.

The lack of diversity in the world of technology and innovation makes these spaces reflect and reproduce social hierarchies and injustices.

++ The Blogueiras Negras [Black Bloguers] shared here 5 technology organizations led by black women.

++ ITS — Institute of Technology and Society has listed 8 women and initiatives that are reprogramming technology.

++ The campaign Take Back the Tech, by APC (Association for Progressive Communications), is a call to everyone, especially women and girls, to take control of technology to end violence against women. It’s a global, collaborative campaign project that highlights the problem of tech-related violence against women, together with research and solutions from different parts of the world.

++ Check out the book Ciberfeminismos 3.0, released this March 8 by the Research Group on Gender, Digital Technologies and Culture (Gig@/UFBA). Organized by professor Dr. Graciela Natansohn, the publication brings new perspectives on the interface between gender and digital technologies and is available online (in Portuguese):

“A racialized, transactivist, geopolitically situated and technologically versed hacker cyberfeminism germinates in these latitudes of the Global South. 3.0 cyberfeminism is giving birth to technical expertise guided not by liberal, extractive, white and masculine principles typical of Silicon Valley, but by feminist ethical principles inspired by emancipationist ideals. A sustainable world and a sustainable internet need to challenge the pitfalls of programmed obsolescence, remote work, electronic waste, extraction of personal data and biodata, material of dominant digital coloniality ”, writes Graciela Natansohn at the book presentation.

If the internet were built by women — black, indigenous, disabled, lesbian, trans — it would be used less as a space for conflict, and more as a space for encounters and connections.

For an internet with fewer cancellations and more collaboration, let’s learn from them.