Much violence against women, girls and other vulnerable groups is “taking place not only in homes, workplaces and public spaces, but also in digital spaces”, said Jac sm Kee, co-founder of the feminist tech Numun Fund, at the opening plenary of the Sexual Violence Research Initiative forum '24 on Tuesday.
The SVRI is the world’s biggest research network on violence against women and children, and this week 1,500 delegates are attending the forum at the Cape Town International Convention Centre. Artworks, performances and exhibition stands from across the world highlighted their collective stand against gender-based violence.
“We think about technology as a tool, a thing we wield, a double-edged sword for good or bad, but it is more than a tool. It’s an infrastructure, it’s a force and a political domain,” said Kee, one of three panellists.
“So many women, girls and queer people get attacked the minute they go online. Surveillance technology is being used to further control and track them,” said Kee, noting this was by design and not accident.
“We have to engage the people most affected ... in how they are experiencing this and where,” said Kee. When they conducted a survey on this, the top three issues were freedom from gender-based violence, digital rights and rights of the LGBTQI+ community.
Surveillance technology is being used to further control and track women and girls
— Jac sm Kee, co-founder of the feminist tech Numun Fund
SVRI executive director Elizabeth Dartnall said their research was political and personal. “We want to make sure the research we do poses questions from the community of survivors and victims, but also that those answers filter through and make a difference to policies,” she said.
Kee’s research into gender-based violence and tech goes back nearly 20 years, predating X (Twitter), and it informed the “Take Back the Tech” campaign which went global. The governance model and accountability of privatised tech needs attention, she suggests.
Digital infrastructure shapes our world, from intimate communication to witnessing conflicts, Kee said. “Never before have we had the ability to see live the kind of destruction and devastation in the same space we share private, loving expression.”
Another jarring example from this conflict-ridden decade was raised by panellist Kolbassia Haoussou, director of survivor leadership for the global organisation Freedom From Torture. Recently returned from Kosovo and Colombia, he was speaking to a woman from Sudan who asked: “Why is nobody talking about our case. Are we not suffering enough or are we not human enough for our plight to be highlighted?”
A survivor of sexual torture in central Africa who was forced into exile, Haoussou called for greater awareness of all conflict, whether it is in the DRC, Tigre, Gaza, Israel or Ukraine.
In times of crisis, girls, women and the most vulnerable suffer the worst, said Tarana Burke, founder of the global #MeToo Movement, declaring that “we are facing a crisis in humanity”.
“Laws and policies are being passed which are an advance ... but what’s not happening concurrently is a shift in culture... The privileged and powerful are fighting like hell to keep the status quo, to push back,” she said.
“We have to become our own political domain,” she said to applause. “If we wait constantly for people to insert us into things, it doesn’t work. If gender-based violence is going to end, we are going to be the ones to end it.”
She said the fight against sexual and gender violence had to happen alongside the fight for gender equality.
Facilitator Dr Emma Fulu, researcher and founder of The Equality Institute, said securing the safety of women and girls improved every development indicator, from education to health. Illustrating the universal threat to any woman no matter how powerful, Burke referred to the attempt to overthrow the US government on January 6 2021. “The most powerful women (in the US), senators and congress people feared losing their lives and being sexually assaulted.”
Closer to home, award-winning actor and activist Kim Blanché Adonis opened the plenary with a gripping series of performances about sexual violence, kicking off with a top woman footballer who had been gang-raped for being gay.
South Africa, she said in another piece, was the winner of the femicide Oscars with five times the world average: one woman dies every eight hours, three women a day. Art activist Nell-Louise Pollock did a haunting artwork on this which seized the attention of delegates.
Burke said is was time to raise hell about gender-based violence. The time to get funders to “wrap their arms around the issue of GBV and say this is solvable. We have the research, we have the numbers and we know what works!” she declared.
“We cannot estimate the power of community,” she said to researchers and activists at the forum, urging them to work together to move the needle on GBV.
Fulu compared this moment in history to being like “the dark before the dawn”.
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