As we near the close of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence Campaign, we’ve heard from organizations and individuals from around the world who have taken up the call and organized special events and campaigns to address violence against women.
One of my favorites is Take Back The Tech!, a collaborative online campaign that takes place during the 16 Days. It is a call to everyone – especially women and girls – to take control of technology to end violence against women.
This year they’ve been encouraging campaign supporters to take actions to address the ways that technology is used to bully, intimidate, and otherwise encourage violence against women in both online and offline spaces.
Here are a few of my favorites:
- Share tactics for staying safe online with your friends and online contacts. The UN estimates that 95% of aggressive behaviour, harassment, abusive language and denigrating images in online spaces are aimed at women, and come from partners or former partners.
- Challenge gender stereotypes in the concept of “expertise.” The reason often given by members of the media for not featuring women experts is because there aren’t any who know the topic at hand. We all know that there are prominent women leaders in the social, economic, political and cultural spheres, but they are often passed over by journalists in favor of male experts. For information and resources about how to get more women’s voices into the media, check out the Op Ed Project.
- Support the work of feminist radio stations and help widen their reach. Considering the fact that there are 796 million adults worldwide who are unable to read and write—and well over half (64%) are women, radio can be a very powerful and valuable (and relatively inexpensive) dissemination tool.
Browse Take Back the Tech’s Daily Action Library to get more ideas for actions that you can take to make communication and information sharing easier and better for women’s rights advocates.
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