Digital Technologies and Interventions Against Gender-Based Violence in Rural Areas

2021 ◽  
pp. 105756772110404
Author(s):  
Andrea Adams ◽  
Suzanne G. Lea ◽  
Elsa M. D’Silva

This study reports experiences of combining digital technologies and facilitated interventions to address gender-based violence in rural areas. The methodology was based on the Safecity platform with a combination of communicative methods, digital technologies, and participant-led interventions to address gender-based violence in the State of Bihar and the Satara district in rural India. The findings indicate that the most common barriers to creating change in rural communities include patriarchal mindsets that foster a culture of silence around women's rights, lack of education, digital illiteracy, and lack of access to digital tools and services. Notwithstanding these obstacles, rural Indian women and girls participated in an intervention to create a new narrative informed by technological solutions that addressed gender violence in their communities.

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
S Arya ◽  
B Pradeep Kumar

During Covid-19, gender-based violence has been intensified and women have to be confined to aggressiveness and harassment from their abusive partners. The lockdown prevents women from moving to a safer places to avoid sexual and physical violence. Continuous calls to the NGOs and concerned authorities seeking help and support since the outburst of COVID-19 justifies this observation. Disrupted public services and diversion of resources to COVID-19 pandemic relief inhibit women from rightness and justice. This situation has soup-up violence behind the doors that leads to shadow pandemic. In India National women’s Commission reported a rise in registered domestic violence cases with the relaxation of lockdown, which points out the fact that a strong supporting system is necessary to ensure a high prior security system to women and girls all over the nation.


Author(s):  
Kay Standing ◽  
Sara L. Parker

Being able to manage menstruation safely and without stigma is a basic human right which many women and girls in Nepal are denied. Unhygienic and ineffective menstrual hygiene practices have been linked to negative consequences for women and girls, in terms of both reproductive health and social factors such as school attendance. Negative cultural attitudes and taboos around menstruation are widespread in Nepal and basic knowledge of menstruation and menstrual hygiene, especially in rural areas, is limited. The chapter begins to explore the barriers to menstrual health and right and how menstrual Hygiene Management Projects providing education on menstruation and the provision of reusable sanitary pads, are widely used by Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) in Nepal to address these problems, with a stated goal of improving girls' reproductive health, educational performance, employment, reducing gender based violence and other psycho-social outcomes.


2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-131
Author(s):  
Kayliegh Richardson ◽  
Ana Speed

The 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence is an international campaign which runs annually from 25 November (The International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women) to 10 December (Human Rights Day). The campaign aims to raise awareness of and stimulate action to end violence against women and girls globally. The issue of gender violence has gained worldwide prominence in the last few decades with the emergence of legislative frameworks including the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women and the Istanbul Convention. More recently, there has been a policy focus on education as a tool for raising awareness of gender-based violence. The recent public unrest regarding sexual harassment, epitomised by the ‘#Me too’ and ‘Times Up’ movements, demonstrate that gender-based violence remains an everyday reality for many women and girls. In England and Wales, there has been an increase in applications to the Family Court for domestic abuse protection, however this has come at a time where cuts to the availability of legal aid have led to concerns about the ability of survivors to seek access to justice. During the 2017-2018 academic year the authors designed and delivered a range of teaching activities for clinical students as part of the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence campaign. The aims were to increase student engagement with issues of gender justice and develop their understanding of the different forms of gender violence, the domestic and international frameworks for protecting victims and the roles that different organisations play in achieving this. It was hoped that this would better prepare students for the realities of family practice in England and Wales. Surveys and a semistructured interview were used to gain insights into the student experience of participating in the campaign. This article will address how their participation went some way to meeting the objectives set out above in that students demonstrated increased knowledge of civil and criminal law relating to gender-based violence, developed their critical lawyering skills and competency in working with vulnerable clients and contributed to wider efforts to advance gender justice. Further the article will draw on the ancillary advantages of participating in the campaign, including improved client outcomes and reputational benefit. The limitations of the 16 Days campaign will also be acknowledged along with ideas for developing the programme in the future.


Mathematics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (8) ◽  
pp. 807
Author(s):  
Carlos M. Castorena ◽  
Itzel M. Abundez ◽  
Roberto Alejo ◽  
Everardo E. Granda-Gutiérrez ◽  
Eréndira Rendón ◽  
...  

The problem of gender-based violence in Mexico has been increased considerably. Many social associations and governmental institutions have addressed this problem in different ways. In the context of computer science, some effort has been developed to deal with this problem through the use of machine learning approaches to strengthen the strategic decision making. In this work, a deep learning neural network application to identify gender-based violence on Twitter messages is presented. A total of 1,857,450 messages (generated in Mexico) were downloaded from Twitter: 61,604 of them were manually tagged by human volunteers as negative, positive or neutral messages, to serve as training and test data sets. Results presented in this paper show the effectiveness of deep neural network (about 80% of the area under the receiver operating characteristic) in detection of gender violence on Twitter messages. The main contribution of this investigation is that the data set was minimally pre-processed (as a difference versus most state-of-the-art approaches). Thus, the original messages were converted into a numerical vector in accordance to the frequency of word’s appearance and only adverbs, conjunctions and prepositions were deleted (which occur very frequently in text and we think that these words do not contribute to discriminatory messages on Twitter). Finally, this work contributes to dealing with gender violence in Mexico, which is an issue that needs to be faced immediately.


2021 ◽  
pp. 155708512098760
Author(s):  
Beth E. Richie ◽  
Valli Kalei Kanuha ◽  
Kayla Marie Martensen

The movements for racial justice, health equity, and economic relief have been activated in the contentious and challenging climate of 2020, with COVID-19 and social protest. In this context, feminist scholars, anti-violence advocates, and transformative justice practitioners have renewed their call for substantive changes to all forms of gender-based violence. This article offers a genealogy of the battered women’s movement in the U.S. from the lived experiences of two longtime activists. These reflections offer an analysis of the political praxis which evolved over the past half century of the anti-violence movement, and which has foregrounded the current social, political, and ideological framing of gender-based violence today. We conclude with a view to the future, focusing on the possibilities for transformative justice and abolition feminism as a return to our radical roots and ancestral histories.


Author(s):  
Jama Shelton ◽  
Kel Kroehle ◽  
Emilie K. Clark ◽  
Kristie Seelman ◽  
SJ Dodd

The enforcement of the gender binary is a root cause of gender-based violence (GBV) for trans people. Disrupting GBV requires that we ensure that ‘gender’ is not presumed synonymous with White cisgender womanhood. Transfeminists suggest that attaining gender equity requires confronting all forms of oppression that police people and their bodies, including White supremacy, colonialism and capitalism (Silva and Ornat, 2016; Simpkins, 2016). Part of this project, we argue, includes confronting the structures of GBV embedded within digital technologies that are increasingly part of our everyday lives. Informed by transfeminist theory (Koyama, 2003; Stryker and Bettcher, 2016; Simpkins, 2016; Weerawardhana, 2018), we interrogate the ways in which digital technologies naturalise and reinforce GBV against bodies marked as divergent. We examine the subtler ways that digital technology can fortify binary gender as a mechanism of power and control. We highlight how gendered forms of data violence cannot be disentangled from digital technologies that surveil, police or punish on the basis of race, nationhood and citizenship, particularly in relation to predictive policing practices. We conclude with recommendations to guide technological development to reduce the violence enacted upon trans people and those whose gender presentations transgress society’s normative criteria for what constitutes a compliant (read: appropriately gendered) citizen.<br /><br />Key messages<br /><ul><li>Violence against trans people is inherently gender-based.</li><br /><li>A root cause of gender-based violence against trans people is the strict reinforcement of the gender binary.</li><br /><li>Digital technology and predictive policing can fortify binary gender as a mechanism of power and control.</li><br /><li>Designers of digital technologies and the policymakers regulating surveillance capitalism must interrogate the ways in which their work upholds the gender binary and gender-based violence against trans people.</li></ul>


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 175-190
Author(s):  
Оксана Кравченко

An article devoted to the issue of social work with women from rural areas that were violent, as well as coverage of approaches to training specialists providing social services to this category of population. It is established that gender policy is based not only on international normative legal acts ratified by Ukraine, but also regulated by national legal acts on equality between women and men. An important area of gender policy is the provision of equal rights and opportunities for women from rural areas, including the realization of their human rights. At the same time, women in rural areas are more vulnerable to gender-based violence than women living in cities that require a specially designed program for their social and psychological rehabilitation. As a result of the clarification of the content and focus of social work with women, the study of the regional experience of social services with women, the disclosure of the specifics of the training of future social workers to work with this category of citizens, recommendations for improving the quality of social services for women victims of domestic violence have been developed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victory U. Salami ◽  
Stanley I. R. Okoduwa ◽  
Aimee O. Chris ◽  
Susannah I. Ayilara ◽  
Ugochi J. Okoduwa

The global battle to survive the onslaughts of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) started in December 2019 and continues today. Women and girls have borne the brunt of the hardship resulting from the health crises. This paper examined the effects of COVID-19 on women. Socioeconomic factors resulting from the pandemic, especially in relation to women's health, were discussed after studying published articles. They include gender specificity and COVID-19, the economic toll of COVID-19 on women, pregnancy and COVID-19, gender-based violence due to COVID-19, and health-care impacts of COVID-19. Making up the majority in the healthcare workforce, women were at higher risk of infection with COVID-19 due to their exposure as caregivers to infected patients. The pandemic took its toll on them as part of the greater population in the informal sector of the economy due to the lockdown directive, as many experienced severe monetary shortages and job losses. Pregnant women infected with COVID-19 were prone to severe diseases, maternal complications, and death due to their weakened immunity and exposure during clinical procedures. Gender-based violence was observed to have increased across the globe for women. The results of this review strongly indicate that women are disproportionately affected by the ongoing COVID-19 health crisis. This review will help health-care professionals and policymakers arrive at properly-thought-through decisions to better manage health crises. Governments and all key players should address the challenge by devising effective policies with a gendered view.


Author(s):  
Emma Cliffe

The COVID–19 pandemic continues to devastate the lives and wellbeing of millions of people around the world; women and girls, people with disabilities, youth, older people, and sexual and gender minorities are most at risk of ‘being left behind’. While confirmed cases of COVID–19 are low in the Pacific compared with other regions, the threat of the virus remains and the wider social and economic impacts are already evident. Pacific Island countries grappling with pervasive inequality, sustainable development challenges and climate change now must consider their response to the COVID–19 pandemic. This paper envisions an inclusive and transformative feminist response focused on four key outcomes: preserving access to healthcare and essential services; promoting women’s economic empowerment; protecting women and girls from gender–based violence; and supporting vulnerable and marginalised groups to express their voice and claim their rights amid the pandemic.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 319-334
Author(s):  
Mauro Machado do Prado ◽  
Ana Paula de Castro Neves ◽  
Nathália Machado Cardoso Dardeau de Albuquerque

O presente trabalho consiste em um estudo qualitativo das representações sociais de imigrantes venezuelanas na América do Sul no período de 2016 a 2019, a partir de manchetes de notícias divulgadas em jornais digitais brasileiros. O objetivo é verificar a ocorrência ou não de veiculações que constituam de forma explícita ou implícita uma violação à dignidade e aos direitos dessas mulheres, ao fomentar ou incitar a xenofobia e a violência de gênero na sociedade através de palavras, frases ou expressões capazes de provocar um aniquilamento simbólico. Para tanto, realizou-se um estudo bibliográfico e documental acerca das vulnerabilidades sociais presentes nos processos imigratórios contemporâneos, que foi consubstanciado com a análise de conteúdo (BARDIN, 2009), em abordagem qualitativa, de manchetes publicadas em jornais digitais brasileiros. A partir da análise realizada, foi possível inferir que estes veículos de comunicação vêm frequentemente descrevendo a migração venezuelana como um problema, mas em conotação negativa, sem o cuidado de descrição do contexto de forma mais clara e abrangente da questão a ser noticiada.   Xenofobia y violencia de género: un análisis de los titulares de las mujeres venezolanas en el periodismo web brasileño El presente trabajo consiste en un estudio cualitativo de las representaciones sociales de los inmigrantes venezolanos en América del Sur en el período de 2016 a 2019, a partir de titulares de noticias publicados en periódicos digitales brasileños. El objetivo es verificar la ocurrencia o no de colocaciones que constituyan explícita o implícitamente una violación a la dignidad y derechos de estas mujeres, al promover o incitar la xenofobia y la violencia de género en la sociedad a través de palabras, frases o expresiones capaces de provocar una aniquilación simbólica. Para ello, se realizó un estudio bibliográfico y documental sobre las vulnerabilidades sociales presentes en los procesos migratorios contemporáneos, el cual fue fundamentado con análisis de contenido (BARDIN, 2009), en un enfoque cualitativo, de titulares publicados en diarios digitales brasileños. Del análisis realizado, se pudo inferir que estos medios de comunicación han venido describiendo muchas veces la migración venezolana como un problema, pero en una connotación negativa, sin preocuparse por describir de manera más clara y completa el contexto del tema a reportar. Palabras clave: Derechos humanos de la mujer. La violencia de género. Xenofobia. Periodismo web.   Xenophobia and gender violence: an analysis of headings broadcasted in brazilian webjornalism on venezuelan women The present work consists of a qualitative study of the social representations of Venezuelan immigrants in South America in the period from 2016 to 2019, based on news headlines published in Brazilian digital newspapers. The objective is to verify the occurrence or not of placements that explicitly or implicitly constitute a violation of the dignity and rights of these women, by promoting or inciting xenophobia and gender violence in society through words, phrases or expressions capable of provoking a symbolic annihilation. To this end, a bibliographic and documentary study was carried out on the social vulnerabilities present in contemporary immigration processes, which was substantiated with content analysis (BARDIN, 2009), in a qualitative approach, of headlines published in Brazilian digital newspapers. From the analysis carried out, it was possible to infer that these media outlets have often been describing Venezuelan migration as a problem, but in a negative connotation, without taking care to describe the context more clearly and comprehensively of the issue to be reported. Keywords: Women’s human rights. Gender-based violence. Xenophobia. Webjournalism.


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