Women join hands to fight cybercrime

Participants highlight threats and challenges females face online.


Our Correspondent May 26, 2017
PHOTO: AFP

LAHORE: Anyone using online spaces is exercising his/her right to freedom of expression, information and privacy.

These comments were made by Digital Rights Activist Nighat Dad while speaking at ‘Hamara Internet Conference: Challenging the Evolving Threat of Online Violence’. The daylong event was organised by Digital Rights foundation.

It aimed to explore or tackle online harassment and gender approaches to the internet, along with discussions about solutions to challenging problems like online and offline abuse and patriarchal and misogynist behaviors towards women.

“Even if we set the bar very low, these three aforementioned rights still remain basic elements,” Nighat remarked.

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“This [fight for digital rights] is not a movement, but a discourse which should be mainstreamed in the public spaces. It is not just a fight for a few digital rights activists, but for everyone who uses the internet,” she said.

The event brought together women from all walks of life to discuss the vast potential of the internet for women, as well as how online violence and harassment makes them retreat from online spaces.

Speaking on the sidelines of the conference, Nighat explained that the purpose of conducting the conference to was to expand and explore the discourse on internet rights. “It is very important to discuss that human rights not only exist offline, but are equally important online.”

Nighat said there was a need for cybercrime laws in Pakistan, but implementing them in a way that sabotaged freedom of speech was wrong.

“There is also a need to revise loose words in our legal documents which do not define to what extent social freedom to express can be regularised,” she added.

Of three discussion panels held at the conference, the first panel titled as Hamara Internet: Understanding Online Harassment marked the soft launch of Digital Rights Foundation’s quantitative study Hamara Internet: Measuring Pakistani women’s of online violence.

The study highlighted the need for more awareness over anti-harassment laws. It was found that 72% of the women respondents reported they were not aware of cyber harassment laws in Pakistan.

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Most women pointed out that they either had not read or understood terms and conditions of social media websites. Furthermore, 45% of the women felt that they did not report online harassment because they were embarrassed and 47% felt that it would not be taken seriously by law enforcement agencies.

Yusra Amjad, member of Girls at Dhabas, said a lot of talented women were not able to put forth their online skills because they either feared backlash from the society or were not simply allowed by their families.

She was speaking at the discussion panel Imagining feminist internet With the Help of Hamara internet.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 26th, 2017.

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