Day: 8 Seek Our Solutions/Make Our Own Headlines

Today focuses on acts of empowerment & solutions by and for women and generating our own media. This can occur through social media, twitter (I'm still not tweeting), blogs, zines, and other retro formats such as newspapers.


From TTBT:

"Search for creative, innovative, groundbreaking initiatives taking place near you, and let the world know. Share it as a tweet to @takebackthetech and let's create our own Twitter paper on
http://paper.li/takebackthetech. Take it offline and share it with the editors from your local newspaper."

See today's activities for a creative media list to get stories and messages across to our groups as well as larger groups, such as:

1) search local, national, and global media on issues important to you, solutions, and then share via tweet #takebackthetech

2) write politicians and newsmedia again and again. use the monthly reminder service given in the actions for this day

3) make your own headlines on these issues and solutions through tweets or a tweet newspaper aggregator as discussed in the actions

My own suggestion....share this TBTT day-link (and others) with all the media people that you have friended on facebook and other networks. This can bring local, national, and international attention to causes, issues, and solutions.

My recent favorite headline comes c/o The Daily Star in Bangladesh, 30 Nov 2010.

Youth held for nuisance on Facebook

A young engineer was arrested yesterday for harassing a female university student on the social networking site Facebook.

Arrested Aleem Uddin, 28, an assistant engineer of Western Marine Shipyard in Chittagong, hails from Noakhali.

Police said Aleem had opened a fake account of the victim, whom he termed his former girlfriend, on the networking site two months back.

He started posting indecent pictures and abusive words using the profile.

Getting verbal complaints from the victim a few days back, Kotwali police started tracing the fake account and other accounts of Aleem and his friends on the Facebook. The crime busters found the allegations to be true.

On receiving a written complaint from the victim on Sunday, a team from Kotwali Police Station raided Lalkhan Bazar crossing in the port city and arrested Aleem yesterday around 1:00am.

The girl, a Chittagong University student, filed a case with Kotwali Police Station accusing Aleem under Women and Children Repression Prevention Act and ICT Act yesterday morning...

go to original article to read more

Well done for the Chittagong female student who filed the complaint and for the arrest by the police. I hope that justice will be served in this case and that the Daily Star will follow up on what happens with this case....a failing of Bangladeshi and other media that only report sensational news with little or no coverage over time.

We need more attention to such solutions for mis-use of social media such as harassment, stalking, posting false info-photos as well as courageous people who stand up against such behaviors and bullying.

Day 10: Controlling images-words ?| Secure online communications | Your right to privacy

On Day 10, please consider the state of your identity in on-line networks, especially social networks. TTBT women have many useful tools and apps on their website.

I want to talk about readers, audience, and the possible uses and abuses of social networking sites.....and what recourse we have when some one takes images and (mis)information and posts it to us and/or social networking sites.

Ultra Violet has some interesting discussions started by Meena Kandasamy who had continued to grapple with a cyber-stalker, in "Self-expression and social networking sites" and pursuant discussions on readers and audience. After anonymous negative comments appeared based on a picture that she posted on her social networking site, she wrote:

Although one is aware that there are laws against defamation in place, how can these be put to use against anonymous trollers and orkut-scrap-posters and their like? Forget the case of independent writers, do we actually have any mechanism to punish ALL those who are abusive on the web because of the anonymity that it provides.

Recently Niveditha Menon asks what are "the voices in our head"? She discusses our abilities to name and/or articulate our experiences, picking our battles, and who is our audience? In particular,

how do we know who is in our heads when we write? Who are we writing for? Who are we writing against? Under what social pressures do feminist writers (whether male or female) articulate their experience? How do we know our “authentic” voice, given all this input from friendly and unfriendly sources?

Back to me (my puran-aged feminist self).....

Several important issues here....1) using writing and posting to clarify who we are, our place in the world and 2) then how our readers can take and use/mix/abuse our words, images, and some times actions. How much agency and control do we have over our own images, identities? TBTT and others stress using pseudonyms and many do.

At the same time, trolls and others hide behind their pseudonyms to stalk and provide misinformation about people, incidents, and episodes...once on the internet...this misinformation is very hard to scrub. As result, stalkers can pursue bloggers and/or people absconding on sexual assault or domestic violence felony charges can set up faux social networking identities complete with 'female friends' writing (interesting gender bending) and/or from the safety of their home country can continue to harass the plaintiff and their families via various internet ISPs...Others join in the discussion and gossip-adda of idiosyncratic personal matters rather than the broader and endemic issues of VAW and abuse. This is not an isolated incident...from some of my earlier writing but also some of my transnational emails and advocacy work on domestic violence.

So it's one thing to be clear on our voices, audiences, and purposes for writing, but what do we do when others hide in the anonymity of the internet and social networking sites and faux identities? Adda and gossip ensue?

Or how do we handle the announcement of beginning and ends of relationships via little symbols on Facebook? When relationships do not begin as we like and/or they end badly? Scorned persons? Or the uses of our images and videos by others, especially when be-friending people gives them access to our profiles and info? Or when disturbed former spouses-partners post pictures of their ex-partners on the internet-social networking sites. Or batterers claim that pictures of abused partners have been photoshopped....

These are also real experiences that brought me to Facebook, and also make me concerned about the uses-abuses of social networking sites. Hence I'm still looking for answers....how how we handle these situations...or when we discuss and use these sites to clarify such issues if that is possible giving the social constructions of our relationships and lives by multiple persons.

How do we handle when such (mis)information persists on the internet and is easily retrieved by searching on a person's name? I see these searches nearly every week on my blog. How do we handle troll comments on our blogs and sites?

Any thoughts? Suggestions?

Day 4/Media, Sexism, VAW & Blog Coverage Justice For Nadine

On this day, we look the media & sexism in its mixed coverage of rape, dowry, and domestic violence. Media coverage can be complicated in countries such as Bangladesh with little reliable data on VAW and where legal and advocacy organizations must rely on news stories to count incidents and severity. In Bangladesh, most data on sexual assault and domestic violence come from newspaper story compiled by NGOs and human rights organizations such as Odikhar, Mahila Parishad, and Bangladesh National Women Lawyers Association. These counts depend on the willingness of media reporters to write the stories and of the survivors to talk with reporters and/or people outside of the family. Some reporters can provide reliable reports and understanding of the power-gender dynamics, while others write stories with a sensational nature, victim-blame or as entertainment. Often coverage of any one case ends after the initial article and readers have no sense of the legal resolutions of cases as happened in the case of tortured-murder Rahela, a garment worker in 2004 among others.

An ongoing case that exemplifies these issues is the media and less than critical blogosphere coverage of a domestic violence-rape case filed in New York City in September against a Bangladeshi graduate student, Sajid, who allegedly beat and raped his wife, Nadine. He failed to show up for his court hearing in NYC in beginning of November and is a fugitive, who has continued to blog under his and a variety of fake names. Rather than to deny the charge, in his trail of blog posts-emails, he has described-justified his behaviors, which originally resulted in his arrest by NYC police. In turn, he has made a series of allegations about Nadine, none of which would stand as a defense against his abuse and rape charges in USA courts.

Concerned about the brutality and events in this case, others set up a Facebook page, Justice for Nadine, which provided support & information & post-abuse photos about her case and has responded to Sajid's et al ongoing postings. Soon they refused to get into point-counterpoint discussions and ceased responding to an onslaught of emails and pseudonym posts by Sajid et al. Missing from most of these blogs--any understanding of issues surrounding marital rape, domestic violence, and the gender power dynamics. Instead, many of the posts read like adda or gossip.

After an initial flurry of posts in October, most bloggers had ended their coverage until the middle of November when, Abdul Kargo wrote an excellent post, "What Is a Woman’s Worth Measured Against? Blogger Kargo has thoughtfully and deftly dealt with the variety of comments-issues generated by his readers and the reappearance of Sajid et al, who closed down his blog about the time Kargo wrote his post. During this month, some of the comments by Sajid et al have become repetitive intellectual excuses for his criminal behaviors and insulting language directed toward Nadine and those who seek an end to VAW. Others have challenged such comments, discussed the dynamics of VAW and responses when women speak up. They called for a change in in the nature of the comments posts and more community action to combat VAW. Today, I posted this comment #99, which expresses my sentiments on this case and the thread:

"Last night I wanted to say bash/shesh–enough, stop. Allowing fugitive sajid et al another forum to repeat their bogus pomo excuses over and over again creates ‘revictimization’, esp for survivors of abuse who may be reading. This also gives others the cautionary tale of what might happen to them if she speaks up, files charges, etc. or if their abuser-rapist is still at large b/c he did not show up for his court hearing. Dec 3 is his next opportunity.

From 25 Nov-10 Dec is the International 16 Days Campaign to Eliminate Violence against Women. Today—day four—asks people to look at their media (blogosphere) for coverage of violence against women and to note sensationalistic coverage & posts. As we’ve seen in this ongoing thread and other blog coverage, these ‘discussions’ ignore that most rapists & abusers know their victims; in such posts, abusers and some bloggers reduce the case to titillating & entertaining details, and ignore the unequal power relationships in rapes and domestic abuse that result in lingering physical, socio-emotional injuries and even death.

As reflected in others’ comments, I also encourage people to educate themselves more about these issues and get in involved community discussion and action such as recently initiated by Adhunika and Sakhi in NYC.

****Check out a new resource from January 2008: New Blogsite OUT AGAINST ABUSE to educate and organize the South Asian Community about domestic violence-gender abuse--please read, comment, and discuss this resource!****

For more info about the 16 days campaign:
http://www.cwgl.rutgers.edu/16days/home.html

and to use ICT-blogs to end violence against women:
http://www.takebackthetech.net/frontpage"

Finally, I reiterate the points that I made in comment #5 in early November:

1. Sajid is a fugitive, who skipped his court hearing over charges filed in USA (they will not be transferred to Bangladesh!). Next hearing date: 3 December.
2. None of his posts-rationalizations about his USA felony charges will work in any USA court defense.
3. Any people who have been hiding him from police and the court can be subject to charges of obstruction of justice.
4. If Sajid is on a student visa at Colombia University and has not been attending classes because he is in hiding, then he is violating the terms of his student visa and subject to deportation. Immigration and SEVIS are probably very interested in finding him, too.