 The observance day tomorrow is a reminder of women's human rights violations and a call to action to eliminate violence against women. Over the next 16 days, the Commonwealth of Learning has arranged various activities and events to shine a light on gender inequality and gender-based violence as part of our contribution to prevent and raise awareness on this silent pandemic. Allow me therefore to welcome you to our first activity for the 16 days of activism, our webinar entitled Digital Inclusion, Addressing Cyber Violence and Online Hate Against Women. Let me invite and welcome our two moderators, Dr. Merette Newman. She is the call education specialist for the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth, of the Commonwealth VASC in short, and she is the person who has brought this all together. Also our second moderator, Dr. Kirk Paris, an ardent advocate for women's rights and women empowerment here at the Commonwealth of Learning. Welcome Kirk, welcome Merette, it's over to you. Welcome everybody. I believe that this is a topic to which we have not given sufficient attention. Online harassment and violence is real and it is as destructive as offline violence and it has far-reaching impacts. Shame and humiliation, yes, but I think very importantly self-censorship is one of those impacts that threatens our fundamental right to freedom and as women we need to prepare ourselves and those we love and serve to use the tools and access the training that will keep us safe. So at this point I'd like to introduce our featured panelists so we can get right into the subject matter. Here with us today are two wise women, Dr. Leanne Perriman and Ms. Vilma Gregory, both of whom will share with us ideas about how we can reduce and protect ourselves from cyber violence. So from lockdown in England our first panelist Dr. Perriman is a senior lecturer at the Open University where she conducts research into, among other things, cyber violence. She's committed to raising awareness about the prevalence and the impact of cyber violence and the need to build digital cultures that are safe and empowering for women. She's going to talk to us about how addressing cyber violence requires a multi-strategy approach involving platform change and accountability, awareness raising, education and training to support digital skills and online safety skills and thereby reducing cyber violence. Our second feature panelist Ms. Vilma Gregory comes to us from Jamaica. Since the early 1980s before computers were mainstream in Jamaica, Vilma has been passionate about all things related to online communication. She has merged her love of languages, her skill with multimedia and a concern for social justice such that today she is a communications consultant and an advocate who designs and develops digital and multimedia technology tools for campaigns promoting gender equality and the prevention of sexual harassment. She has worked with several international organizations and today she will demonstrate for us how we can use digital approaches to raise awareness of cyber violence and online harassment and encourage behaviour change. So at this point I'm going to hand over to Dr Perriman who will speak with us for approximately 15 minutes and we will move straight into Vilma's presentation following that. Leanne, over to you. July 2020 the web foundation who were discussing the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on women's online participation so powerfully about a pandemic of online violence against women. Now bearing in mind the catastrophic impact of the COVID pandemic it'll be tempting to feel that web foundation's choice of words is inappropriate but a look at some statistics makes for chilling reading I think and I think justifies web foundation's choice of words. So looking at those statistics 20% of women in Canada reported in 2018 that they'd experienced some kind of online harassment 15% in France in the EU 10% and in Pakistan 40% of women reported experiencing cyber harassment since the age of 15. Now fast forward to 2020 where due to lockdown quarantines and self-isolation women are using the internet much more than before and internet use has actually increased between 50% and 70% overall and a report by UN Women this year reveals that ICT facilitated violence has spread under the shadow pandemic of violence against women. Women and girls are subject to online violence in the form of physical sexual harassment stalking, Zoom bombing and sex trolling. So specific cases have been documented by media and women's rights organizations have unsolicited pornographic videos displayed while women were participating in online social events threats of violence and harmful sexist content and as you and women say Zoom bombing during video calls so that's where racially charged and sexually explicit material is displayed to the unexpected participants. Now the Indian NGO IT for Change have done some very significant work in this area and they point to the fact that online violence against women is extending offline gender-based violence through activities including online discrimination, cyber bullying, cyber stalking, blackmail and hate speech and they explain that this cloak of online invisibility encourages patriarchal attitudes of entitlement over women resulting in a toxic disinhibition in the online public sphere lowering the thresholds of sexist and misogynistic speech and behavior. Now why does this matter? So it matters in a lot of ways. Online participation as Merritt said it has huge potential for women, it's got the potential to increase women's capabilities through the acquisition of informational power, so access to information, the memberships of information networks, communicative power, the power to open up official communication channels to critique the status quo and to shape or challenge mainstream public discourse. Also through associational power so the ability to participate in community issues, participate in formal political groups, community groups, participate in collective action and so on. Now participation then in open online spaces offers huge potential massive potential but also huge threats for women and this is a particularly exclusionary in the current circumstances where so much of everyday life has moved online due to the pandemic I think. Women are being denied access to online services including education, health and legal support due to the fear and the reality of cyber violence and women's participation as active digital citizens is also being censured, our voices are not getting heard in many circumstances. Now Merritt also mentioned earlier the implications, the impact and it's hugely wide-ranging online actions have offline consequences and cyber violence against women is no exception as severe psychological, social, health related and mental health related effects and the mental health consequences are terrible, anxiety, stress, depression, trauma, panic attacks, a loss of self-esteem and a powerlessness in being unable to respond to cyber violence it's a sort of a very one-way traffic because the perpetrator is generally so remote. Now what can be done? So Merritt mentioned this multi-layer approach really and that is a common view that action needs to happen at multiple levels. We do need legislation change at national and international level I mean that advocacy can help achieve that but I think on a sort of a personal individual level that feels sort of slightly out of our control. We do need clear guidance for law enforcement officials in terms of how to handle cases and I think that is a particular problem internationally. Going down to women themselves, we need awareness raising about what women should do if they experience cyber violence and include specialist help lines providing support to women and to girls in such circumstances. It's not obvious what should do and platforms, social media platforms and other platforms don't necessarily always make it clear what you know what people should should do if they encounter these situations and we definitely need more provision for skills development in safe online participation. Not only online based skills development obviously because if people are not participating online you may think that that same free courses, MOOCs, other open content would be the way to go but it's in those spaces that sometimes these incidents can occur. Now education has a huge role to play really, obviously changing attitudes and beliefs amongst the perpetrators of cyber violence against women is central including promoting positive masculinity but that's not going to happen overnight mainly and as IT for change say these beliefs are often very deep rooted indeed. What can happen though is education can support the development of communities of practice around safe online participation and communities that offer peer support and can point people to guidance and advice as well and people can share their own experiences and knowledge and research is also vital and I think that that may be something that sort of comes out of this in the longer term I was talking about you know wanting this to this to continue. We definitely need more research exploring women's experiences and also finding out what can help to mitigate against cyber violence and what things work. All our efforts really do need to be evidence informed and especially I mentioned there earlier about legislation and that we've got more power in advocacy if what we're saying is evidence informed. Also there have been some very promising technological solutions of late but again research is needed into their effectiveness. So one thing I just wanted to share that we've been doing at the Open University where I lead a postgraduate curriculum focused on online teaching. We have a global student body and we tend to use a curriculum and fusion approach to cover the issues of cyber violence against women in our courses really to raise awareness and we also include skills development in safe online participation and to share resources and support the development of peer support communities but I'm particularly interested in Open Pedagogies and that's why I included this this slide because I'm so interested in how they can be made safe for women and indeed men actually who are vulnerable to online violence. So pedagogies that they are really focused on having learners having autonomy over what and how they learn and connecting learners with the world outside a formal course so bridging formal and informal spaces there's an emphasis on learners and educators co-creating and remixing and sharing open educational resources on creating and opening sharing their assessment path and also this overarching in um emphasis on social justice and educational equity and a pedagogy of care but ironically for women who are fearing open online participation because they're fearing cyber violence then this emphasis on open connectedness and linking formal education with the wider world leaves women exposed to cyber violence and harassment in a way that men are not uh most men are not and I don't to to generalize that much so while Open Pedagogies offers the potential for learner autonomy and and empowerment and and a reimagining of the hierarchical relationship between learner and educator as collaborators rather than teacher and taught the set of cyber violence and other type of online abuse excludes many women from from these affordances and I wanted to share um just one quote here from from one of our students and I've sort of really affected by it that the the student had been approached one of our courses really enthusiastically was very very enthusiastic about getting involved connecting with you know a global community and everything that that that that seemed to promise and um uh partway through the course she um hadn't been participating uh online march and we had a bit of a a a Skype chat about this and um she she said you know that's okay to share what she said she's in my country many men still believe the internet is their domain and women shouldn't be participating alongside them I've taken part in open discussions before and had a terrible experience threats abuse real hatred from a standpoint of initially feeling confident and excited about making connections across the world I now feel fearful and out of my depth I'm happy to participate in closed discussion forums but feel scared about doing so more openly especially if I'm required to show my true identity so there that there's a student being denied the potential to participate in open online exchanges that the protest by a pedagogy because of the experiences had with um cyber violence and it's difficult to see how this gets um you know turned around really so um I've been working with some of our educators and thinking about ways to reshape open pedagogy so that they do offer alternatives and the option to opt out but that's sort of a working process for progress really and I think it's something that we could as a community work together on so uh what next um as Merah has has has said really you know we need to be having global conversations just like this one about this issue we need to be coming together across disciplines and across nations to to work on collective solutions that draw on our individual areas of expertise and and also to some people who are already active in this area there's a lot of you know work going on in this area I mentioned I see for change there are there are any organizations but we you know we need to be first supporting them we need more sessions like this more research more advocacy and and definitely more awareness so that's what that's all I have um in my sort of formal presentation um happy to to take questions or to talk about it further looking forward to seeing Vilma's presentation and thank you ever so much for for listening and for coming today wherever you are and and stay safe Liam thank you very much for that that has set us off very very nicely Vilma is now going to share with us some of the ways that she has been working to do exactly some of these things that we that we that that Leanna sort of suggested and that we we've touched on I think a little bit especially in that last poll there um the the first thing is we're having this discussion one day before the 20 I think I've blocked my own screen isn't that smart yeah one day before the international day I devolve and um it strikes me that in many ways I too had to look up the meaning of cyber violence um Leon um so I really do appreciate the conceptual framework you gave and um it was educational for me as well and so I just took snippets of some of the definitions and I looked through the eyes of social media at the most common hashtags no to cyber violence no to cyber violence but they weren't very popular either so this is really an embryonic stage I think a discussion that we can build on and um some of the side reality is that there's a dark side to technology and I looked at the causes and having done a whole campaign with UN women and some aspects of the work I did with UNDP and UNFPA looked a lot at the business of what causes sexual harassment which it doesn't have to be sexual cyber violence comes in different ways but the business of being rooted in dominance and power keeps recurring and it's because it's mostly male but from a gender sensitive point of view it's also male male female female or female on male so there's a whole set of intersectionalities that we can look at in terms of how we would like to visually engage persons in either campaign or behavior change and so I the intersectionality of gender race and sexual orientation and disability I think that's pretty well known but um Leon you spoke a lot to the negative impact and the psychological one I think reverberates more than anything else but when I looked at how if I were to use a communicative campaign lens to treat how I would like to engage and have behavior change with our women or men and everybody involved I realized it has to focus on a multi-sectoral audience and I took this uh pie from the EU where we're looking at things related to sorry let's go back sorry I think I messed up my screen the laws the legislation governance with charm Leon mentioned but the cultural norms a lot of the things that people consider acceptable and not recognizing how offensive it is those are the things that we have to bring in as well and then I looked in the mirror I looked at myself and said what's my predicament I'm of I'm of an ICT practitioner woman to boot and there's a dark side to the very technology that I you know I make a living from and then I also accept the SDG sustainable development goal that there's a lot of empowerment when women embrace technologies but I have a dilemma in that I'm part of an ecosystem that also violates the very people that I stand for so I I try to come up with some ideas and look in the digital space for solutions to deal with a problem in the space itself and hopefully we can work with it and this is what I came up with the idea first of all sharing the vision that we all should be happy and safe when we're online this visual is one that I work with UNFPA for gender-based violence but in this case you notice the girl is happily learning how to use her tablet and the mask and so it's a positive image of a family choosing if you can read it says do not make your loved ones a punching bag you know put your energies out there so the business of visualizing using images illustration scenarios to share the message and of course with the realities that in 2020 COVID has exacerbated violence against women and girls and then I thought of this idea as a solution what about creating and going back here to the the cyber wall what about creating avatars all these images these faces are not real they are created by a computer in other words they don't these people do not exist right and these have become weapons for fake identities online but we can use the same artificial intelligence generated images as tools and so I thought why not cope with cyber wall avatars because the normative in terms of how the weed technologies react is to say send us a report we will notify them we will do the report online in the case of Twitter and Facebook with the election they have been tagging so report and tap but in a way it lacks a lot of personalization and it lacks a lot of well it's not as impactful as it can be so I'm inviting you to visualize a scenario where we create an avatar we take one of these avatars and we give them different roles so we're going to use artificial intelligence now to try to sensitize persons and hopefully impact behavior change in terms of what cyber violence is and I thought about a project I did with the Ministry of Education and UNFPA where in the health and family life education instead of having a static web interface website we would create scenarios gender gender sensitive mind you the girl is making a move and the boy is making a move and gender sensitive scenarios where that web platform becomes a space not just for reading and absorbing but interacting so in this case it's a quiz but it could be other things but what it means is that you're inviting engagement through visuals with the thematic areas and targeting the audience in this case the youth audience in the schools then then I said we could have our advocacy avatars we could have in this case the Prime Minister of Jamaica had made a speech about the upcoming sexual harassment bill and the person from the ministry Sharon Robinson in this case this was a video here this was just a card so we would create avatars we would give them roles and we would popularize them and let them become cyberbog anti-cyberbog normatives and characters infiltrating the global platforms especially at this time in COVID and that's the vision I kept having and I thought is it possible let me share it let me discuss it let me try to see infographics you know taking the statistics there are so many that learn shared and so many that I read about but I wanted to see a little more of taking those numbers put in with graphs so here we would actually have our avatar and that would be the avatar would carry our infographics and carry our advocacy along with trying to not share the message but inviting people to see the extent to which there is an impact that is as negative as it is and then in this case I won't play the audio because of time but I have a male voice here and perhaps I'll end with it really the podcast the audio engaging male voices to be a part of the solution and ending with illustrations animations which you animate and dramatization always with the male presence engaging them in the dialogue so that through the visuals here that we would have created I'm saying let us move from the static medium and the static response to interactive and engaging ones using visuals and the entire multimedia toolkit and let us appropriate the avatars and the artificial intelligence the computer generated faces into actors and social agents so that we can eventually make a change and so that's it stay in touch it's a challenge but hopefully we can get it done thank you very much just in my closing remarks and I want to thank right for giving me this opportunity the you know overall of course I think we've spoken to this but quick summaries of course lay on your presentation very much focused on you know providing the background around the skills research open education and certainly speaking to the mental health aspect and I think that has become much more prominent in today's education circles and I will speak to the education space more so as an educationist and most of us on the panel are educationists and the mental health aspect again is becoming more and more prevalent and I think the other part about that is awareness I think there's more awareness and understanding around this space that we didn't have really only a few years ago and of course even further back where it was attributed to you know whatever the case might be but not realizing that these are deep rooted issues that people face every day and that it's okay to talk about this and the fact though however is that it's certainly perpetuated in many respects with the onset of the ubiquity of online learning technology which again really penetrates almost every aspect of our lives today for good or bad I think that sort of segues to Vilma's well Vilma you talked about the good and bad of technology I like how you provided us with some ideas and tools to think about impacting or negating those aspects of cyber bullying or cyber violence the avatar issue which you certainly came back to is a really interesting one around this idea of kind of modeling or visualizing scenarios that are very real and how to address those in education settings and beyond that as well workplace etc and of course I can speak to workplace as well workplace violence gender-based violence in the workplace cyberbullying penetrates or cyber violence excuse me penetrates those areas as well that's another hat that I wear in terms of corporate training in that space overall I think the other thing we need to consider is you know who controls information and I often think about the fangs Facebook Apple Amazon Netflix and Google those are all controlled by men in a very small corner of the United States and not only they're men they're white men and I think that we need to see more change in that space in terms of who are the leaders around technology and how we can empower individuals and women in particular and I think we can't deny the the reality of optics up until just a month ago we never would have thought that you know the the holder of the second most important position in the world's most visible democracy was very much limited to white men and that's changed the onset or the the the election of the Biden Harris ticket really will enhance visibility and I think also present opportunities for women realizing that you can do this of course I'm in the position of speaking as a male so I mean I certainly recognize my position of you could say privilege but I think at the same time it's important that recognizing that men are not only part of the problem but part of the solution and I think as Vilma spoke to bringing men into this conversation recognizing their role in combating cyber violence is imperative so I think as educators we need to consider these ideas and really present them to our learners to our friends to our family to our our neighbors etc etc to really try to make impact and really change and change is happening so those are just some of my remarks that I'd like to close out with this and again thinking back to our role as educators and how we very much are in control and have a very very very important influence on individuals in terms of addressing these issues around cyber violence against women so with those final remarks I would just like to then return to an offer of thanks. First off thank you to Morent Newman who was the facilitator of our event today and of course my colleague Francis Ferreira who started off with presenting a good overview about the webinar that we had and the third person of course is Najjaleh. Najjaleh and I were working on the polls those polls were put together by Najjaleh and her coordination was invaluable. Last but not least of course I want to thank both of our panelists Ms. Vilma Gregory thank you for your remarks and preparation for this and also of course to Dr. Leanne Perriman.