Tue, Mar 03, 2020 page4

• Pakistan’s digital warrior battling the patriarchy

  • AFP, LAHORE, Pakistan
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  With her flashing rings, green-streaked hair and “Hack the patriarchy” laptop stickers, Nighat Dad is a digital warrior.

  However, the human rights award winner and founder of Pakistan’s first cyberharassment helpline still teared up as she described receiving calls from women afraid of being killed by male relatives for using the Internet.

  “We sometimes find ourselves helpless... Somebody calls us and asks for help while crying that ‘Please, please save my life,’” she told reporters at the offices for her non-profit Digital Rights Foundation in the eastern city of Lahore.

  Much of Pakistani society lives under the patriarchal, outdated code of so-called “honor” that systemizes the oppression of women by preventing them from, for example, choosing their own husband or working outside the home.

  Advocates have denounced pervasive, sometimes deadly violence by men — usually male relatives — against women who break those taboos.

  The situation is dire enough in the offline world.

  However, Pakistan is only just beginning to grapple with what violent notions of honor mean for women online, in a country where Internet penetration is at 22 percent and growing, but digital literacy is low.

  There have been examples of men attacking women for using the Internet in ways that much of the rest of the world considers normal, such as publishing photographs of themselves on a Facebook page.

  Dad formed the Digital Rights Foundation, a think tank tackling digital rights through a gender lens, in 2012, winning her recognition as one of Time magazine’s next-generation leaders in 2015 and a Human Rights Tulip award in 2016.

  She launched the cyberharassment helpline that same year, funding it with the 100,000 euros (US$108,000) in Tulip prize money.

  The idea “came out of anger” at the violence women were suffering, she said.

  The helpline receives up to 20 calls a day and the number is increasing.

  Callers range from celebrities to poor women in deeply conservative areas whose male relatives do not allow them to leave their homes. Many call about the non-consensual publication of their intimate images.

  The issue can be damaging enough to women in developed countries. In Pakistan, even less severe cases can see families forbidding women from attending school or forcing them into quick marriages to save their “honor,” while in the most severe it can be deadly.

  Much of the work the helpline does is to explain to women what recourse they have.

  More than three years on, the Tulip money has run out.

  Now the helpline survives only by the grace of small grants from groups such as the Netherlands-based Digital Defenders Partnership, which supports rights advocates.

  Much of Dad’s activism is rooted in what she describes as her “privilege” — having parents who, though illiterate themselves, fought to give their six children an education.

  Her father defied more conservative relatives when he insisted she leave an abusive marriage, fight for custody of her son and study law at a co-ed university.

  Listing other ways he has supported her, she smiled.

  “It ... tells me that you don’t need all this education to be a feminist,” she said.

  Now she feels she must do the same for others — but she is keenly aware that her work is dangerous.

  Earlier generations of feminists took on state oppression. Her generation is confronting the issue in the home and the workplace, meaning it is no longer an abstract criticism for the men in their lives.

  That is one reason why the backlash can be so severe, she said.

  She cited last year’s International Women’s Day march in Pakistan, which saw women turn out in unprecedented numbers loudly celebrating divorce and periods, among other things.

  The response was swift and shocking in its intensity, with Dad describing mullahs making rape and death threats against the march organizers in videos widely distributed online.

  The 2016 murder of social media star Qandeel Baloch has also affected her, she said.
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