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Cyber Violence Against Women and Girls - A World-Wide Wake-Up Call

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kat:
Due to issues with sourcing and written quality of the following report it wasn't originally going to be mentioned in this topic but for the number of outlets pushing this forward as a 'considered' (not their word) approach to controlling privacy and speech on the Internet (as it pertains to abuse on the Internet): "A Report by the UN Broadband Commission for the Digital Development Working Group on Broadband and Gender: Cyber Violence Against Women and Girls - A World-Wide Wake-Up Call". In a nutshell the central premise of the report is that "online violence" toward women and girls should stop (and by "extension", men and boys).

To do this the term "online violence" is often framed using language that conflates it with real-world (physical?) violence (in terms of 'actual harm' that may be done). In other words the Commission equate the phrase to a person "not just receiving death threats but the daily grind of being told 'you're a liar' or 'you suck'" with a women in an Emergency Room contused, rids broken, wrists fractured due to 'violence' perpetrated by another. Are the two truly the same?

What's worse is the reports obvious bias toward gender specific abuses in support of its general theme at the expense of the broader picture; women do indeed receive more gendered abuse, i.e. comments based solely around their being female; which contrasts with men being in receipt of the greater degree of abuse that's more broadly applied, i.e. boys/men are more likely to receive death threats, or just told they suck at something (stats on this vary depending on the questions asked, who's doing the asking/answering, which it's always worth considering).

If a solution to online abuse is to be sought it should not be done at the expense of one gender (****) over the other, nor should it be done through suggestions of outright censorship of expression. Requesting service providers monitor and approve comments is unilaterally impractical due to the volume of traffic generated by current users, expand that outwards to include areas of the globe coming online and the numbers become impossibly large - this is all notwithstanding service providers already providing systems and tools users can use to report and block abuse. Government should only ever be involved when there's criminal intent, i.e. calls to incite/actionable violence etc. as law currently stands (and even this has its problems where free expression crosses 'religion' or other particularly rigid 'systems' of thought).

[EDIT]As of 6th October (date of writing this update) the CVAWG report has been pulled from the official ITU blog, replaced with a PDF stating its being revised. The report can however still be acquired in its current form from the link at the top of the article (note that even it may be updated once the report is changed). Additional sources added below.

Further Reading
Note: the following are not provided to prove a point one way or the other, rather they illustrate the complexity of the underlying issue, that males and females engage in different *types* of harassment as well as receive based on gender biases, circumstance and many, many other mitigating circumstance.

* Pew Research: Online Harassment ("... 73% have seen OH, 40% experienced it...")
* International Journal of Cyber Criminology: Battle of the sexes: An examination of male and female cyber bullying ("... females have been shown to be involved in cyber bullying just as much as males (if not more) ...")
* Gender and Alcohol Consumption: Patterns from the Multinational Genacis Project ("... the prevalence of high-frequency drinking was consistently greatest in the oldest age group, particularly among men ...")UN Sources

* UN Women - Urgent action needed to combat online violence against women and girls, says new UN report
* ITU Blog - Cyber Violence against Women and Girls
* ITU - Urgent action needed to combat online violence against women & girls, says new UN report

ratty redemption [RIP]:
kat, where do you see all this going over the next 5-10 years? will online free speech be eradicated under the guise it's harming people?

personally i believe this is more rooted in silencing political or religious dissent. and cyber bullying prevention is an excuse for governments putting into place the infrastructure to only allow view points deemed acceptable. yes, i'm referring to 1984 here.

kat:
There is no 5-10 years. It's already here (this topic is evidence of that).

Governments already block websites under the auspices of Copyright (List of Court Ordered Blocks). They also mandate access to certain 'political' or 'religious' sites be blocked in libraries, schools, universities and other public service establishments [1] [2]. Private business are also obliged to certain legal requirements to block access to certain types of content and destination (beyond what is illegal in an obvious sense), but beyond that blocks that they institute are more often the result of individual policy mandates - if you stay at a hotel chain for example you might not gain access to so-called 'right-wing' sites; there's no general legal mandate for that, they do for self-justified reasons. Having said that social media sites are more than willing to 'help' with respect to people being arrested for 'mean comments'.

Governments have also long wanted to change the Internet, or at least who can access it using the principle of 'trusted sites' and 'trusted users' [3]. But it's not just Government doing that, Apple has the "Touch ID" credential system, Google had a retina scan system for Glasses and so on. But that's nothing new (it's old hat actually), corporate users have used numerous types of bio-metrics to secure access to corporate networks and devices for decades.

What's relatively new in all this is the interconnectedness of it all and the fact that Government has access to it in various ways and for various reasons, laws and regulation to prevent 'harm' aren't need to initialise control, it's used to secure what's already in place.

Further Reading/Sources
https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/net_block_report.pdf
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/the-internet-and-****-prime-minister-calls-for-action
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23401076
https://www.fcc.gov/guides/childrens-internet-protection-act
http://www.copacommission.org/papers/rosenberg.pdf
https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/NSTICstrategy_041511.pdf

ratty redemption [RIP]:
interesting, thanks kat. and i'll have a read of some of your sources when i have more time.

i did have a quick look at that blocked sites list, which appears to mainly be for copyright reasons yes? strangely several of the sites did appear in google search for me. so are they only blocked by certain isp's?

kat:
Sites being on that list are 'blocked' at the ISP, its suppose to mean they can't ordinarily be accessed directly by persons typing in the URLs. The block won't have any bearing on search results appearances though unless Google et al de-list such sites.

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