APC successfully advocated for the inclusion of Strategic objective J.1 in the Beijing Platform for Action
The year was 1990 and the internet was a new concept to many people around the world. The idea that we could use personal computers to connect to a “World Wide Web” of people spanning from our community to the other side of the globe was a strange and fantastic notion. As the future came rushing upon us, embedding itself in our workplaces, schools and eventually our homes, a small group of rights-focused activists registered itself in South Africa as an organisation of internet service providers. This marked the earliest beginnings of the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), now represented by a global network of staff, members and partners advocating at the intersection of human rights and technology.
In those formative years, what quickly became apparent was that in order to build a truly rights-based social movement in the digital sphere, it would be essential to address the needs of women and gender-diverse people. By 1995, when the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action was implemented, APC’s Women’s Network and Support Group – the predecessor to the current Women’s Rights Programme (WRP) – was already demanding a seat at the table of discussions on inclusivity and gender rights.
Now as we celebrate over 30 years of work, struggle and dedication to building a feminist internet, we continue to position gender squarely at the centre of our work. To continue making an impact as a movement, we know it is critical to understand our roots and carry forward the lessons learned along the way, as we face a context very different from those early years, marked by the unfortunate role of technology in exacerbating crises and conflicts.. As APC’s Karla Velasco reflected in the new GenderIT edition, Looking forward: Feminist futures beyond Beijing+30, “part of not losing hope and finding spaces for inspiration and resilience for me has consisted of looking back to the recent decades, celebrating achievements from past generations, and evaluating what we have learned so far.”
To highlight the important work done by APC’s Women’s Rights Programme over the past 30 years, we spoke with four longtime staff members about their early experiences at the crossroads of digital rights and women’s rights, what inspired those initial approaches, the evolution they have seen in gender and digital rights, and the challenges that remain. Jennifer Radloff, Chat Garcia Ramilo, Fatima Byat and Dafne Plou shared key learnings and offered advice for digital rights defenders who are new to the terrain and looking to continue on this important work.
These interviews were conducted individually with each APC staff member by Francia Baltazar. They have been edited for clarity and length.
How has your identity contributed to your involvement with APC’s work on digital and gender rights?
Jenny: I’m an out lesbian, and in the 80s and 90s it was pretty tough to be out in South Africa and in the world generally. So that has informed my approach in a very big way: Who is excluded? Whose voices are amplified and whose are shut down? And how do we change that?... For me APC has always been incredibly open about challenging identities and bringing in structurally marginalised voices. That dialogue of sharing amongst different contexts has been incredible.
Chat: 1995 was when the World Wide Web started to be known and there was much more attention on electronic networking as important for social movements... How do internet-related initiatives really contribute to social change and development generally? Our trajectory was focusing on gender and the empowerment of women’s rights.
Fatima: I had no educational background in technology and went on to become a systems administrator and all of that was just by learning, by doing... I think it was a lot of interactions on a personal level with family and other activists that pushed me into looking into technology from a women’s rights or gender perspective.
How have gender rights and digital rights evolved in the past 30 years?
Dafne: It [the 90s] was a very exciting time to see how these new tools could really do a lot to put women’s rights on top – of course women’s rights as a whole but also women’s rights to communicate and to have access to new technologies and to work in this new world that was really opening up at the time.
Jenny: It was absolutely fascinating in the beginning to see how white men controlled, and still do, the production and the distribution of technology. In the last 90s, it was very much information and communication technology for development – it was this very paternalistic, Northern-dominated idea of technology and slowly that started being disrupted and dismantled through women’s rights activists and gender activists who later claimed the identity of “feminist” just to slowly unravel that... Another big change was when we started the Feminist Technology Exchanges (FTX), when we deliberately used the word “feminist”. We deliberately started saying “you cannot just learn the tools, you’ve got to understand the feminist politics.”
Chat: One of the main advocacies was finding out from feminists about online harassment and wanting to understand more what this meant. In 2005 we did the first significant research done on understanding this continuum of violence. Gender-based violence continues to be a very significant issue. That research was seminal in that it identified how women experience violence online, and connected it with and drew from what we already know about violence against women.
How have you seen APC evolve in response to the shifts in digital and women’s rights?
Fatima: I always see ebbs and flows between policy capacity building and the actual take on of technology... We went from being service providers to trying to look at content and also being more actively involved in digital spaces like the Beijing conference in 1995. It was also about the environmental movement. We were looking at bringing the voices of civil society to those international spaces and looking at information and context. That’s when the work around policy started to come into play.
Dafne: Through all the years I worked with APC I could see that we were becoming more sophisticated in the kinds of issues we wanted to tackle, but it was interesting how we truly wanted to introduce gender issues and a gender perspective on whatever we did, and on APC’s policies too.
Chat: One of the things APC has done is the consistent intersection and connection of and placing ourselves within the women’s movement and all the significant issues that relate to technology, the internet and the digital from the very beginning. We really have been pioneers in deeply understanding what are the important issues for women and why the women’s movement needs to be concerned about technology from the very beginning.
What are the barriers and challenges in making digital rights accessible to women and gender-diverse people?
Jenny: Technology can be for some people really brutal and difficult and it’s not necessarily this fabulous thing that everyone should access and use in the same way. There’s diversity in its uses... Keep in the top of mind that we need to be kind and open-minded in all of the work that we do, in holding space, in bringing people together.
Fatima: The question of access is still an issue. We still have more than a third of the world that is unconnected and that is still something that needs to be addressed... Sustainability and how we use technology is something that we are going to have to look at more carefully.
Dafne: I remember discussing access, access, access and we still have problems with access in some of our countries. In Argentina people still have problems with good access. We don’t have enough good connectivity and still states and companies owe the people a lot so they can get really well connected.
Chat: Technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) continues to be a significant problem but at the same time there is now attention to it and saying this really needs to be responded to. The naming and understanding of it, the ways we have influenced the field in saying this is part of the spectrum and not separate from violence against women is a significant contribution of our work throughout the years.
What advice would you give to new generations of digital rights activists and feminists looking to make a difference in this work?
Dafne: We are all looking at this shift to a more conservative world. People are perhaps questioning things they did before, especially in language and cancel culture that took place. We still have to work for freedom of expression, even on the internet... You have to be very strong and very clear in what you are working for. We’re not going back. This is something that has to be very clear in organisations like APC.
Jenny: The ways that we have moved from starting with imagining a feminist internet into making a feminist internet – those processes and ways of naming things are really important. We must make sure we keep aligned with that way of doing things.
Chat: The Feminist Principles of the Internet (FPIs) provide an analysis and a framework that are very valuable and useful whatever the issues are when it comes to digital rights and gender justice. It’s important to have this framework in how we analyse these issues... We know that there continue to be barriers in women’s involvement with technologies. Safety is an issue unfortunately. This is the reality. Violence, misogyny, stereotyping continue to be expressed online, from the design to online spaces.
Fatima: Don’t forget history, don’t forget where things started. There are often answers to the challenges by looking at the past.