Social Media and Women's Activism
Pink Panties in the Mail
Submitted by Sabina Panth on Thu, 12/23/2010 - 11:20
The other day, I received a Facebook invitation to join a global network on ‘16-days of activism against gender-based violence’. According to the description, the campaign has been helping to raise awareness about gender violence and its effect on women on a global-scale. The Facebook forum is intended for individuals and organizations championing the cause to share the achievements and challenges they have encountered toward building a global alliance. The global alliance is intended to support the demands made to the states and institutions and the actions that are needed to pressure for better results. Incidentally, I wrote my previous blog post on the increased use of social media in civilian-led activism and advocacy campaigns. My membership to this new social networking site made me interested to learn more about how social media is helping to promote the cause of women’s issues worldwide. Here are some of the examples I have collected, primarily from the Tactical Technology website.
I start with my all time favorite, the Pink Chadi Campaign. Women activists in India used Facebook to campaign against the right wing political party that organized attacks on women in the drinking clubs. In defense of their rights, the women activists asked supporters to send Pink Chadis (panties) to the leader of the political party behind the attacks. By the third day of the launch, the campaign had attracted 16,000 supporters on Facebook and within a few months the membership rose to 50,000.
In Lebanon, an overwhelming public response is said to have been attained from the animated video, ‘Adventures of Salwa’ that was promoted via Facebook to address workplace harassment. In India, the Blank Noise project used blogs and Flickr to display the images of clothing that the victims of sexual harassment wore (saris and burkas) to counter the prevailing notion that women invite harassment from the clothes they wear. In Kenya, women have used mobile videos and you-tube to record harassment incidences and seek justice on their behalf.
However, the online presence of social media has not always been successful in translating into an off-line mode. For instance, the Pink Chadi campaign faced a limitation in the use of Facebook in its on-line campaign. After the membership crossed the 5,000 mark, the organizers could no longer send messages to group members. The campaign was also defaced, hacked and eventually deleted from Facebook. The Blank Noise project, on the other hand, was able to bring its virtual presence into street actions, which remains an integral part of its campaign style.
As to the question of whether and how these types of social media activism have wrought changes in women’s lives, many organizers perceive social media as a platform whereby ‘individuals become empowered through personal experiences in the collective’. “The main impact is internal. People are able to personalize the meaning of their involvement in the collective and undergo personal transformation,” quotes a blog post on the Blank Noise project in India. Social media activism is also seen by some as a creative, non-confrontational way of conveying and responding to critical social messages. It is seen as particularly favorable to women’s activism as it shields them from the violence that street protests tend to propagate. Compared with the traditional methods of meeting on the streets and petitioning for a cause, the sheer scope of social media in reaching the public itself is the attraction for its use as an activism tool.
Source: http://blogs.worldbank.org/publicsphere/pink-panties-mail
Photo Credit: Siti Saad (Flickr)