From instruments of abuse

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, Sept 27, 2015

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  Different editions of Khabar Lahariya newspapers that is published in six different local language editions in the state of Uttar Pradesh.

They waited nine months.  Filed two FIRs and one complaint.  But the police were deaf to their appeals.  No response; no action. Suddenly, everything changed. Within two days, the problem was solved.

The lack of response is a familiar story yet there is a difference.  The protagonists in this story are a remarkable group of Dalit and Adivasi women journalists in U.P. They publish a weekly paper, Khabar Lahariya, in five local languages — Bundeli, Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Hindustani and Bajjika.  In a part of India where the sex ratio is hopelessly skewed, where women confront a daily dose of violence and abuse, where female literacy clings stubbornly to levels well below the national average, where poverty and absence of opportunities breeds its special brand of despair, these women are breaking every norm.  And also setting high journalistic standards by doing what reporters are supposed to do — doggedly follow even difficult stories.

Their organisation provides no transport; instead they walk, cycle, hitch rides to places where they personally want to investigate a story.  It would be much easier to call, an established norm these days. But these women journalists of Khabar Lahariya stubbornly stick to the old-fashioned way of reporting — burning shoe leather. And the difference is evident in the accuracy and quality of their reports from the rural hinterland.

For their labours, they have received recognition.  From a paper that was viewed only as a “woman’s” paper, Khabar Lahariya is now seen as a genuine rural paper.  It covers all kinds of news including political developments. In fact, as I wrote in an earlier column (The Hindu, March 23, 2008: http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sundaymagazine/article1437139.ece), mainstream journalists are now turning to these women for details, and even using their material without crediting them.

But the unsavoury side of recognition is abuse. For nine months, one man has been stalking and abusing some of these women on the phone.  He used dozens of different sim cards to call and harass different women. He would tell them things like, “Talk dirty to me else I’ll have you kidnapped and raped, many times over. Wherever you hide, I’ll find you. You and everyone in your team.” Despite complaints, the calls did not stop.  He called at all hours of the day and night to the point that some of them were terrified every time their phones rang.

The women registered their complaints and gave the cell numbers from which the calls emanated to the police and to the phone provider.  Yet nothing happened.

The nightmare ended only when another form of technology kicked in, that of social media. The Ladies Finger, a web-based portal, ran their story. (http://theladiesfinger.com/the-policeman-said-why-dont-you-tell-me-what-gaalis-he-whispers-in-your-ear/).  It went “viral”.  It was posted on Facebook and Twitter.  It reached the ears of the U.P. Chief Minister.  And all of a sudden the local police woke up and arrested the man.  Without this kind of pressure, nothing would have happened.

But as Shalini, one of the coordinators told the press, “Ironically, for journalists who report on gender issues, the very process of filing complaints and visiting several police stations for repeated recording of statements turned out to be a form of harassment in itself.”

We now have to wait and watch under what provisions of the law this despicable and unrepentant man, who calls himself Nishu, is charged.  But the entire sequence of events has thrown light on many aspects of the challenges before women who are doing something different.

At least, the women journalists of Khabar Lahariya are known and have connections beyond the villages from where they report.  But think of thousands of young women who want to break out, who make tentative attempts to do something different with their lives.  When local police ignore even women like the Khabar Lahariya journalists, what hope is there for any other woman who faces similar harassment?

Then also consider the double-edged sword that is technology.  On the one hand, the mobile phone has been an instrument of tremendous empowerment, including for women.  It has given millions of people a means of communication that just did not exist for them.  But on the other, it is also the source of harassment.  

That also goes for social media.  In this and other instances, it has been successfully used to put pressure on the authorities to act.  But we also know of the increasing harassment that women writers, social activists and others face through this very channel.  Any criticism of those in power is met with an avalanche of abuse and threats. The abusers use fake identities to evade detection.  Few of them are caught or punished.

So even as we inch forward — and certainly the very existence of something like Khabar Lahariya represents progress — we are pushed back because a woman’s right to her space, her right to choose, her right to be explore the unknown, is simply not accepted.

Address gender divide

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, July 19, 2015

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Technology is not gender-neutral. Photo: N. Bhaskaran

When I first came to Mumbai in my teens, the object of envy of all my aunt’s neighbours was a black instrument: a telephone. Only those with “influence” got one. And the fact of the telephone suggested that my aunt was a person with “influence”.

In the middle-class neighbourhood where she lived, ownership of the telephone made her immensely popular. Because that black instrument was not just hers; it was communal property. When it rang, there was a buzz of excitement. From her balcony, people would be summoned to receive calls. Others would knock on the door when they wanted to make a call. Through the day, there was a steady stream of people making their way to and from that instrument.

Today, everyone has a phone, or almost everyone. Ownership and use of mobile phones in India has gone exponentially. An estimated two-thirds of the population now has access to this technology. But do we pause to think about the remaining one-third, some 300 million people? Who are they? It should not come as a surprise to us, living as we do in a gender-unequal society, that the majority of those who do not own a mobile phone, and don’t even have access to one, are women.

A recent study by the GSMA (Groupe Speciale Mobile Association), formed in 1995 by mobile operators worldwide, found that 1.7 billion women in poor and middle-income countries do not own a mobile phone. On an average, women were 14 per cent less likely to own a mobile phone than men, and in India that figure stood at 31 per cent. The report points out, “Social norms and disparities between men and women in terms of education and income influence men’s access to and use of mobile technology, and often contribute to women experiencing barriers to mobile phone ownership and use more acutely than men.”

Simply put, what this means is that even if you put a mobile phone in the hands of every single woman in this country, there is no guarantee that she will be free to use it as she wants, or even if she will know how to use it. Her inherent disadvantage of being born a woman in this society works against that. She may not know how to read numbers, or letters. Hence how will she manage a phone?

And if indeed she is unlettered, as are a little under half the women in India, is there any chance that the men in her family will allow her to handle a phone, or help her to learn how to use it? Understanding this is essential as we continue our love affair with technology in this country with visions of a Digital India and “smart” everything. Technology is not gender-neutral. It cannot erase the disadvantages that are embedded in our societies. In some ways, it can even exacerbate them. To make such new technologies work for everyone, we have to recognise the gender divide and find ways to address it.

To further illustrate this divide, here are some findings from a 2012 study by the Grameen Foundation titled “Women, Mobile Phones and Savings”. The study was assessing whether and if mobile phones were effective in encouraging women to participate in savings groups. The researchers found that even when women owned phones, they often did not know how to use them. They had to rely on their husbands or other members of the family to even make a call.

Another interesting fact that emerged was that 74 per cent of the married women in the group surveyed said that their husbands would not allow them to own a mobile phone. In fact, a good number of the women said that they preferred to deal with their savings without having to use the mobile phone.

These studies emphasise that the current obsession with advancing new technologies in India must be tempered with the reality of gender, as well as other social factors. Otherwise, those with access will build on their advantage, and those without will be left even further behind.

Yet, the picture is not entirely gloomy. More women do own mobile phones now. Surveys reveal that owning a phone makes them feel safer and gives them some level of autonomy and independence. Organisations working with poor women have found that women’s access to this technology has helped them to organise women, bring them together, and even overcome the handicap of lack of education by teaching them this relatively simple technology. There are many stories of transformation in the lives of women and the communities where they work with the aid of mobile phones.

If the old black instrument, where you had to shout to be heard, opened up access in ways unknown before its advent, the mobile phone has revolutionised and democratised the way we connect and communicate with each other. New technologies, like mobile telephony, should erase barriers. But it will take some effort to bring down the gender barrier.

Someone is watching you

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, April 12, 2015

Should we be worried or is this just paranoia? The recent uproar caused by Union Human Resources Development Minister Smriti Irani spotting a closed circuit television (CCTV) camera allegedly pointing toward the women’s changing room in a store in Goa raises many questions. While the police will hopefully figure out how a camera placed for store surveillance recorded women trying out clothes as has been alleged, the incident draws attention to larger questions about surveillance and privacy.

So even as CCTV cameras proliferate in our cities, we have to ask how what they record is being used. To catch shoplifters, all big stores justify having surveillance cameras. To catch criminals and law-breakers, and to provide “security” to law-abiding citizens, we have cameras on the street, in offices, in buildings, in elevators, in public places, at traffic signals, at toll booths, in railway stations, at airports, in trains and in buses — virtually everywhere. People even have them in their homes. But none of us care to ask what happens to the footage recorded by these cameras, who views it and whether that footage is secure. In other words, is the technology designed to enhance security really secure or is it open to misuse.

We know now that there are an increasing number of reported instances where footage from CCTV cameras placed in public places, such as the Delhi Metro for instance, has been uploaded on the Internet without the knowledge or the permission of the people depicted in it. The Information Technology (IT) Act has provisions to deal with such misuse but it has failed to act as a deterrent. The watchful eye behind the camera can also be a voyeur and women, who are most often the subject of such misuse, really have no way to protect themselves.

While CCTV cameras are worrisome, there is another kind of surveillance that is, perhaps, even more menacing for women. Today millions of people have cameras and recording devices on their phones. This has been a positive development but it also has serious negative fallouts.

In terms of empowering women, there are dozens of examples from across India where something as simple as a mobile phone has changed women’s lives. In Dharavi, the enormous urban poor settlement in the heart of Mumbai, women have been trained by a local non-governmental organisation to record and report instances of violence against women by using their cell phones. In Bundelkhand, U.P., rural women journalists are using phones to record and report from areas that the mainstream would never bother to cover, to tell stories that would otherwise remain untold. These reports are printed in the different editions of their newspaper Khabar Lahariya and distributed throughout the region. Young women in our cities use the phone literally as a safety device. They speak on it to show they are connected to a person when alone in a taxi or a train. They take pictures of taxi drivers or potential harassers. So a simple technology like the mobile phone has made a difference to the lives of many women.

But there is also the downside. This very phone in the hands of a man can become the instrument of harassment. Women are targeted with unsolicited and sexist text messages. Men are known to photograph and film unsuspecting women and use that footage as “revenge porn” to blackmail them. Not long ago, on a flight from Delhi to Guwahati, two men were caught filming a woman passenger and an airhostess. The woman noticed what they were doing, used her phone to photograph them and uploaded the pictures on social media to name and shame them. But not every woman has the courage or presence of mind to respond like this. The majority get scared, intimidated and depressed if they are subjected to such voyeurism.

A report by the Association for Progressive Communication (APC) titled “How technology impacts women’s rights” (March 2015) discusses the gender perspective on technology. It points out, “People share images of women without their consent because they think women’s bodies and sexuality are shameful but also public property…The message is clear: privacy rights do not extend to women.”

Of course, in India the concept of “privacy” is not just gendered but also has a class angle. Only the privileged have access to a private space; for the majority all space is public. The only space that is private is what is in their heads. The majority of women and men living in our crowded cities, and even in the villages, are compelled to create the illusion of privacy in the absence of any physical private space.

Despite this, the recent incident in Goa ought to spark a serious debate on issues of privacy, on excessive surveillance, on laws that we need to protect the right of individuals to privacy and above all to understand that technology is not always gender neutral.

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