Tackling online gender-based violence; understanding gender, development, and the power relations of digital spaces

Abstract

Digital systems now mediate our everyday social practices, political and economic lives. But ICT4D (ICT for development) research exploring the relationship between gender, technology and development has only had a limited conception of the power relationships and structures underpinning these systems. In this literature, technology is linked to gendered empowerment in that it is conceptualized as a means of increasing women’s choices and freedom, with little consideration of its potential disempowering impacts. Based on an understanding that the production of gender is ineluctably related to the production of power, and rooted in earlier techno-feminist scholarship, this paper proposes a new theoretical framework on the power relations of digital systems, exposing the visible, hidden, and invisible power in socio-technical systems and infrastructures. The framework is explored through a review of data and research on the global epidemic of online misogyny and gender-based violence (GBV). Harassment contributes to a culture of violence against women offline, and silences women’s voices in digital civic spaces, threatening the achievement of development goals. This paper illuminates the multiplicity of structural factors behind online GBV and offers a provocation for a critical ICT4D research agenda on the relationship between gender, digital technologies and development goals which engages with the complex and opaque power relationships underpinning the contemporary digital economy.