This year, the Foundation for Media Alternatives (FMA) launched GenderScoop, an e-bulletin initiative about developments on issues that impact Filipino women’s access and use of ICT and the internet. Among others, GenderScoop delves into online gender-based violence (OGBV), gender digital divide, and feminist principles of the internet (FPI).

Online gender-based violence (OGBV)

OGBV is defined as “acts of gender-based violence that are committed, abetted or aggravated, in part or fully, by the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as mobile phones, the internet, social media platforms, and email.” (p. 3, Association for Progressive Communications, 2017). GenderScoop includes topics on online sexual harassment, discriminatory speech, non-consensual use of private information, among others. (See: 13 Manifestations of Online Gender-based Violence).

Gender digital divide

Gender inequalities reflect in women’s access and use of ICT or lack thereof. Guided by the REACT framework by the Web Foundation, GenderScoop looks into developments on barriers to Filipino women’s connectivity, gender gaps in digital literacy, accessibility and relevance of online content to women users, and actions to address all these by governing bodies and concerned agencies and institutions.

Feminist Principles of the Internet

The FPI are a series of declarations that “offer a gender and sexual rights lens on critical internet-related rights” (See: FPI Website). FPI serves as a backbone to articulate and explore the relationship of gender and the internet. The principles are a result of a global conversation held by women’s rights advocates in 2014 where a “feminist internet” was collectively imagined and discussed. A total of 17 principles organized in 5 clusters (see below) will underscore GenderScoop’s updates on FPI.

Access cluster: Access • Information • Usage
Movement cluster: Resistance • Movement-building • Governance
Economy cluster: Economy • Open source
Expression cluster: Amplify • Expression • Pornography
Embodiment cluster: Consent • Privacy & Data • Memory • Anonymity • Children • Violence

Check GenderScoop’s first issue here. Here are the past issues:

• February – Safer internet? Combatting online persecution of women, exploitation of girls, and the dangers of SIM registration
• March – Online violence as ‘real-world violence’, surfacing feminist lens on the borderlessness of the Internet

The April issue will be out today.