Making IT work for gender justice in South Africa

A number of organisations working in the GBV sectors have created different ICT platforms to campaign for gender justice. The organisations have had to employ a number of creative ways of communicating with their core constituency and make use of the new media tools on offer. As the different case studies will show, the lack of financial resources has not stopped the organisations from employing creative strategies in its communication strategy. South Africa has a myriad of organisations working in the field of GBV. It ranges from lobbying to different grassroots organisations.

The SADC Gender Protocol calls on member states to mainstream gender in ICT laws; mount public education and awareness campaigns on GBV, and challenge gender stereotypes. ICT’s are a mixed blessing. They have been used in ways the denigrate women, like cell phone videos of women being raped. On the other hand, cyber space is an open and largely free space that activists can claim to promote gender justice.

According to Womensnet, an organisation dedicated to assisting organisations developing ICT in their work, “the digital divide is bridging but with this comes new challenges and it seems the issue of violence against women is not reflected on our online spaces and technology is used as enablers.”

According to the International Telecommunications Union, South Africa has almost full mobile coverage of all inhabited areas (92%). South Africa is one of the first countries in the world to outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation, and the first in Africa to legalise same-sex marriage. However, a dark cloud looms over these many ‘firsts’ and that is the emergence and scourge of the so-called “corrective rape” phenomenon.

One of the first homophobic cases reported in the media was in 2006 with the murder of the 19 year old Zoliswa Nkonyana. She was stoned and beaten to death by a mob of men in Khayelitsha on the outskirts of Cape Town. This brutal murder led to renewed activism in the community and saw the emergence of the organisation called Free Gender.

The organisation does not have many resources and does not have a website either. However, this has not deterred Free Gender from mobilising hundreds of lesbians in the area and across Cape Town to join them at the court cases where perpetrators of “corrective rape” have appeared.

Free Gender uses MXIT, a quick, fast and inexpensive communication platform. Free Gender has used this to organise several public demonstrations at Khayelitsha court, drawing huge local and international media coverage and getting the attention of the Ministers of Police, Justice and Social Development.

The Western Cape Network on Violence Against Women developed a special mobi-site accessible via a mobile phone. This mobi-site has content developed by the network on a varied of issues but is easily accessible via the mobile phone. Members can register via the mobi-site and access information on the network for their own usage and the site also offers a free ‘call me back’ service. The network wants to ensure that it is quick and efficient in communicating with its members and the size of the mobi-site ensures the network is able to do this and take into account affordability and also manage its content.

The Sex Workers Education & Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT) work is focused on providing “safe sex educational work with adult sex workers”. Given the organisations core members, it needed to ensure that ICT works for them and it creates it own public space on this issue. “Sexworkers are silent and voiceless, we have had to take up public space to get our message out’, says Sweat Director, Sally Shackleton.

Sweat wanted to ensure that its members were able to access information via Internet, Facebook, Twitter, mobile phones and podcasts. However, in order to do this, Sweat also had to ensure that it developed appropriate policies for the information and that it was also integrated into the work of the organisation. “Our messages whether on the site of FB had to be in line with the positions of Sweat and messages had to be consistent with our aim and vision,” Shackleton said.

Sixteen Days campaigns use a combination of face-to-face discussions, cyber chats, and SMS campaigns to encourage people to participate in GBV discussions. Face-to-face discussions often precede a cyber dialogue and participants of the chat sessions are notified about these through a daily SMS service reminding them of the cyber chat and informing them of the topic to be discussed.

In 2011 as part of the joint Gender and Climate Justice campaign face-to-face discussions and cyber dialogues started with a discussion on specific aspects of climate change that were often related to the GBV theme for the day. A total of 688 women and men participated in the dialogues across 13 SADC countries, conducted in the three official languages of SADC (English, French and Portuguese) as well as several indigenous languages such as Zulu, Sotho and Shona.

Three days of the campaign in 2011 focused specifically on gender and climate change: 29 November, “Gender and climate justice start with local government”; 8 December, “We have Faith: The role of the church in gender and climate justice”; and 9 December, “Peace begins at home: Gender and climate justice by 2015” To keep the momentum going GL began the cyber dialogues on other days with an update from COP17 and a discussion on the key issues raised in the e-newsletter.