CYBER VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AND GIRLS

violence against women
represents a significant
security challenge for
all OSCE participating
States, and addressing this
challenge is at the heart of
the OSCE mandate.
• The Internet Governance
Forum (IGF) can play
an important role in
addressing cyber VAWG,
given its holistic approach
and engagement of
variety of actors – states,
women’s rights organizations,
Internet intermediaries and
users. The IGF is bringing together multiple
stakeholders to outline what constitutes abuse
of women, factors that contribute to enabling
environments for abuse and the impacts that
such abuse has in communities. Solutions and
strategies resulting in best practices are also being
addressed. The Best Practices Forum (BPF) is
working to produce a tangible output for IGF 2015
on the question: What are effective practices and
policies that address, mitigate and/or prevent
the abuse of women online? Through organized
fortnightly calls and using an inclusive, transparent
and iterative multi-stage process, the BPF aims to
gather input from multiple stakeholders. 113
The UN System has also been examining engagement
around cyber security issues from different perspectives,
including rights frameworks, and developing a system
“...states have an obligation
to exercise due diligence
to prevent, investigate and
punish acts of violence,
whether those acts are
perpetrated by the state or
private persons, and provide
protection to victims...”
(Recommendation (2002) 5 of the
Committee of Ministers of the Council
of Europe to member states on the
protection of women against violence).
wide plan on how to address cyber
security and crime. 114 UNODC has
been working at the forefront of
cybersecurity and has noted that
threats to Internet safety have
spiked dramatically in recent years,
and cybercrime now affects more
than 431 million adult victims
globally and that the Internet has
become a breeding ground for
criminal activity related to child
pornography and abuse material.
115
It has been delivering technical
assistance to law enforcement
authorities, prosecutors, and the
judiciary, in three regions of the world,
in Eastern Africa, South-East Asia, and Central America.
Because developing countries lack the capacity to combat
cyberattacks and other forms of cybercrime, criminals
will exploit countries’ legal loopholes and weak security
measures to perpetrate cybercrimes.
Other examples of emergent thinking come in the form
of the Feminist Principles of the Internet provide an
innovative, holistic and inclusive framework that speaks
to the intersections of gender and sexuality with Internet
freedoms. 116 The principles are being shared with Internet
governance bodies in Bosnia and Herzegovina, India,
Indonesia and the DRC, among other countries. There
is a coalition advocating for these principals and related
commitments, including within WSIS, CSW, IGF and the
SDGs.
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