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"They Don't Leave Us Alone Anywhere We Go": Gender and Digital Abuse in South Asia

Published: 02 May 2019 Publication History

Abstract

South Asia faces one of the largest gender gaps online globally, and online safety is one of the main barriers to gender-equitable Internet access [GSMA, 2015]. To better understand the gendered risks and coping practices online in South Asia, we present a qualitative study of the online abuse experiences and coping practices of 199 people who identified as women and 6 NGO staff from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, using a feminist analysis. We found that a majority of our participants regularly contended with online abuse, experiencing three major abuse types: cyberstalking, impersonation, and personal content leakages. Consequences of abuse included emotional harm, reputation damage, and physical and sexual violence. Participants coped through informal channels rather than through technological protections or law enforcement. Altogether, our findings point to opportunities for designs, policies, and algorithms to improve women's safety online in South Asia.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '19: Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    May 2019
    9077 pages
    ISBN:9781450359702
    DOI:10.1145/3290605
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike International 4.0 License.

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    1. bangladesh
    2. coping
    3. impacts
    4. impersonation
    5. india
    6. leakages
    7. online abuse
    8. pakistan
    9. privacy
    10. stalking
    11. women

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