25/11/2023
On 17 December 1999, the UN General Assembly declared the 25th of November as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women and Girls in order to highlight an important problem that has a global dimension. This Day had already been established in 1981 by women’s organisations, in memory of the horrific murder of the three Mirabal sisters, political activists from the Dominican Republic, by order of the dictator Trujillo on 25 November 1960.
For us, gender-based violence should not only be directed at women and girls, but also at any person with any gender identity, as long as violence is perpetrated because of the person’s gender identity – although we recognise that large percentages of this phenomenon unfortunately concern femininities..
However, the commission of gender-based violence is also facilitated by the use of technology or the Internet. For the first time, the Council of Europe, while addressing recommendations to its member states, referred to the term “digital dimension of violence against women”, which it introduced. Examples are mocking comments about the body or appearance (body shaming), sending unwanted sexual images online (cyber flashing), sharing a person’s personal information without consent (doxing), online stalking (cyber stalking), posting offensive or hostile messages on social networks or forums (flaming), as well as non-consensual generation and/or sharing of visual/audio-visual content (image-based abuse).
In fact, the Council of Europe’s group of experts on combating violence against women and domestic violence (GREVIO) identified during the monitoring of the implementation of the Istanbul Treaty that there are large gaps in the national laws of the member states regarding violence against women through technology.
For this reason, our organisation was founded in June 2021, with the aim of raising the awareness of Greek society around these issues. For us, every day is orange.
As part of our participation in the days of activism for gender-based violence, we would like to announce two important actions of ours.
1. The first concerns our participation in the project “Cyber Intimacy” run by the organisation SHARE Foundation which concerns the study and mapping of this phenomenon in the Balkan region. We would like to thank the SHARE Foundation from the bottom of our hearts for trusting us and giving us this opportunity!
2. The second concerns the initiative we have undertaken for the establishment of the interdisciplinary advocacy working group whose purpose of action is to study the phenomenon of gender-based violence through images and the advocacy around it. Specifically, when we refer to gender-based violence through images we mean any form of gender-based violence (e.g. abuse, sextortion, etc.) that is carried out through the non-consensual creation and/or distribution/posting of audiovisual material – usually with sexul content, known as “revenge pornography”. We would like to sincerely thank all the members of this group, such as ActionAid Hellas, Homo Digitalis, Red Umbrella Athens, and Positive Voice! We are very happy to have joined forces with you and believe that we will achieve a lot together!
Stay tuned for our actions!
