Contemporary Challenges in Ending Violence against Women and Girls: Preventing and Responding to Online Attacks

Featuring Dubravka  Šimonović, UN Special Rapporteuor on violence against women, its causes and consequences, and Cynthia M. Wong, Senior Internet Researcher at Human RIghts Watch

In today’s digital age, the Internet and other technologies are rapidly creating new social digital spaces and transforming how individuals meet, communicate, meanwhile reshaping society as a whole. Despite the benefits and empowering potential of the Internet and ICT, women and girls across the word have increasingly voiced their concern at harmful, sexist, misogynistic and violent content and behavior online. Female political leaders, journalists, and human rights defenders are at particular risk of online and ICT-facilitated violence, while the phenomenon has spread across cultures and continents to the workplace, schools, homes and campuses, affecting millions of women and girls. Through this panel discussion, we hope to gain understanding of how to effectively apply a human rights-based approach to prevent and combat these latest manifestations of violence as human rights violations, which shares its root causes with other forms of abuse and discrimination. 

Cynthia M. Wong is the Senior Internet Researcher at Human Rights Watch, where she leads HRW’s work on digital privacy, freedom of expression online, and business and human rights in the information and communications technology sector. She currently serves as a board member of the Global Network Initiative, a multi-stakeholder organization that advances corporate responsibility and human rights in the ICT sector. Before joining HRW, Wong was the director of the Center for Democracy & Technology’s Project on Global Internet Freedom, with a focus on international free expression and privacy. Prior to joining CDT, Wong was the Robert L. Bernstein International Human Rights Fellow at Human Rights in China. Wong earned her law degree from New York University School of Law and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.

Dubravka Šimonovic was appointed as United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences in June 2015 by the UN Human Rights Council for an initial three years' tenure (maximum tenure of six years). She started her tenure on 1 August 2015. Ms. Šimonović was a member of the CEDAW Committee between 2002 and 2014, and served as its Chairperson in 2007 and 2008, its follow-up Rapporteur from 2009 to 2011 and as the Chairperson of the Optional Protocol Working Group in 2011. For a number of years she headed the Human Rights Department at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Croatia and was posted as the Minister Plenipotentiary at the Permanent Mission of Croatia to the United Nations in New York.  She was also the Ambassador to the OSCE and United Nations in Vienna, Austria. She was the Chairperson of the UN Commission on the Status of Women between 2001 and 2002 and also worked as a member of the UNIFEM Consultative Committee. Ms. Šimonović holds a PhD in family law from the University of Zagreb. She is the author of several books and articles on women’s rights and violence against women.