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The right to privacy is a fundamental human right, to be enjoyed by all. This statement was delivered at the UN Human Rights Council 40th Session, on March 1st, 2019.      

As I reflect back on my experiences as a girl and woman, and what living in a deeply patriarchal, prejudiced, sexist, racist, ableist and ageist society means, I wonder often about what influenced my [feminist] politics. Was it the ostracizing? The unjust beauty standards for women? The countless times I heard and lived stories of surviving violence? These all added up. But the ability to look at different struggles and forms of oppressions and draw connections strengthened my feminism, as did my willingness to empathize (and not sympathize). These are all elements of “breaking the silos,” building solidarity and forming a sense of sisterhood.

We are feminists because we have consciousness, because we collaborate to raise other women’s consciousness, and above all because we know that the feminist movement, with all of its ups and downs, has since long ago been fundamentally about solidarity.

Generosity is precisely the word that comes to mind as I think of the Feminist Forum against the G20 which took place late November in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Generosity of knowledge and experience, of feminist transformative energy, of solidarity. Let me show you.

Earlier this year I attended a Digital Security workshop organized by Association for Progressive Communication and Point of View in Mumbai, India. This was my first workshop on digital security and, like most others in the group, I was clueless about my expectations. I was generally aware of the larger issues of surveillance, politics of big data and other issues of concerns in the digital world. However in my mind, these were hardly issues that would ever affect me. For a very long time, I thought that digital security does not concern me because there was hardly anything of relevance from my digital existence that was of any potential significance.  

With the expansion of Internet access and the increasingly widespread use of social networks, the occurrence of crimes of violence against women on the Internet has been grown exponentially. Online activity aimed at attacking women — by publishing offensive comments and name-calling, by the unauthorized sharing of personal photos and by threatening virtual assaults — is an increasingly common practice. According to an UN report, about 73% of Internet users have been exposed to some kind of cyber-violence.