"They Don't Leave Us Alone Anywhere We Go": Gender and Digital Abuse in South Asia
Open accessAbstract
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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Many interviewees said Indian public-sector AI was seen as a way to modernise and fix long-standing inefficiencies in resource delivery.
“Many respondents described how public sector AI projects in India were viewed as modernising efforts to overcome age-old inefficiencies in resource delivery (also in [175]).”
From Re-imagining Algorithmic Fairness in India and Beyond (2021) · cites this paper as [175]
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“…of TFGBV, including online harassment, image-based abuse, doxxing (the deliberate public exposure of a target’s real-world identity to facilitate offline harm), and coordinated targeting, finding that women and gender minorities are disproportionately and systematically affected [24, 25, 43, 50].”
- Authors
- Sambasivan, N., Batool, A., Ahmed, N., Matthews, T., Thomas, K., Gaytán-Lugo, L. S., Nemer, D., Bursztein, E., Churchill, E., & Consolvo, S.
- Affiliations
- Google (United States) (US)
- Information Technology University (PK)
- North South University (BD)
- Independent Researcher, San Jose, CA, USA
- Universidad de Colima, Colima, Mexico
- University of Kentucky (US)
- ORCID
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2019-05-02
- Pages
- 1-14
- OpenAlex
- W2911428659
- Cited by
- 175
- References
- 63
- Citations by year
- 2026: 25 · 2025: 36 · 2024: 24 · 2023: 22 · 2022: 21 · 2021: 24 · 2020: 20 · 2019: 3
- FWCI
- 48.55
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-sa)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Stalking, Cyberstalking, and Harassment
- Social Sciences › Gender Studies › Gender, Feminism, and Media
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Privacy, Security, and Data Protection
- Keywords
- online abuse, women's online safety, cyberstalking, impersonation, coping strategies, NGO staff, feminist analysis, South Asia, emotional harm, reputational damage, sexual violence, informal support networks
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