6. VAW and e-government strategies

In 2012, the media and civil society outrage that followed the brutal gang rape of a young college student in a moving bus in the national capital New Delhi brought VAW renewed attention in policy and programming. The most obvious illustration of this was the establishment of the ‘Nirbhaya Fund’⁹⁴ in 2013, a 10 billion INR corpus intended to support governmental and NGO initiatives that seeks to further the safety and dignity of women. In the current context, where using the IT opportunity in every sphere is the dominant mantra, this spotlight on VAW has also spawned a lot of interest in the area of designing digital solutions for women’s safety, among government, private and civil society actors. The most common manifestation of this trend has been the development of mobile apps for women in distress. As one commentator observes, “safety apps are dime a dozen in India”⁹⁵ and private mobile companies, civil society organizations as well as government agencies, have taken to the business of appdevelopment, with little assessment regarding their efficacy.

In addition, some state governments such as Andhra Pradesh⁹⁶ and Orissa⁹⁷ have introduced another innovation, which are Internetenabled kiosks to enable women to report incidents of GBV to the police. Finally, there are two central government proposals in this area, which have been in the pipeline for some time:

• A directive to all mobile phone manufacturers to provide a mandatory SOS alert button on their handsets.
• A scheme covering 32 cities with a population of over one million, for fitting public transport vehicles in these cities with a GPS tracking device, to enable law enforcement agencies to effectively respond to women in distress situations.

An overview of the existing and proposed government-led IT initiatives for addressing VAW reveals that they are not geared to address the core systemic issues that contribute to the problem of gender-based violence, that of the widespread incidence of sexual harassment, lack of basic infrastructure like street lighting in public spaces, absence of gender sensitive policing, etc. Further, policy interventions do not tackle new threats to women’s safety and bodily integrity in the online public sphere although there is an urgent need for proactive awareness and education, especially for young people.

As feminist critics have pointed out, an over-valorization of apps reflects a narrow approach that reduces the question of GBV to merely one of dealing with ‘stranger danger’,⁹⁸ instead of challenging hegemonic gender structures which normalize everyday violence against women. Also, in a context where only 3 out of every 100 individuals have mobile broadband subscriptions, apps-based approaches target only a small proportion of the population, leaving out those women who are most vulnerable to GBV.

The Society for the Elimination of Rural Poverty (SERP) in Andhra Pradesh has demonstrated an alternative approach to ICT programming in the fight against VAW. SERP’s main strategy is to utilize a Self Help Group approach for the economic and social empowerment of poor women. Tackling Gender Based Violence is considered a critical part of this strategy, and hence, in all the villages it works in, SERP created Social Action Committees of women volunteers willing to challenge domestic violence, human trafficking, sexual assault, child marriage, and other such rightsviolations against women in their local communities. The Social Action Committee volunteers have been trained to liaise with district-level institutions such as Family Counselling Centres, Free Legal Aid Cell and alternative dispute resolution mechanisms to assist women who are facing GBV. In 2012, SERP created an IVRbased reporting and tracking mechanism to support the work of the Social Action Committee in timely reporting of GBV instances in their local communities, and coordinated assistance for individual victims, from the district machinery.