Redefining Women’s Voices and Rights Through Social Media in South Asia

Social media has shown to be an effective tool for drawing attention to women’s rights concerns among a larger audience, igniting protests in cities worldwide, and pressuring policymakers to increase their pledges to gender equality. The #metoo movement’s influence highlighted social media’s influence as the phenomenon that revealed misogyny in several fields, including the area of humanitarian relief, and gave sexual assault survivors a voice. The proliferation of social media and the remarkable adoption of new technologies by women provide significant chances to put gender equality and women’s rights problems at the center of public discourse and media coverage.

Internet and Technology Use Among South Asian Women

The amount women’s online activism has impacted and influenced policy-making remains inconsistent and unexpected in South Asia, despite many of these efforts’ great exposure and effectiveness. South Asia has the most significant mobile gender disparity when we compare the statistics to other parts of the world. In the area, women are 28% less likely to buy a mobile phone and 58% less likely to use mobile Internet than men. This echoes the marginalization of women in public life and the struggle of the grassroots women’s movement to be heard in decision-making processes. 

Even when women have access to the Internet and technologies, they cannot fully utilize social media for political activism due to illiteracy, language hurdles, and the infrastructural gap between rural and urban areas for digital infrastructure. Furthermore, even though literacy in South Asia increased from 46% to 72% between 1990 and 2016, the region is home to half of the world’s illiterate people, most of whom are women. According to GSMA research, normative hurdles can add barriers to mobile phone ownership and use in South Asia. For example, women in South Asian nations are viewed as prone to online corruption, meaning that women’s mobile internet usage can jeopardize their family’s reputations. Because of these normative restrictions, women’s internet use may be limited.

Impact of Use of Social Media on South Asian women’s rights

The eight countries of South Asia, home to a quarter of the world’s population, represent a wide range of legal and political regimes for media control and ideological stances on free speech, which translates into a variety of views toward new media technologies and the Internet. Social media has evolved into a platform for female self-expression and has aided in developing women’s capacities, promoting their involvement in the decision-making processes.

The 2012 Delhi gang rape serves as a historical case where the agitation by many activists on various social media platforms forced the government to take strict action and reform the laws as soon as possible. Similarly, She Says India, a Mumbai-based NGO, launched the #LahuKaLagaan campaign in 2017 to eliminate the Goods and Services Tax on sanitary pads. In 2018, the campaign was successful when the government declared sanitary napkins tax-free. Furthermore, in Bangladesh, women are standing up against the culture of violence through the help of social media. Umana Zillur, the co-founder of the #RageAgainstRape movement alongside Ms. Mortada, notes that protests had previously taken place in Bangladesh, but it is different this time. Numerous women have taken to the streets and social media to protest the need for laws to address the daily rise in rape cases. In response to these requests, on Oct. 12, 2020, the cabinet swiftly accepted a proposal by Aninsul Huq, Bangladesh’s minister of law, to include the death sentence for all four categories of rape recognized by Bangladeshi law.

The Occupy Baluwatar movement was one of the first to use social media, and #Occupybaluwatar was a popular hashtag on Twitter and Facebook during the protest in Nepal. This 107-day campaign was started by lone activists and developed into a full-fledged effort to combat violence against women and impunity. The public, prominent women’s rights activists, civil society members, and political parties all overwhelmingly supported the campaign. Despite ongoing efforts and triumphs, women-led social media movements have not had a lasting influence. 

Shortcomings and Way forward

On the one hand, social media is a vital tool for empowering women, but it is also harmful in other ways. It has aided in the democratization of information access but has also revealed the significant fault lines that remain. This has become a big global, national, and regional worry. The hashtag culture may be a tremendous tool for empowering women, but it has also been reported that it is commonly used to threaten women. Slut shaming and threats of rape and death by anonymous accounts have become widespread. Furthermore, the proliferation of many hashtag movements causes activism fatigue, preventing significant movements from receiving the attention they deserve. The internet and social media platforms, which were once lauded for providing an unbiased forum for minority perspectives, are now being abused by particular segments for promoting their self-interest, depending on who pays the most.

Another difficulty for the women-led nonviolent movement in South Asia via social media is providing underprivileged women from around the area a voice and assuring their involvement. It is high time to move the conversation beyond homogenized South Asian women and finally acknowledge the region’s diversity of women and the various types of discrimination based on caste, ethnicity, and religion. Furthermore, it is past time for the South Asian women’s movement to lose its elite and urban-centric image and pave the Way for an inclusive movement in reality. A similar difficulty for the women’s movement is to guarantee that women without access to technology are represented. The onus is on metropolitan South Asian women to overcome the technological divide between them and their rural village counterparts.

In a globalized world where most urban women use hashtags like #metoo to show solidarity with women worldwide, the voices of women from South Asia’s rural hinterlands, and their actual cause and battle for rights, should not be drowned out.

[Photo by Kevin Smith, vi Wikimedia Commons]

Aashiyana Adhikari is a research associate at Centre for South Asian Studies, Kathmandu, Nepal. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. 

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