Women Help Women

https://womenhelp.org/

The open call for applications was open for two weeks and half and received 170 applications among which almost 40% came from pro-choice activists thanks to a strong diffusion by our partner WHW.

Participants mainly came from Central American and Caribbean countries encompassing Mexico (7), Panama (5), Nicaragua (7), Honduras (4), El Salvador (2), Republica Dominicana (2) Guatemala (1), Costa Rica (1). Among those we find four countries which forbid abortion under any circumstance. There were also some participants from South American countries, namely from Peru (1), Colombia (1), Venezuela (1), Ecuador (1) and Chile (1) where the legal and social criminalisation of abortion is also among the harshest of all LAC. All together they brought various experiences regarding their activism, uses and practices with technologies, the risks and attacks they were facing inasmuch as their security strategies, resilience and agency.

It should also be noted that one of the aims behind the selection of participants was to provide priority to centro american countries. Our research on risks and attacks faced by pro-choice activists in LAC detected that activists from those countries were facing higher level of dangers, and this finding was echoed by some of the experts invited at the 5 days preparatory meeting that took place in March 2017. They confirmed that activists from Central American countries, in comparison to activists located in south America, had in general fewer opportunities to attend training oriented towards privacy and digital security and had also in general fewer possibilities to meet and share among them.

- Digital Security: Security basics, Browser control, Malware attacks, Server attacks and hosting solutions, Anonymity, Encryption, TAILS and Deep web. - Mobiles security: Understanding of infrastructure and mobiles, Security and privacy configuration for mobiles, Alternatives for telephony over VOIP. - Politics of data: Metadata, Criteria for selecting and developing apps, Creating and protecting databases, SEO and positioning your contents. - Gender and technology: Creative uses of social networks, Feminist campaigning taking into account privacy and security, Reporting and documenting gender based online violence, Hacking hate speech, Big data and sexual surveillance. - Training skills: ADIDS for education to technologies, Create safe spaces.

Besides those sessions, there were three labs at the end of the day that people could attend: the feminist hackerspace, a science fiction lab and a self care lab. We can note that lots of participants engaged in the hackerspace even if it was not a mandatory activity. It shows that digital security and privacy are concepts that they understood as relevant for their activity. Some didn't have any experience with free software and privacy tools before, but they were clearly in search for learning and using immediately or as soon as possible those in their routines. The other most attended lab was the self care one where the facilitator provided methodologies for dealing with stress and anxiety, how to relax and rebalance when facing fear and trauma, and provided space for exchanging on methods for collective and individual self care. The science fiction lab was also attended by some participants during the first two days but was dropped in the last two days as participants felt it was more urgent to attend the hackerspace or the self care lab. Anyhow it enabled to work on the issue of creativity and how to develop methodologies that easy the process of collective creation of imaginaries, narratives and desires in relation to our technologies and activisms.

From those conversations they moved towards a first collective session aimed at designing and updating an integral security plan. Participants worked around four different cases studies where they assessed actors, risks and mitigation strategies in order to design a protocol taking into account the inter-relation between physical integrity, digital security and psychosocial well-being.

This inaugural session enabled to visibilize the diversity of knowledge and practices of security already in place among the participants and their networks. It enabled the group to understand that they were already applying in their daily routine as pro-choice activists the basic principles of the four digital mitigation strategies namely called “fortification”, “reduction”, “obfuscation” and “compartimentalisation”. During the wrap up we introduced briefly the main results from our research on risks and attacks faced by pro-choice activists in LAC and checked with them that the information made sense and resonate with their own experience. We also discovered that some of them had answered the online survey or provided us with an interview through email.

This first day enabled participants to share a common vocabulary and to have a better understanding of the diversity of their contexts, challenges and strategies. At the same time it informed them about which sessions they should attend during the next days. In the same way, facilitators could have a general sense of the levels of knowledge and practices regarding security and to better feel how they should adapt their contents and facilitation methodologies during the next days.

The schedule generally offered 2 different sessions in parallel enabling participants to engage in the session that better suited their level of practice and knowledge. Besides that all sessions were distributed among 2 or 3 facilitators and an extra facilitator was taking notes of the session. Added to this, all facilitators had a formal debrief meeting every night to evaluate how the day and the sessions went on and where they could get extra support for adapting methodologies, contents, hands-on exercises and the overall training spaces.

Finally the last day, the agenda was shaped along the conversations that the group of participants felt they need to go more in-depth, namely a session for sharing about their security protocols, one session about lobbying towards public institutions and developing campaigns together and a session about how to be supported and support others when they are facing technology related violence. This was followed up by a closing session regarding updating and maintaining integrated security protocols where participants review the cases studies they analized during the first day and complemented those with the new contents, tools and methodologies they discovered during the GTI. We moved finally to a closing session where we discussed the next steps after the meeting, which training or advocacy activities participants where planning once back home, how they wanted to stay in contact, how the documentation of the sessions should be managed and where everyone could achieve a formal evaluation of the event (see annex 1).

Finally, participants also felt that the Institute was different because it focused on the security as a multilayer of processes and practices taking place inside their networks of solidarity and support, rather than providing a top down approach that focuses primarily on privacy and digital security tools. In that sense, it was also felt important that facilitators underlined the existing links between the holistic and integrated security approach to the different methodologies and practices developed within feminists and gender social justice movements, showing the continuum existing between online and offline approaches to security. All together, it provided participants with a sense of enjoying a strong framework (theoretical and practical) that make easier to link all those dimensions together and include more privacy and digital security into their lives and work.