Manual introduction

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Motivations behind this manual + Oriented at - target audience

This manual is the result of a global conversation between women, queer and trans persons about how to develop practices that enable us and our allies to include privacy and digital security into our lives, and how can we keep on learning meanwhile helping others to learn about those concepts, methods and tools? Recurrently our reduced amount of free time, fragmented and precarious lives and lack of individual and collective self care cultures are pointed at as major challenges. How can we include and pack those fast evolving privacy and digital security practices into our already very busy lives as human rights defenders and activists? How can we find collective mechanisms of support to keep advancing together and empower each other?

Why those sub chapters?

Safe Spaces as Feminist Practices

Safe spaces have been used by groups marginalized in societies and communities for many decades now. Safe spaces have been a way to care for one-self and for a collective, to design and craft strategies and tactics of resistance and to create an oasis of peace in what sometimes can be a tiring struggle for resistance. Safe spaces have taken different meanings and bear different names depending on a variety of factors be it geographical, temporal, spatial, cultural and social, among others. The British author Virginia Woolf's has talked about a Room of One’s Own, a term often used by feminists to describe safe spaces.

What is the Relationship between Offline and Online?

The relationship between the online and offline worlds were addressed early on by cyberfeminist scholars and activists. In her book Zeroes + ones: digital women + the new technoculture, Sady Plant suggests that cyberspace has a feminist essence, and is therefore a natural space for women to inhabit. Rosi Braidotti, in her book Nomadic Subject, focuses on the fluidity and mobility aspects of online spaces that allows, she suggests, the creation of collective bonds among women. In other words, cyberspace makes global feminism possible in one's offline world as it is linked to the intimate, the immediate, the personal and the collective. Donna Haraway, in her Cyborg Manifesto, framed the internet as a force that might help shift forms of gender power on the Internet in turn enabling feminists to somewhat escape patriarchal structures online. This utopian view of cyberspace has since then been tone down as escaping gender, race or other intersectional forms of oppression has been much harder than first thought. But safe spaces are one way to experience and enable forms of collective and individual empowerment both online and offline.

What are Safe Spaces?

A common understanding of safe spaces are that they share common values, whether explicit, through a community agreement, or implicit through the sharing of values and enable members of a group to flourish, empower themselves and create community. The concept of safe spaces as embodied in second wave feminism in the western world was “explicitly committed to safety for individuals or communities that are targets of oppression” (Newman 2011, 138)1. Safe spaces are known to have provided a safe speaking and awareness raising environment for women involved in the women's liberation movement in the 60s and 70s in many countries where women could discuss about their experience in a patriarchal environment. Safe spaces are also about pushing boundaries and confronting certain difficult issues among a group of people such as: Who can be part of a women's only group? Who can be define as a woman? As these are important questions to be addressed, they need reflection, trust and the understanding of where our own assumptions come. We will come back to those questions later on in the manual.

Safe Space strategies have been used recently during the USA Occupy movements where many women, queer and trans did not feel safe to camp in the squares and parks. Some resorted to women-only tents, or women of color-only affinity groups while others mostly transwomen, opted for an online presence has putting their bodies on the line were deemed too dangerous. In Tahrir Square in Egypt, Operation Anti Sexual Harassment (OpAntiSH) was set up to react to a hostile environment and as a way to protect women and/or confront harassers and support survivors of sexual abuse and harassment. In Kenya, the women-only Umoja village was created for women survivors of rape and sexual assaults where they could feel safe and secure, raise their kids, earn a living collectively, heal and reclaim their dignity.

1) Newman, E. (2011). “Safer Spaces of Decolonize/Occupy Oakland: Some Reflections on Mental Health and Anti-Oppression Work in Revolutionary Times.” Journal for Social Action in Counseling and Psychology, 3(2), 138-141.

Safe Space Online?

Digital spaces are unique in multiple ways. Many women have reported experiencing the internet as a safe space for resisting gender oppression that they encounter in their every-day life. Fereshteh Nouraie-Simone talks about the internet as Wings of Freedom for Iranian women. Scholar Saskia Sassen argues that the internet allows women to be involved in new forms of contestations, build global community and potentially transform local women’s conditions. While these emancipatory experiences exist, and cannot be undervalued, women can also experience cyberspace in very different ways. Anita Sarkeesian who is behind the Feminist Frequency web platform was in 2012 the target of an online harassment campaign following the launch of her Kickstarter project called Tropes vs. Women in Video Games. She was harassed online and still is because she highlights sexism in video games. This story is not a unique case, it happens over and over.

Using safe spaces tactics and strategies is a good way to start inhabiting online and offline spaces according to the boundaries we want to set for ourselves and for our friends. This manual intends to do just that. To provide you with concrete suggestions on how to create safe spaces online and offline. It is divided in three core parts. First, a set of tools will be highlighted to move forward with starting to build safe spaces for you and your collectives/organizations through online communication such as mailing list, pads, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), etc. Second, it will focus on how to build safe spaces in “hostile” environments such as howto organize Wikipedia storming, how to install bots against trolls, how to do feminist counter-speech and finally, how to build safe spaces off line such as through women-only/feminist-only space to learn and Do-it-Together.

What are Feminist Principles on the Internet?

What is closer to today's feminist practice on the internet, which goes beyond simple politeness, are the Feminist Principles on the Internet. Those principles were developed in 2014, almost 20 years after the drafting of the above netiquette principles. The Association for Progressive Communications (APC) gathered a group of feminists to a Global Meeting on Gender, Sexuality and the Internet with the mandate to come up with a first list of principles. Their principles are about the ways in which the internet can be a transformative public and political space for feminists. It situates online violence and tech-related violence on the continuum of gender-based violence making clear the structural aspect of gender violence online and offline. The principles also highlight surveillance as a patriarchal tool whether it is used by the state, private individuals or corporation.

Why are these principles important?

The Feminist Principles on the Internet are a good way to address the relationship between the online and offline world making for instance the link clear between online and offline violence. The goal behind these principles are two-fold. First, it is a tool for feminists to guide them in understanding the internet as a new public space and how this space can be informed by feminist principles. In other words, it is about reframing the conversation around gender, sexuality, sexual rights and the internet. Second, it is a way to reclaim the Internet in creating spaces for feminists. In other words: safe spaces. If you want to contribute to the discussion join the hashtag #ImagineaFeministInternet.