Bringing CSW Home: Solutions to Strengthen Civic Space and Women’s Digital Rights

Moderator: Alexandra Pascalidou, award-winning journalist, author, producer, and TV hostess, UN Women Sweden’s President.

Speakers: Representation from governments, civil society, private sector, youth, media, and international organisations.

This virtual event is co-organised by the UN Women Nordic Liaison Office, and Finnish, Icelandic, and Swedish National Committees.

Opposition to gender equality and to women’s rights activism has become more vocal, global, and better organised in recent years. Not only are there coordinated and well-resourced, well-networked groups putting forward traditional, patriarchal, binary, and hetero-normative constructs of men’s and women’s roles in society and polity, but these notions are finding public legitimacy through political processes and rhetoric, including from political leaders at the highest levels of governments. This challenge to long established international UN human rights frameworks norms and standards is playing out in policy making spaces nationally, regionally, and globally.

As a result, we are seeing the hard-won gains on women’s rights currently under attack in fields as diverse as sexual and reproductive rights, political participation, the labour market, care work, and violence against women.

Trends of de-democratisation have gone hand in hand with the articulated opposition to established standards of gender equality and the backsliding of previous gender equality policy gains. Women’s rights are significantly at threat particularly when such rights have been more recently established and where the space for civil society actors to defend them is limited and/or shrinking.

This situation is further aggravated by rampant misinformation and disinformation fuelled by technology and the surveillance, censorship, and violence enabled by the digital sphere.

Women are disproportionately targeted and suffer serious consequences as a result of online and technology-facilitated violence against women (TFVAW). The aggression faced by women and girls online also restricts their access to online services and tools, affects their work and learning opportunities, and deters their engagement as active digital citizens in important online spaces and dialogues. Women human rights defenders, politicians and journalists are at greater risk of technology-facilitated violence, as are women facing multiple discriminations. One of the consequences of online and technology-facilitated violence against women and girls is that victims/survivors silence themselves online, which limits participation in public discourse, resulting in a democratic deficit.

The growing resistance, regression, and push-back on gender equality is taking place globally as well as in the Nordic context. In September 2022, the Nordic Ministers for Gender Equality launched the Nordic Roadmap on Advancing Gender Equality, Women’s and Girls Rights, and Equal Rights of LGBTI-persons 2022-2024 outlining their commitment and response to the push-back and anti-gender movement.

The Nordic Roadmap is anchored by the Nordic Council of Ministers and serves as a framework to strengthen and elevate the common Nordic voice for gender equality, women’s and girls’ rights, and equal rights for LGBTI- persons internationally, responding to three specific objectives:
a) To promote a common Nordic voice and communication,
b) To foster advocacy, alliances and cooperation,
c) To exchange experiences.