Titled ‘How Pakistani Women are Taking the Internet Back’, the segment becomes the featured talk at TED Talks.
An accomplished lawyer and human activist, Nighat Dad is the founder of Digital Rights Foundation, Pakistan – a research-based non-profit advocacy geared towards ICT to support human rights, democratic processes, and digital governance. Also the core Pakistan member of TED Talks, she is one of the pioneers who have campaigned for access to open internet in Pakistan as well as globally.
One of the lawyers taken onboard to fight Meesha Shafi’s case against Ali Zafar (the former recently accused the latter of sexual harassment), Nighat Dad spoke about cyber harassment and the need to have safe online spaces for women, in a segment featured at TED Talks. Titled ‘How Pakistani Women Are Taking the Internet Back‘, it was originally presented at an official TED conference in 2017 but has now been published as the featured talk on their site. And it couldn’t be more relevant than it is today.
“Imagine waking up to a stranger, sometimes multiple strangers, questioning your right to existence for something that you wrote online,” she says in her talk. “Waking up to an angry message, scared and worried for your safety, welcome to the world of cyber harassment. The kind of harassment that women face in Pakistan is very serious and leads to sometimes deadly outcomes. This kind of harassment keeps women from accessing internet, essentially knowledge. It is a form of oppression.”
She speaks about how Pakistan is the sixth most populist country in the world with 140 million people having access to mobile technologies and that the country is also the birth place of the youngest Nobel peace prize winner, Malala Yousafzai. Having said that, she also points out that it is where the twisted concept of honor is linked to the women and their bodies.
“[It is] where men are allowed to disrespect [women] and anyone kills them sometimes in the name of so-called family honor where women are left to die right outside their house for speaking to a man on a mobile phone,” she adds. “Let me say this very clearly, it is not honour, it is a coldblooded murder. I come from a very small village in Punjab, Pakistan, where women aren’t allowed to pursue their higher education. My family traditions and expectations from women wouldn’t allow me to own a mobile phone until I was married. And even when I was married, this tool became a tool for my own surveillance. When I resisted to this idea of being surveilled by my ex-husband, he really didn’t approve of this and threw me out of his house along with my six months old son, Abdullah.”
“That was the time when I first asked myself, ‘Why aren’t women allowed to enjoy the same, equal rights enshrined in our constitution?’” she questions. “While the law states that a woman has the same, equal access to information, why it is always men – brothers, fathers and husbands – who are granting these rights to us, effectively making the law irrelevant?”
This led to the formation of Digital Rights Foundation in 2012 that aimed to provide free and safe internet as well as convince young women that it is their fundamental right. In an attempt to offer a solution to this menace, Nighat Dad started Pakistan’s first cyber harassment helpline in December 2016 to extend support to women who don’t know who to turn to when they face serious threats online.
“Safe access to internet is an access to knowledge and knowledge is freedom. When I fight for women’s digital rights, I am fighting for equality,” she concludes her talk optimistically.
