ASEAN Regional Coalition to #StopDigitalDictatorship
Panusaya ‘Rung’ Sithijirawattanakul - © Adirach Toumlamoon (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Panusaya_Sithijirawattanakul.jpg)
💗🏳️🌈 Digital Dictatorship threatens the safety of
women, LGBTIQA+, and all other communities
marginalised based on gender/queerness
Similar to the aforementioned cases regarding
people who have been marginalised based on race,
ethnicity, and religion, women and LGBTIQA+ people
are targeted based on their identities, even when
states claim that they recognize gender equality
and LGBTIQA+ rights. Online sexual harassment,
smear campaigns, doxxing, forced outings, misogyny,
and other gender-based violence, are used in
every Southeast Asian nation as weapons against
people of marginalized gender and sexuality
identities, especially those with intersecting
marginalized identities. For example, Malaysian
Muslim women’s advocates have reportedly been
harassed for supporting Muslim women’s rights
causes, and have been accused of being morally
‘deviant’ for doing so.1 It must also be acknowledged
that separate from online harassment, people of
marginalised gender/sexuality identities also deal
with disproportionate levels of gender-based and
sexuality-based violence if/when incarcerated as
a result of Digital Dictatorship. Part of the issue
is also likely the lack of representation of diverse
gender identities in governments and other decisionmaking bodies. If societies are disproportionately
straight-identifying and patriarchal, they are more
likely to cause and/or allow violence against people
of marginalised gender and sexuality identities.
Overall, women and LGBTIQA+ individuals are
disproportionately affected by gender-based
harassment and digital dictatorship overall.
To read more, please see our ’INTERSECTIONAL
GENDER ANALYSIS’ sections at the end of each
country chapter.
1. UN Women Asia Pacific, Online Violence Against Women in Asia: A Multicountry Study, (November 2020), available at: https://asiapacific.
unwomen.org/sites/default/files/Field%20Office%20ESEAsia/Docs/Publications/2020/12/ap-ICT-VAWG-report-7Dec20.pdf
Fig. B2, Intersectional Gender Focus: Digital Dictatorship threatens the safety of women,
LGBTIQA+, and all other communities marginalised based on gender/queerness.
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