The governments of Egypt and Belgium organized a side event during the 68th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), in partnership with UNFPA, UN Women, UNODC, ITU and UNICEF on March 11 in New York.
Titled “Making All Spaces Safe for Women and Girls: Unified Actions to Combat All Forms of Violence in the Digital Contexts,” the side event leveraged the collective expertise and resources of the participating organizations and provided a platform for stakeholders from various sectors to share insights and forge strategies to combat the challenges related to gender inequality, and misuse of the new and emerging technologies.
The event saw the participation of Dr. Maya Morsy, President of the Egyptian National Council for Women, Andrew Saberton, UNFPA Deputy Executive Director, and Leyla Sharfi, Chief of the Gender and Human Rights Branch at UNFPA’s Technical Division.
Dr. Morsy relayed Egypt’s efforts to address violence against women in digital spaces.
“Egypt is among the only three countries in the Arab region with comprehensive technology-facilitated violence against women legislation, as per the last Gender Justice report,” she said.
On his part, Saberton said, "It is critical that we innovate for the inclusion of technology-facilitated gender-based violence across existing gender-based violence programming to ensure that every woman and girl in every space is free from violence."
Meanwhile, Sharfi explained the different forms of technology-facilitated gender-based violence.
“When we hear the words ‘technology-facilitated gender-based violence’ we might think first of social media and image-based abuse. Technology-facilitated gender-based violence is much broader and includes all combinations of how hardware, software, data and algorithms create new opportunities for the expression of harmful gender norms, and the ways in which technologies can be used to perpetrate harm,” she said.
Recently, the Government of Egypt has pledged on a global initiative “Zero Tolerance for The Misuse of Technology to Incite or to Commit Violence Against Women and Girls” within the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights’ (OHCHR) initiative marking 75 years on the Declaration of Human Rights in 2023.
