Point of View held “Connect Your Rights!”, an all-day meeting exploring the links between gender rights, sexual rights, and Internet rights, on November 11, 2013 at Mumbai. It was the first meeting in the second phase of the EroTICs India project. The first phase comprised of an exploratory research study on sexuality and ICTs in India.
This exploratory meeting ventured into somewhat uncharted terrain, but terrain that it is critical for activists to start navigating in this digital age. Some of the issues discussed at the meeting were: online activism (in the context of violence against women, both offline and online), online pornography (against the backdrop of two recent petitions in India to ban online porn), online identities (does the Internet create a space for women to express themselves in ways that are not always permissible in the offline world?), and online risks (that activists face, and ways to mitigate them).
The meeting was live-tweeted with the hashtag #EroTICsMum. Meetings with the same theme are scheduled to take place in New Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai and Bangalore. Here are a few snippets from Connect Your Rights put together by Paras (@WiseDonkay).