Tell us a bit about The Empower Project…
The Empower Project is an intersectional, feminist, membership organisation supporting communities to lead change to end gender-based violence in Scotland. Our focus is on responding to violence and abuse in the digital age, looking specifically at online and tech abuse; this includes image abuse (so-called revenge porn), sextortion, doxxing and harassment.
We do this by creating spaces for women to share their experiences and thoughts on tech-facilitated abuse and then support them to design local and community-based responses. Over the past three years, we’ve been creating spaces for women to engage with us, this could be anything from a pizza party or zine-making workshop through to a parliamentary reception.
Taking what we learn, we engage with support organisations and universities and schools, providing training directly to workers, students and teachers on issues that women are faced with in the online world. We also engage with Scottish Government and elected officials to ask for change in making online spaces safer for all.
What is tech abuse?
Stalking and Harassment has always existed but since the growth of the digital world, it has become easier for those who carry it out to do so in online spaces. This is a broad term for a type of online abuse that can affect or impact people in many different ways. Some terms you might not be familiar with are doxing, which means documents and is the act of disclosing personal information without consent. Deep fakes are an emerging form of abuse where images of a person have been photoshopped onto pornographic images to humiliate and manipulate. Orbiting often happens if someone has been rejected but they continually orbit your online world to threaten you.
So-called ‘Revenge Porn’ is not about revenge or pornography, it’s about control and humiliation. This type of abuse is frequently commented on within the media and is one of the more ‘well-known’ types of online abuse.
Cyber-flashing is the sharing of nude/explicit images often via Airdrop, DMs, messaging apps or email. The images are often sent to strangers or you will receive them from someone you might know but they will be unwanted.
Cyber-bullying is offensive, threatening or abusive behaviour that happens in online spaces.
Finally, here are some of the things you might see happening on social media platforms:
A troll is someone who deliberately tries to upset someone or be controversial to start arguments for their own amusement or a specific gain. A pile on is when a large number of people respond to a particular tweet or target an account and being ratiod is when the number of replies to a tweet are larger than the number of likes. This usually signifies that a pile on has occurred.
How can people look after themselves online?
Firstly, it’s important to think about your privacy. Privacy can be anything from the level of privacy we have on our social media accounts and who can access our pages through to who we let follow us on social media accounts. Some apps will auto-set your privacy settings to basic when you update or re-install, so it’s always important to check.
We see so much content online that it can be become really overwhelming at times. Make sure you set yourself boundaries. Boundaries is a two-fold heading, as we mean both online and offline. Online, social media platforms allow us to edit our feeds in a number of ways to limit the harmful or abusive content that we see. Take advantage of these settings! Filtering can improve the quality of the tweets that you see by using account origin and behaviour and can improve your experience. The mute feature is always a great way to remove an account’s Tweets from your timeline and of course you have the option to block users too.
Think about what you need from your online world? Sometimes, we need support from our families and friends but they also need to know your boundaries! It is okay for you not to want certain content shared of you online, even if you have an active social presence.
What does the future hold?
The Empower Project is a small charity with no paid members of staff. We operate with two co-directors, who are paid on an ad-hoc basis through grants for projects, volunteers and we are governed by a board of trustees. We are currently being supported by Rosa Fund for Women to redevelop our strategy and build the capacity of our small, but mighty, team.
Looking forward, we are approaching the future with ambitions under the three headings of Community, Learn and Influence. Our vision is to ensure that we are a community-led charity that exists to create inclusive spaces for people to learn, resist and party. We want our people to embody and champion our values and are from diverse backgrounds.
We want to build on our existing training packages to provide high-quality, current training and resources to practitioners, public-sector workers and teachers and students to inform and educate. We want to ensure our website and digital presence is interactive, engaging and provides opportunity for learning.
Our intention is to use our community-led insight, we make change at a Government level and to establish new, diverse partnerships, to engage new groups, promote opportunities and amplify voices.
You can find more information about us on our website, www.theempowerproject.co.uk and on instagram and twitter @empowerproject_