To speak to this moment, JASS is excited to offer a series of virtual dialogues – where we can come together in reflection and discussion, share ideas, tools and build collective analysis and strategies. We are calling the series Women Radically Transforming a World in Crisis in honor of the Mexico City framework developed for the 25th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women.
We invite you to the First Virtual Dialogue!
Thursday, April 2, 13:00 hrs UTC (check for your time zone)
This dialogue is co-convened by JASS, the Mesoamerican Initiative of Women Human Rights Defenders (IM-Defensoras) and the Association of Progressive Communications (APC). As activists we know that collective safety is a critical ingredient in transforming a world in crisis. Our challenges to the status quo bring backlash and risk on multiple levels, this is intensifying as we live through the COVID-19 Pandemic.
We will focus on activist safety from a feminist and movement perspective, and on resources in our new toolkit for women human rights defenders, Our Rights, Our Safety developed by women for women, with the support of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders. The toolkit is designed to strengthen both the power and safety of our work. It invites us to celebrate our struggles and to recognize ourselves as part of a global movement for a just and sustainable world.
The virtual dialogue is open to all and will include interpretation in English and Spanish.
Please note that we will be using an audio-conferencing system that will allow us to use simultaneous interpretation during the call.
If you need a dial-up number to join, find your country code here. Then, if you’re dialing in, for the English Channel press 1*504127, for the Bilingual Channel press 0*504127, and for the Spanish Channel press 2*504127.
Feel free to share this invitation to other allies and WHRDs. We look forward to being with you virtually
The first installment of our Dialogues – Women Radically Transforming a World in Crisis – focused on activist safety from a feminist and movement perspective. We co-hosted it with our friends from the Mesoamerican Women Human Rights Defenders Initiative (IM-Defensoras) and the (Association for Progressive Communications-APC. The speakers were Marusia López (IM-Defensoras), Jennifer Radloff and Erika Smith (both APC) and Shereen Essof (JASS).
We conducted the dialogue in English and Spanish with simultaneous translation. Not an easy feat and not without its technical glitches, but reflective of our commitment to language justice and the full participation of women across the regions in which JASS works. This feels important particularly, as Jennifer noted, given “the huge inequality that exists in access, control and ownership [of the Internet].”
The world was already in crisis: a climate crisis caused by extractive capitalism, a crisis of violence and human rights abuses with new levels of authoritarianism and repression, and a crisis of States failing to adequately address basic needs and co-opted by corporate power and criminal forces. It is for this reason we created the toolkit. – Marusia
Marusia kicked off the conversation by sharing the new JASS toolkit, Our Rights, Our Safety, a resource by and for women activists to help strengthen both the power and safety of our work.
She described the toolkit as a holistic guide that centers the knowledge of women human rights defenders from different contexts, and is designed to help individuals and communities assess risk and create strategies for collective safety. As a feminist guide, it begins with our bodies and the impact of threats, fear and violence on lives. And from there, it helps users analyze their context and the power dynamics driving the risk.
The guide offers tools and activities, including the protection tree, designed to help groups draw on their own knowledge, ancestral and movement traditions and community strengths – not an outside intervention – to create collective safety. She stressed, that at this “time of uncertainty, when elites intend to profit from our lives and strengthen social control, it is time once again to trust in our own knowledge and our networks of protection and care.”
"time of uncertainty, when elites intend to profit from our lives and strengthen social control, it is time once again to trust in our own knowledge and our networks of protection and care." ~ Marusia
The toolkit has 5 modules:
This toolkit is an important product from JASS multi-year exploration of closing democratic space and violence against human rights defenders – Defending Rights in Hostile Contexts. The learning from the related convenings can be found on our Power and Protection platform.
The toolkit, created by Mariela Arce, Valerie Miller and Marusia, is based in feminist popular education (FPE). JASS uses this methodology as part of its movement building work to foster critical consciousness, because it helps grassroots women and their communities challenge the prevailing forms of knowledge that reinforce the status quo and legitimize their own experiences, knowledge and analysis. In the context of this toolkit, FPE supports activists in rejecting the stigma and other power dynamics are that are used to silence us, as well as challenge harmful ideas about protection.
Jennifer Radloff and Erika Smith (APC) began by reminding participants that: “We cannot separate our physical and emotional safety from the digital world. What happens in real life, happens in the digital world.” APC has a longstanding relationship with JASS including our collaboration in creating an activist toolkit, “ICTs for Feminist Movement Building” (2015).
Here are some of the key reflections they shared on digital safety and WHRDs from their work:
Check out these online resources on digital safety and security: