Digital Technologies and Interventions Against Gender-Based Violence in Rural Areas

• Date: 01 December 2021
• Published date: 01 December 2021
• Author: Andrea Adams,Suzanne G. Lea,Elsa M. D’Silva
• DOI: 10.1177/10575677211040413
• Subject Matter: Articles

Digital Technologies and

Interventions Against

Gender-Based Violence

in Rural Areas

Andrea Adams

1

, Suzanne G. Lea

1

,

and Elsa M. D’Silva

2

Abstract

This study reports experiences of combining digital technologies and facilitated interventions to

address gender-based violence in rural areas. The methodology was based on the Safecity platform

with a combination of communicative methods, digital technologies, and participant-led inter ven-

tions to address gender-based violence in the State of Bihar and the Satara district in rural India.

The f‌indings indicate that the most common barriers to creating change in rural communities

include patriarchal mindsets that foster a culture of silence around women’s rights, lack

of education, digital illiteracy, and lack of access to digital tools and services. Notwithstanding

these obstacles, rural Indian women and girls participated in an intervention to create a new nar-

rative informed by technological solutions that addressed gender violence in their comm unities.

Keywords

smartphone apps, gender-based violence, rural safety

Introduction

Studies that address how digital technologies support women’s safety in rural areas are just emerg-

ing. Globally, sexual violence and gender-based violence (GBV) are pandemics impacting, on

average, the lives of one in three women (Tappis et al., 2016). According to the National Crime

Research Bureau of India, a rape occurs every 18 min (Bhattacharya & Bhattacharya, 2015). As

many as 95% of Indian women report having been sexually assaulted (Himabindu et al., 2014).

Several recent initiatives address GBV in urban areas, including Women’s Safety Audits and the

Safe Delhi campaign (Whiztman et al., 2009). Mobile applications for urban areas have been devel-

oped to address safety—the largest and best known of which is Safecity (Pavitra & Karthikeyan,

2017). In rural areas, the process of deploying tools women can use to protect themselves has

1

Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of the District of Columbia, Washington, DC , USA

2

Crime, Justice and Security Program, Red Dot Foundation Global, Mumbai, India

Corresponding Author:

Andrea Adams, Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of the District of Columbia, Washington, DC, USA.

Email: andrea.adams@udc.edu

Article

International Criminal Justice Review

2021, Vol. 31(4) 438-455

© 2021 Georgia State University

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DOI: 10.1177/10575677211040413

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been much slower, but there are efforts to empower women to foster cultural change within their

communities (Nimala, 2015).

The Safecity app was conceived and launched in December 2012 in the aftermath of the horrif‌ic

gang rape of Jyoti Singh on a bus in Delhi. The aim was to encourage survivors to document their

sexual and GBV experiences to bridge the data gap that exists due to the underreporting of these

experiences. Every story is anonymously crowdsourced and geotagged on a map creating visualiza-

tions that help analyze the patterns and trends emerging by category, location, and day of the week.

Close to 19,000 reports have been collected, mainly from India and Kenya. Almost 90% of the data

collected has resulted from the workshops and focus group discussions facilitated within communi-

ties among women and girls (Lea et al., 2021a; Lea & D’Silva, 2021b). A similar approach could

work in a rural setting, but women and girls in rural India are much less likely to own a smartphone

or have access to one (Mehta & Mehta, 2014). The f‌ifth National Family Health Survey also iden-

tif‌ied a signif‌icant digital divide in India, with rural women having particularly low digital literacy or

access. In 2020, only 40% of the women surveyed had ever used the internet, compared to 60% of

men (Borah & Kalita, 2019).

According to UNESCO’s, 2014 report Teaching and Learning: Achieving Equality for All,

women comprise 59% of the 313 million Indians who are illiterate. But, ∼50.6% of women in

rural areas are illiterate compared to 23.1% of women in urban areas (RA, 2019). Literacy is critical

to a woman’s safety and well-being because it enables them to access and understand their legal

rights, f‌ind better jobs, and advocate for their safety (Avis, 2017).

That being said, individual access to smartphones is not the only way to capture or use the digital

information smartphones collect. Apps have facilitated dialogue within the community

(Tymoschchuck et al., 2021) and with police or municipal off‌icials (Brewster et al., 2018) and

have helped identify infrastructural areas that need improvement, such as lighting, public toilets,

transport, and police beat patrols (Kopackova & Komarkova, 2020).

Using a communicative methodological approach (Gómez et al., 2019), the Safecity team worked

with communities to gather rural women and girls’stories in community settings to understand their

willingness to learn and use digital technology. The study used community dialogue and stories to

co-create contextualized community knowledge about instances and locations of GBV.

We present in this article the intervention and results of initiatives in two rural communities: the

State of Bihar and the Satara district. We specif‌ically explore the how the patriarchal mindset informs

rural India’s place-based factors contributing to GBV or sexual harassment against women. We also

review the development of smartphone apps to address women’s safety and to consider how to

address the limited existence of these apps in rural settings. This study demonstrates how the

Safecity app’s modif‌ication for rural use can help “shed light on societal levels of violence”

(Eisenhut, 2017, p. 7) to support community-level interventions. We conclude that this framework

can be used to address similar issues in other rural communities.

Theoretical Background

Digital India Initiatives and Digital Literacy

India is one of the fastest-growing markets for digital consumers with >600 million internet users

in 2019. Through the Digital India program, India’s Government is trying to bridge the digital divide

by improving infrastructure, particularly in rural India. Per Kantar’s ICUBE report, rural internet sub-

scribers accounted for >38% of the total internet subscribers as of March 2020, which increased from

∼32% in March 2017 (Kantar ICUBE Report, 2020). Recent studies have also shown that technology

initiatives that support digital literacy can help empower rural women living under patriarchal

systems. Digital literacy, “the ability to f‌ind, evaluate, utilize, share, and create content using

Adams et al. 439