Technology Facilitated Violence Against Women and Girls with Disability in the Sub-Sahara Region: Anthropocentric Intensification, Risk and Resistance.
Technology Facilitated Violence Against Women and Girls with Disability in the Sub-Sahara Region: Anthropocentric Intensification, Risk and Resistance.
Friday, 11 July 2025: 00:00
Location: FSE015 (Faculty of Education Sciences (FSE))
Oral Presentation
As technology develops, it broadens the scope for potential opportunities for violence and abuse, both
by exacerbating conventional forms of Gender Based Violence and by perpetrating qualitatively new
forms of violence that were previously impossible, or which take a fundamentally different form online.
During an era of intensified digital penetration in the sub-Saharan region, digital inclusion not only
enabled women and girls with disabilities to shape their narrative and make their voices heard via digital
technologies, but also opened up the risk of reproducing and entrenching long standing forms of
discrimination, deep social stigmatization and covert everyday forms of microaggressions towards
people with disabilities. Anthropocentric modes of engagement heavily rely upon further digitisation
across all forms of social, economic and cultural life. Civil society, government and social platforms,
Apps, communications and information flows are now built around new AI and algorithmic formulae,
modelled on NLP processes that often entail deeply entrenched structural biases, generating further
risks. Whilst technology companies such as Microsoft are developing fully accessible everyday
technologies, such affordances are not necessarily available to highly vulnerable community members in
the Sub-Sahara region. Novel digital affordances thus operate at a distinct place of contradiction for
women with disabilities – they offer the promise of new forms of accessible engagement yet
simultaneously, are limited in their regulatory capacity to safeguard women and girls with disabilities
from technology facilitated sexual violence and vulnerability. Drawing upon the findings of a large-scale
national survey across South Africa, this paper will demonstrate new emergent vulnerability and risk for
women and girls with disabilities and discuss practices of disruption and hacking practiced by this group
to disrupt the everyday forms of violence that they experience when being online.
by exacerbating conventional forms of Gender Based Violence and by perpetrating qualitatively new
forms of violence that were previously impossible, or which take a fundamentally different form online.
During an era of intensified digital penetration in the sub-Saharan region, digital inclusion not only
enabled women and girls with disabilities to shape their narrative and make their voices heard via digital
technologies, but also opened up the risk of reproducing and entrenching long standing forms of
discrimination, deep social stigmatization and covert everyday forms of microaggressions towards
people with disabilities. Anthropocentric modes of engagement heavily rely upon further digitisation
across all forms of social, economic and cultural life. Civil society, government and social platforms,
Apps, communications and information flows are now built around new AI and algorithmic formulae,
modelled on NLP processes that often entail deeply entrenched structural biases, generating further
risks. Whilst technology companies such as Microsoft are developing fully accessible everyday
technologies, such affordances are not necessarily available to highly vulnerable community members in
the Sub-Sahara region. Novel digital affordances thus operate at a distinct place of contradiction for
women with disabilities – they offer the promise of new forms of accessible engagement yet
simultaneously, are limited in their regulatory capacity to safeguard women and girls with disabilities
from technology facilitated sexual violence and vulnerability. Drawing upon the findings of a large-scale
national survey across South Africa, this paper will demonstrate new emergent vulnerability and risk for
women and girls with disabilities and discuss practices of disruption and hacking practiced by this group
to disrupt the everyday forms of violence that they experience when being online.