From Tech-Led Violence to Digital Empowerment: Localizing Global Norms on GBV among the Rohingya Youth
摘要
Rohingya refugees are routinely exposed to multiple forms of violence, such as a lack of access to education, healthcare, and food security. These challenges often intersect with gender, such as women’s experiences of militarized sexual violence during the genocide and today with routine kidnapping and trafficking of girls, child marriage practices, intimate partner violence, and abuse by aid workers and Rohingya extremists and practitioners have cautioned that technology has heightened sexual and gender-based violence in the camps. In response to these challenges, humanitarian actors have attempted to offer treatment and prevention for survivors of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) but have been criticized for decentering the voices of survivors, stereotyping Rohingya men, and providing only a patchwork of services to communities. Drawing on interviews conducted in Cox’s Bazar and analyses of digital content, this chapter examines how Rohingya youths fight technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) through digital activism. While analyzing the different aims of this online activism, we argue that Rohingya youth are creating networked spaces to partner directly with international agendas and stakeholders. Thus, while NGO and academic research has thoroughly underscored the gendered harms that technology can cause, this contribution demonstrates the other side of the “double-edged sword” of technology, highlighting the potential and the efforts of online Rohingya activism against SGBV.