In the bustling town of Malda, West Bengal, a group of field workers working on the rights of young women came together for a digital security workshop. The women, all aged between 18 and 24 years old, were asked what they wanted to discuss.
‘Wrong numbers,’ they said.
The facilitators didn’t quite know what they meant, until one by one, all 14 women shared stories of receiving unending phone calls from unknown men.
‘I love you.’
‘You are so beautiful.’
‘I want to spend the night with you.’
‘I want to marry you.’
‘Do you have a boyfriend?’
The calls are non-stop. The callers are persistent, even manipulative. Some plead with the women to meet them. Some ask women personal questions about where they live and what they do. Some seem to know what the women are wearing or doing. Some act familiar with parents who take calls. One caller even threatened to commit suicide and mention the woman’s phone number in his suicide note if she hung up on him.
But how are the callers getting their numbers? In many ways. Boys going through their sisters’ contact list. Groups of men dialling random numbers until a woman picks up. Young men sharing and trading numbers with each other — two numbers in exchange for two new numbers.
As one field worker disgustedly put it, ‘A girl’s phone number is like a toy for boys.’
These phone calls stir up a welter of feelings in women. Irritation. Rage. Tension. Disgust. Discomfort. Anxiety. Fear, especially in situations when the callers say they know the women’s addresses or seem to be watching them. These phone calls — euphemistically called ‘wrong numbers’ lead to a slow, constant, erosion of everyday life. A permanent, invisible, state of discomfort.
It is these everyday forms of harassment that often get lost in the conversation on technology-enabled violence. What do we talk about when we talk about tech-enabled violence? The online. Rape threats on social media. Images spreading without consent. Surveillance. Much of this conversation centres on social media, which is not entirely off the mark. But that’s only part of the story.
What do we not talk about when it comes to tech-enabled violence? The larger realm of the digital. We rarely talk about what happens in low-income communities who use basic mobile phones that don’t connect to the Internet. That’s three out of four mobile phone users in India today. Even though they’re not online, they’re still digital. Many women charmingly call these basic phones ‘button mobiles’ even as they dream of getting their own ‘touch mobiles’ or smart phones that their brothers or male partners have. (Gender alert!)
Like the ‘wrong number’ phone calls, abuse, harassment and violence flow through these digital devices in various ways.
In Free To Be Mobile, we feature ten stories of teenagers, women, trans and queer persons across India that expand the conversation around digital violence. All these ten stories are rooted in gender, which expresses itself in a million different ways. Teenage boys hacking the WhatsApp accounts of teenage girls. Fathers tracking daughters through itemised phone bills. Rural journalists receiving endless calls from strange men. Trans women constantly facing demands for sex on social media. Brothers tracking and throwing sisters off messaging apps.
It is not the ‘mobile phone’ that causes this violence, even though we sometimes tend to blame inanimate objects. It is gender. It is gender bias that stops the Malda field workers from reporting the calls. From past experience, they believe their complaints won’t be taken seriously. They’re afraid complaints will backfire on them. That their phones will be taken away from them, their characters called into question. As one woman explains, ‘If the woman getting wrong number calls is someone’s wife, then there are questions thrown at her like, “Why are they calling on your phone?” or “Why do you pick up when you know it’s a wrong number?”’
The mobile phone, the internet, digital devices: these are not objects, but spaces for people, and, therefore, for hierarchies. Experiences in this space are mediated by the usual axes of power — around gender, sexuality, language, caste, ability and other social markers. We need to dig deeper into power to address digital violence, which is ultimately, much more than a technological problem.
We need to recognise the root causes underpinning digital violence to ensure that women, girls, queer and trans people can inhabit digital spaces freely — and fearlessly. That everyone is free to be mobile.
Read the full publication here.
