Technology-facilitated gender-based violence & the business and human rights normative framework

Technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) is an international human rights issue (CIGI, 2023) with serious consequences for the human rights of cis-gendered and trans women and girls and other gender diverse people and sexual minorities. TFGBV manifests in multiple forms including discrimination, sexual harassment, doxxing, extortion, non-consensual distribution of intimate images, deepfakes, and hate propaganda, with far-reaching emotional, physical, psychological and cultural impacts on those it targets (Bailey & Dunn, 2023). Technology corporations not only facilitate TFGBV by providing tools and platforms for its creation and dissemination and through their content moderation practices, they perpetrate structural violence through practices including discriminatory algorithmic profiling, with disproportionately negative effects on members of already-marginalized communities (Bailey, Burkell, Dunn, Gosse & Steeves, 2021).

In 2023, the UN Commission on the Status of Women recognized the role that technology corporations play in TFGBV and called on them to undertake due diligence to prevent such harm and on states to enact regulation that takes into account the United Nations Guiding Principles (UNGPs) on Business and Human Rights (BHR) (UNCSW, 2023, paras 41, 45). The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), through its B-Tech project is developing guidance on how the UNGPs can inform state and business action to prevent and address human rights violations caused by digital technology, including in relation to its gendered impacts. Yet there remain serious concerns as to the ability of the androcentric BHR normative framework to address gender-based violence (Simons & Handl, 2019), let alone TFGBV. Drawing on feminist intersectional analysis, we critically examine the strengths and limitations of the UNGPs, the B-Tech project and select domestic laws in addressing TFGBV and providing redress for survivors.

About our speakers

JANE BAILEY is a full professor in the Faculty of Law, Common Law Section, at the University of Ottawa, where she teaches Cyberfeminism, Technoprudence, and Contracts.  As co-leader of The eQuality Project, a 7-year SSHRC funded partnership initiative focused on young people’s experiences of privacy and equality in digitally networked environments, her research centres on technology-facilitated violence, including its privacy and equality implications. She is co-editor of The Emerald International Handbook on Technology-facilitated Violence and Abuse, a 2021 online open access publication. Among her proudest professional moments are being appointed to the Canadian delegation for UNCSW 67, acting as lead counsel for the intervenor CIPPIC in two Supreme Court of Canada cases related to voyeurism, and her forthcoming Research Fellowship at the Center for Protecting Women Online at Open University in the UK.

PENELOPE SIMONS is a full professor in the Faculty of Law, Common Law Section, and holds the Gordon F. Henderson Chair in Human Rights at the University of Ottawa Human Rights Research and Education Centre (HRREC). She teaches Business and Human Rights, Public International Law and International Human Rights Law. Her research focuses on the human rights implications of domestic and transnational extractive sector activity, state responsibility for corporate complicity in human rights violations, the regulation of transnational corporations, gender and resource extraction, as well as the intersections between transnational corporate activity, human rights and international economic law. She is the co-author with Audrey Macklin of The Governance Gap: Extractive Industries, Human Rights, and the Home State Advantage (Routledge 2014) and has acted as co-counsel for Amnesty International Canada, interveners in Choc v Hudbay, Garcia v Tahoe and Nevsun v Araya.