The Universitat de València has realised this Tuesday, 25 November, several official ceremonies due to the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. After a silent gathering of five minutes at the doors of the Office of the Principal a lecture was given by Paz Lloria García, lecturer of Criminal Law of the Universitat de València and co-director of the Master's Degree in Law and Gender Violence.
The lecture was entitled Gender violence in the Digital Age (La violencia de género en la era digital). Have new forms of gender-based violence appeared with Whatsapp? What about Facebook or Twitter? Several studies and researches have already warned about how social networks, mobile devices, some apps and websites on the Internet have become new tools where sexism and gender violence reinvent themselves and achieve new forms. Paz Lloria has reflected on all these aspects.
In the hall of the Office of the Principal, it has been opened the exhibition The gender studies and the equality policies in the Universitat de València (Los estudios de género y las políticas de igualdad en la Universitat de València) organized by the Office of the Vice-Principal for Territorial Projection and Participation in collaboration with the Equality Unit and the University Institute of Women's Studies.
The Principal has read the manifesto and has announced, among others measures and actions, the official announcement of the 1st Prize “Olga Quiñones Fernández” that it is presented for two forms for the Undergraduate degree Final Project (TFG) and for the Master's degree Final Project (TFM) which include the gender perspective framework and encourage people in equality. This prize carries the name of Olga Quiñones, first director of the Equality Unit and a woman joined to the Universitat de València and to the fight for gender equality, who passed away last June.
According to lecturer Lloria, the digital tools and their general use have showed the existence of a new way to control women. The simplicity of these tools, along with their democratisation, have produced an important increase of gender violence reports, creating in this way a new form of violence against women that affects specially to young women, although not exclusively.
“If you really love me, you’ll tell me your Twitter and Facebook passwords”, this could be one of the sentences that we could listen in a relationship based in a social control that demands no secrets in a couple. Having power over other person, investigating their contacts and asking them to delete ex-couples, impersonating someone in the social networks and publishing contents that ridicule that person, threatening to publish erotic photos on the Internet if they don’t do what they have been said to, connecting the geolocator... are some examples of new forms of violence in the Digital Age.
As the lecturer Lloria explains, “however this doesn’t affect so much as the more serious offences, this kind of violence, that supposes a special control in women and attacks against their dignity, their honour and their freedom, is especially dangerous because it hides the beginning of a violence more insidious that it’s necessary to stop and punish as another proof of gender-based violence”.
Last update: 24 de november de 2014 08:00.
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