While the Indian government attempts to include gender on the official agenda in traditional sectors like health and education, gender within the technology sphere is a relatively new concept in India and one that government officials are just not ready to take seriously. They are not convinced by recent findings on the disempowerment of women into rural e-governance in Chhattisgarh, India’s poorest state, and this has been a challenge for lead researcher Dr. Anupama Saxena, a political scientist. Saxena tells APCNews about the struggle to be taken seriously and how the GEM, APC’s Gender Evaluation Methodology (GEM), has given her the credibility and confidence to tackle policy makers head-on.

Proposals to fight cybercrime have been floating around in Brazil for more than a decade but the backers – primarily banks and music companies worried about internet fraud and unauthorised music sharing – couldn’t find public or parliamentary support till they switched their focus to child pornography. Lula has refused to sanction online censorship and the government has opened a public consultation on what a civil law to regulate the internet should look like. EroTICs researchers Corrêa, Maria and Queiroz explore the history of the Brazilian regulation debate and conclude that the time is ripe to talk about rights – and for feminists and sexual rights activists to get involved. Photo: “Mike Vondran”:http://www.flickr.com/people/over_kind_man/

Two out of three gay South African respondents to an online survey said that going online had helped them accept their sexual orientation and many admitted to coming out online before they did so offline. But the voices of transgender people rarely appear in studies and surveys. To address the gap, APC EroTICs researcher Jeanne Prinsloo of the University of Grahamstown looks at the use of a transgender site which provides a critical space for trans people to lurk and listen to ideas and debates that are not present in mainstream sites, to rehearse their new identity and to assess the risks they might take. Image: “Gender Dynamix”:http://www.genderdynamix.co.za/

Freedom of speech and its flipside, access to information, is guaranteed by the First Amendment of the US Constitution. However federally-funded libraries are required to prevent people under eighteen accessing “harmful” content. Kevicha Echols and Melissa Ditmore investigate the use of internet filters on public library computers and find that measures adopted by libraries range from installation of filtering software on all computers for child and adult use to no filters at all! The law is being implemented differently varying across city, county and state. Sectors of the society most likely to be affected by this ad hoc censorship are young people and the economically-disadvantaged who rely particularly on library computers to access online information. Photo: “FallWithMe”:http://www.flickr.com/people/fallwithme/

“The gay rights movement in Lebanon would not be anywhere near where it is today if it weren’t for the internet”. In the midst of strongly censored neighbours, Lebanon enjoys online freedom that is hampered only by very slow and very expensive internet connections – but is that freedom there to stay? In a country where homosexuality is punishable by upto two years in prison, Nadine Moawad assesses the role of the internet in the rise of sexual rights activism in Lebanon and asks if Lebanon’s strict social controls are about to encompass the internet. Photo: “Laura Burlton”:http://www.flickr.com/people/lauraburlton/