Introduction and learning objectives

In this module, we work with participants to share strategies and tactics for using their mobile phones more safely in situations and contexts where they live.

This module offers guides for facilitating conversations about how women's rights and sexual rights activists experience their access to mobile technology and communications differently based on their genders and sexual identities. We'll talk about how we are using our mobile phones for personal and private communications, for public and movement communications, and strategies and tools we are using to managing our mobile communications more safely.

This module includes: group activities for and examining our use of mobiles and how this relates to our genders and sexual identities; hands-on activities for exploring and understanding how mobile phones and mobile communications work; group activities for sharing and practicing safety strategies and tactics in the context of our lives; facilitation guides for trainers to bridge issues of feminist safety and technical security.

Common questions we hear and are trying to address in this module:

• What happens if someone else has my phone? What information is on my phone? How might this affect myself, my colleagues, my movement?
• How do I know if I'm being surveilled by my partner, exes, family members, governments?
• How do I use my phone more safely?
• How can we use our phones to organize?

Learning objectives

By the end of this module, the participants would have:

• an understanding of how mobile access and communications are gendered and intimate;
• an understanding of mobile communication safety from the perspective that mobile phones are our tools for both personal, private and public, movement communications;
• an understanding of basic concepts of how mobile communications work in order to better understand the risks of mobile communications;
• shared and practiced strategies and tactics for mobile safety to manage the impacts of our mobile communications on ourselves, our colleagues, our movements;