Category: Politics and society

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Quick link: decriminalise abortion in NSW

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

In 2013 and 2014 there was a push to introduce legislation which incorporated fetal personhood into law in NSW: Crimes Amendment (Zoe’s Law) Bill (No. 2) 2013. See for example Julie Hamblin’s commentary at the time on how such legislation could be used to further restrict access to abortion in NSW, even when the stated purpose is to allow for abusive violence to fetuses to be punished. The bill passed the Lower House of NSW Parliament but was never put to the Upper House, and thus lapsed in November 2014 when the 55th Parliament ended. It never became law.

Leslie Cannold, speaking to a Greens forum in September 2013 (video here, not subtitled) called on NSW to not only fight a rear-guard action in defending pregnant people seeking abortions from further rights being granted to fetuses, but to follow Victoria (and later Tasmania) in decriminalising abortion entirely. And now Greens MLC Dr Mehreen Faruqi, is campaigning for the decriminalisation of abortion in NSW. Here are some of the facts about abortion access in NSW her flyer gives:

The laws surrounding access to abortion in NSW are very confusing. Abortion is currently in the Crimes Act (Sections 82-84), although court decisions have established that abortion will not be unlawful if a doctor reasonably believes it is necessary to save the woman from serious danger to her life, or mental or physical health[…]

In NSW, an abortion is unlawful unless a doctor deems that a woman’s physical, psychological and/or mental health is in serious danger. The criterion of ‘mental health’ can include economic and/or social factors[…]

Any amendments to the Crimes Act, such as those proposed by supporters of foetal personhood laws risks changing that interpretation. By removing abortion from the Crimes Act, it will no longer be a criminal offence and women and their doctors will no longer have to rely on the interpretation of the law by a court in each case in order to avoid criminal liability.

Learn more about the campaign at the Decriminalise Abortion page on Faruqi’s website. You can help by signing the online petition in support of decriminalisation or collecting signatures offline.

Featured image credit:
Pro_Choice_March-Texas_State_Capitol-2013_07_01-9378.jpg by ann harkness on Flickr.

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Unhappy data retention day

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

This morning, Australia’s mandatory 2 year data retention regime began. Internet activity through Australian ISPs (including mobile phone providers) is now recorded. Australians, according to Crikey, here is what is likely to be retained about your accessing this link today:

  • your name and similar identifying details on your Internet account
  • the Internet address of where you accessed Hoyden About Town from
  • the Internet address of Hoyden About Town itself
  • the date and time you accessed this site
  • how long you accessed it for (quickly, in the case of websites, no doubt, but what if you were Skyping with us?)
  • what technical services you used (HTTP over ADSL or mobile or cable or …)

If you are accessing this over a mobile device, your location is also stored, to quite a high degree of accuracy. This data is also by far the hardest to conceal using any method, since it’s revealed as a core part of your phone’s communication with cell towers.

At least the actual specific page you accessed would not (or at least need not) be retained, if I am interpreting the information at Allens and Crikey correctly.

Surveillance cameras attached to a building exterior
Surveillance, by Jonathan McIntosh CC BY-SA

Further reading:

Image credit: Surveillance by Jonathan McIntosh, Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike.

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Blogging for Geek Feminism, a short history

With yesterday’s release of Spam All the Links, I’ve finished my long awaited project of departing the Geek Feminism blog.

I was involved in the blog on, if not from the first day of its existence, at least from the first week of it. My involvement in the blog was huge, and comprises among other things:

  • over 200 posts to the blog
  • founding and for a long time running the Ask a Geek Feminist, Wednesday Geek Woman and Cookie of the Week series
  • doing a linkspam post by myself multiple times a week for about a year
  • recruiting the initial team of Linkspammers and setting up their manual, mailing list and of course, the script that supports them
  • recruiting several other bloggers, including Tim, Restructure! and Courtney S
  • a bunch of sysadmin of the self-hosted WordPress install (it’s now hosted on WordPress.com)

My leaving the blog is delayed news. I initially told the co-bloggers I was leaving close to a year ago now (mid-August, if I’d waited much longer on writing this I could have posted on the one year anniversary), because my output had dried up. I feel in large part that what happened was that I spent about ten years in geekdom (1999–2009) accumulating about three years of material for the blog, and then I ran out of things to write about there. I also have two more children and one more business than I had when I was first writing for it, and, very crucially, one less unfinished PhD to avoid. But I had a handover todo list to plod my way through, and Spam All the Links was the last item on it!

I remain involved in Geek Feminism as an administrator on the Geek Feminism wiki, on which I had about 25% of total edits last I looked, although the same sense of being a dry well is there too.

The blog was obviously hugely important for me, both as an outlet for that ten years of pent up opinionating and, to my surprise, because I ended up moving into the space professionally. I’m glad I did it.

Today, I would say these are my five favourite posts I made to the blog:

“Girl stuff” in Free Software, August 2009 (original link):

Terri mention[ed] that she had resisted at times working on things perceived as ‘girl stuff’. In Free Software this includes but is not limited to documentation, usability research, community management and (somewhat unusually for wider society) sometimes management in general. The audience immediately hit on it, and it swirled around me all week.

Why we document, August 2009 (original link):

I do not in fact find writing the wiki documentation of incidents in geekdom very satisfying. The comment linked at the beginning of the post compared the descriptions to a rope tying geekdom to the past. Sometimes being known as a wiki editor and pursued around IRC with endless links to yet another anonymous commenter or well-known developer advising women to shut up and take it and write some damned code anyway is like a rope tying me to the bottom of the ocean.

But what makes it worth it for me is that when people are scratching their heads over why women would avoid such a revolutionarily free environment like Free Software development, did maybe something bad actually happen, that women have answers.

(I’d be very interested in other people’s takes on this in 2015, which is a very different landscape in terms of the visibility of geek sexism than 2009 was.)

Why don’t you just hit him?, December 2010 (original link):

This is the kind of advice given by people who don’t actually want to help. Or perhaps don’t know how they can. It’s like if you’re a parent of a bullying victim, and you find yourself repeating “ignore it”, “fight back with fists” or whatever fairly useless advice you yourself were once on the receiving end of. It’s expressing at best helplessness, and at worst victim-blaming. It’s personalising a cultural problem.

You are not helpless in the face of harassment. Call for policies, implement policies, call out harassment when you overhear it, or report it. Stand with people who discuss their experiences publicly.

Anti-pseudonym bingo, July 2011 (original link):

Let’s recap really quickly: wanting to and being able to use your legal name everywhere is associated with privilege. Non-exhaustive list of reasons you might not want to use it on social networks: everyone knows you by a nickname; you want everyone to know you by a nickname; you’re experimenting with changing some aspect of your identity online before you do it elsewhere; online circles are the only place it’s safe to express some aspect of your identity, ever; your legal name marks you as a member of a group disproportionately targeted for harassment; you want to say things or make connections that you don’t want to share with colleagues, family or bosses; you hate your legal name because it is shared with an abusive family member; your legal name doesn’t match your gender identity; you want to participate in a social network as a fictional character; the mere thought of your stalker seeing even your locked down profile makes you sick; you want to create a special-purpose account; you’re an activist wanting to share information but will be in danger if identified; your legal name is imposed by a legal system that doesn’t match your culture… you know, stuff that only affects a really teeny minority numerically, and only a little bit, you know?

But I’m mostly listing it here because I always have fun with the design of my bingo cards. (This was my first time, Sexist joke bingo is better looking.)

I take it we aren’t cute enough for you?, August 2012 (original link):

… why girls? Why do we not have 170 comments on our blog reaching out to women who are frustrated with geekdom? I want to get this out in the open: people love to support geek girls, they are considerably more ambivalent about supporting geek women.

The one I’m still astonished I had time for was transcribing the entire Doubleclicks “Nothing to Prove” video. 2013? I don’t remember having that kind of time in 2013!

Thanks to my many co-bloggers over the five years I was a varyingly active blogger at Geek Feminism. I may be done, at least for a time and perhaps in that format, but here’s to a new generation of geek feminist writers joining the existing one!

Hand holding aloft a cocktail glass
from an image by Susanne Nilsson, CC BY-SA
Image credit: Cheers! by Susanne Nilsson, Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike. The version used in this post was cropped and colour adjusted by Mary.
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Quick links: nothing to hide

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

Data retention is coming to Australia very soon.

[Data retained] includes your name, address and other identifying information, your contract details, billing and payment information. In relation to each communication, it includes the date, start and finish times, and the identities of the other parties to the communication. And it includes the location data, such as the mobile cell towers or Wi-Fi hotspots you were accessing at the time…

But surely they’ve included special protections for communications between doctors and patients, and lawyers and clients? No. Never even discussed…

The Joint Committee recommended that the Act be amended to ensure that the metadata can’t be obtained by parties in civil litigation cases (I’ve mentioned before how excited litigation lawyers will be about all this lovely new data), and George Brandis said that would be fixed in the final amendments. But it isn’t there. The final Bill being bulldozed through Parliament right now contains no such protection. The fact remains that, under the Telecommunications Act, one of the situations in which a service provider cannot resist handing over stored data is when a court has required it by issuing a subpoena. In practice, that means that your ex-spouse, former business partners, suspicious insurance company or employer can get hold of a complete digital history of your movements and communications for the past two years, and use it against you in court.

Michael Bradley, Our privacy is about to be serially infringed, The Drum, March 19 2015

Surveillance cameras attached to a building exterior
Surveillance, by Jonathan McIntosh@Flickr CC BY-SA

Noted elsewhere: all this data will be stored by various companies with varying degrees of security awareness, so in practice it will sometimes be available to some criminals too.

Elsewhere:

Image credit: Surveillance by Jonathan McIntosh, Creative Commons Atttribution-Sharealike

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The 79th Down Under Feminists Carnival

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

In blue on a white background, the DUFC logo: in a square with rounded corners, there is the female/feminine symbol; with the Southern Cross inside, above which it says 'Down Under' and below 'Feminists Carnival'.

Welcome! This post is the 79th monthly Down Under Feminists Carnival. This edition of the carnival gathers together November 2014 writing of feminist interest by writers living in Australia and New Zealand. Thanks to all the writers and submitters for making this carnival outstanding, amazing, sad, outraging and uplifting.

Highlighted new(er) Down Under voices

I’ve highlighted posts that come from people who began been writing at their current home in 2014, such posts are marked with (new site) after the link. Hopefully this will be a quick guide to sites you may not be following yet.

Also, this carnival (broadly…) observes the rule that each writer may feature at most twice.

Feminist identities and practices

Kelly Briggs explained how her intersectional feminism supports Aboriginal women:

Critique of pop culture does nothing for me and my sisters. It does nothing to aid in our struggle to be seen as equal, which is why I stick to critiquing the policies of governments that use black women as whipping posts… At my last reading of the statistics surrounding this heinous human rights violation [the intervention] incarceration rates have more than doubled, self harm rates have more than doubled, suicide rates are at unprecedented epidemic proportions and forced rehab is nothing short of criminal. WHERE ARE THE FUCKING FEMINISTS?

Catherine Deveny republished her Destroy the Joint piece Feminism in Twelve Easy Lessons.

Tulia Thompson explored the limits of conceiving of bargains with hetero-patriarchal culture as an individual choice.

Race, ethnicity and racism

Kelly Briggs wrote about racism and resulting self-harm and she and Christine Donayre wrote about Aboriginal deaths in custody and how they seem invisible to Australians (new site) compared to police killings of black people in the US. Kelly was also interviewed by Saffron Howden about racist barriers to accommodation and employment for Aboriginal people.

Celeste Liddle listed terrible failures of top-down approaches to Indigenous safety and wellbeing.

Ruby Hamad asked why Australian media continually assembles panels full of white people to discuss race issues and non-white people and communities? She also recounted how she and other people of colour are commonly dismissed as having a lower bar for their work.

Bodies

Jessica Hammond took us on a pictorial tour of the truth of her body. (new site)

Kath at Fat Heffalump described the double-bind of fat women’s sexuality.

Jes Baker asked why the hourglass figure is the only version of plus size that we see?

Tracey Spicer showed us how she uses makeup, how she looks without makeup, and how various pressures changed her makeup use during her career.

Disability

Some of what were to be Stella Young’s last pieces appeared in November:

Danielle Binks discussed differing portrayals of Deafness in Young Adult fiction.

El Gibbs explored other people’s attitudes to disability, and how it’s those that make disability hard.

Carly Findlay wrote about unsolicited comments and advice in the workplace about both disability and appearance. She also debunked claims that autoimmune illnesses are caused by “self-hatred” and cured by “self-love”.

Kathy writes through the five stages of chronic illness (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance).

LGBTQ

In the wake of Apple CEO Tim Cook coming out, Rebecca Shaw argues that coming out is still important and heroic.

Harassment and abuse

Jem Yoshioka explored the alignment between activist organisations in the technical community with misogynists and abusers such as Julian Assange and weev. (new site)

Jo Qualmann asked why rape is tolerated as a subject of “masterpieces” of Western fine art?

Roger Sutton, chief of the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority, resigned after allegations of sexual harassment. Writings included:

Jenna Price reported on the Australian government denying responsibility for violence against women in a report to the UN.

Deborah Russell highlighted the many chilling aspects of the Roastbusters ongoing rape scandal in Auckland, including police failures.

Ada Conroy talked about her work as a men’s behavioural change practitioner.

Jane Gilmore debunked claims that women are as likely to commit violence as men and observes that offender demographics are far harder to access than victim demographics. Jennifer Wilson followed up urging men to stop feeling unfairly attacked.

Motherhood

Lisa Pryor wrote a column about surviving medical school and mothering with the help of caffeine and antidepressants. Former federal Australian Labor Party leader Mark Latham responded in the Australian Financial Review with commentary (which I’m not going to link) called “Why left feminists don’t like kids”. Criticism of Latham’s piece included:

Penni Russon talked with her daughter Una about time travel, women heroes, and community.

Andie Fox told her story of hiding her caring responsibilities while proving herself at a new job as part of the broader picture of women’s caring responsibilities and workplace roles.

Education

Camilla Nelson followed up some October pieces in counting how many of the various states’ English curricula texts are by men.

Clementine Ford wondered what would an anti-sexism school curriculum look like?

Media and culture

Sharon Smith attended PAX Australia and found that the Australian gaming community proved that it was not GamerGate.

Danielle Binks remembered Heartbreak High, including its exploration of gender and racial politics, and the role of public broadcasters in creating diverse programming.

Scarlett Harris explored feminist themes in the musical Wicked and anti-feminist themes in Gone Girl.

New sites

Blogs and sites started in 2014 featured in this carnival were:

Next carnival

The 80th carnival will follow at The Scarlett Woman. Submissions to scarlett.harris [at] y7mail [dot] com by 5th January.

Volunteers are needed to host carnivals from March onwards. Volunteer via the contact form.

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Vale Stella Young

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

Photograph of Stella Young
Stella Young: Twitter photo

As a few people already wrote in the Welcome back thread, Australian writer, comedian and disability activist Stella Young died suddenly on Saturday, December 6.

I didn’t know Stella in person; I knew her work mostly for her writings on ABC’s Ramp Up, but the many other places she appeared as a performer, speaker and writer included TEDx Sydney, the Melbourne Comedy Festival and the Global Atheist Convention. You’re welcome to link your favourite appearances and pieces in comments.

I loved Stella’s writing, and I’m really sad. I wish 80-year-old Stella had got to read the letter. Goodbye Stella.

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Call for Submissions: Seventy-Ninth Edition @ Hoyden About Town

I’m the next host of the Down Under Feminists’ Carnival! Here’s the call for submissions:

The next edition of the Down Under Feminists Carnival is planned for 5 December, 2014 and will be hosted by Mary at Hoyden About Town or perhaps puzzling.org, as circumstances permit. Submissions to mary-carnival [at] puzzling [dot] org.

Submissions must be of posts of feminist interest by writers from Australia and New Zealand that were published in November. Submissions are due on 2 December at the latest, but it’ll be easier on Mary if you submit sooner rather than later. So submit early and often, please, and spread the word!

Submit away, please!

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Terms not to use when negotiating meeting times, an incomplete list

Also of use to conference organisers setting submission deadlines.

  • “midnight Tuesday”. Ambiguous between the midnight at the beginning of Tuesday and the one at the end of Tuesday. In casual usage, this usually turns out to mean the midnight at the end of Tuesday, but why be ambiguous? (And if you’re wondering why anyone is organising anything for midnight precisely, time zones. Or deadlines, “midnight Tuesday” usually means you can spend Tuesday evening on the task.)
  • “this Tuesday”. Almost always means the Tuesday immediately following, but that can be ambiguous in the case of time zones (if one of your attendees is already in the Tuesday in question) and in the case of someone reading their email belatedly.
  • “next Tuesday”, even worse, because some people mean the Tuesday immediately following, but most people (I think) mean the Tuesday a week after that, and then add in the same problem that it may already be Tuesday somewhere, and people may read their email belatedly.

I like to avoid midnight entirely, especially if you’re intending the “you have Tuesday evening to get this done” meaning. Use “11:30pm Tuesday” or “1am Wednesday”. Problem solved. If you really need it to be terribly terribly close to midnight, you can use “11:59pm Tuesday” quite often or at worst you can just spell it out “midnight at the end of Tuesday”).

For upcoming weekdays, just state the date. “Tuesday 21st”, “Tuesday 28th”. Avoid anything that requires people to know the time you wrote at.

And while we’re here, a free reminder that dates of the form 10/06/2014 are ambiguous between the 10th June 2014 (Australia, much of the rest of the world) and the 6th October 2014 (the USA). 2014-06-10 is less ambiguous and often comes with free sorting by date, but when doing meeting negotiation just write “June” and “October” and be done. You’re welcome.

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Handling harassment incidents swiftly and safely

This article was written by me and originally published on the Ada Initiative’s website. It is republished here according to the terms of its Creative Commons licence.

As anti-harassment policies become more widespread at open technology and culture events, different ways of handling harassment incidents are emerging. We advocate a swift process in which final decisions are made by a small group of empowered decision makers, whose focus is on the safety of the people attending the event.

Open technology and culture communities, which often make decisions in a very public way, can be tempted to also have a very public and very legalistic harassment handling process, a judicial model, but we advocate against this. It prioritises other values, such as transparency and due process, over that of safety. Alternatively, because many members of such communities find ostracism very hurtful and frightening, sometimes they develop a caretaker model, where they give harassers lots of second chances and lots of social coaching, and focus on the potential for a harasser to redeem themselves and re-join the community.

But neither of these models prioritise safety from harassment.

Consider an alternative model: harassment in the workplace. In a well-organised workplace that ensured your freedom from harassment — a situation which we know is also all too rare, but which we can aspire to, especially since our events are workplaces for many of us — an empowered decision maker such as your manager or an HR representative would make a decision based on your report that harassment had occurred and other relevant information as judged by them, and act as required order to keep your workplace safe for you.

A well-organised workplace would not appoint itself your harasser’s anti-harassment coach, have harassment reports heard by a jury of your peers, publish the details of your report widely, have an appeals process several levels deep, or offer fired staff members the opportunity to have their firing reviewed by management after some time has passed.

Like in a well-organised workplace, we advocate a management model of handling harassment complaints to make events safer: reasonably quick and final decisions made by a small group of empowered decision makers, together with communication not aimed at transparency for its own sake, but at giving people the information they need to keep themselves safe.

The management model of harassment handling is that:

  1. you have a public harassment policy that clearly states that harassment is unacceptable, and gives examples of unacceptable behaviour
  2. you have a clear reporting avenue publicised with the policy
  3. you have an empowered decision maker, or a small group of decision makers, who will act on reports
  4. reports of harassment are conveyed to those decision makers when reported
  5. they consider those reports, gather any additional information they need to make a decision — which could include conduct in other venues and other information that a very legalistic model might not allow — and they decide what action would make the event safer
  6. they communicate with people who need to know the outcome (eg, with the harasser if they need to change their behaviour, avoid any people or places, or leave the event; volunteers or security if they need to enforce any boundaries)
  7. they provide enough information to the victim of the harassment, and when needed to other attendees, to let them make well-informed decisions about their own safety

Further reading

Creative Commons License
Handling harassment incidents swiftly and safely
 by the Ada Initiative is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://adainitiative.org/2014/07/23/handling-harassment-incidents-swiftly-and-safely/.

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Are your lulz low quality? Valerie Aurora is here to help

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

Warning for mention of sexual assault, and extensive discussion of harassment.

In May, my GF co-blogger and Ada Initiative co-founder Valerie Aurora posted Handy tips for my Internet harassers on her blog. They included:

Threatening my job: Unfortunately, I am my own boss. Try emailing one of the Ada Initiative sponsors? Although they might take that as a sign that the Ada Initiative is doing important work and make another donation. Hmmmm. Maybe create a Yelp page for my file systems consulting business and leave bad reviews? Endorse me for CSS on LinkedIn?

Rape and death threats: Run spell check! There’s nothing more jarring than reading an otherwise creative and well-written death threat and then seeing “decapetate.” Also, chain-saws are so last year. Remember, Gmail won’t display images by default. P.S. I happen to know one of the members of Nirvana and your bright idea has already been done.

Why did she do such a thing, and what resulted? Geek Feminism obtained an exclusive tell-all interview.

Q. Have you received any harassment as a result of this post? Was its quality indeed improved?

Sadly, no. Part of the problem is that my friends loved it — I’ve never had so much positive feedback on a post — but they didn’t want to share it with other people online. I like to joke that it’s the ultimate in dark social since people only talk about it offline using vibrations in the air called “sound.” I think that my friends are more afraid of me being harassed than I am.

Q. The post is pretty out there! Why did you put this post up? What point are you trying to make?

“Self-doxxing” myself (thanks, Kate Losse for the term) was inspired in part by how incompetent and bad the online harassment that I’ve received has been. Most people doing online harassment are just trying to impress other online harassers, at the same time that what they are doing is, frankly, totally unimpressive. The reality is, anyone can spend $25 and get another person’s home address and a bunch of other personal information, but we act like it is some kind of amazing act of computer hacking. By showing how bad people are at online harassing, I’m hoping to remove some of the motivation for people to do the harassment, or at least make them spend more time on it before they get the reward of “so cool, bro!”

I was also inspired by Krystal Ball , who ran for U.S. congress in 2010. When her political opponents tried to slut-shame her into quitting her political campaign over “sexy photos” of herself that they published, she turned around and shamed THEM — both her opponent and the media outlets that published the photos. It was glorious, and it hit home for me: if we let the existence of sexy photo of a woman prevent her from serving in political office, then I and every woman born after 1990 were out of luck. Women’s representation in political office would go down.

Q. Should other people do this?

For most people, no, I wouldn’t recommend it. It was okay for me for a lot of reasons: I already went public about sexual abuse in my family, I’m white, I’m my own boss, I don’t have children or a partner, I have skills that are in high demand, I have lots of friends and a huge support network — my emotional, physical, and economic safety is pretty good. Most women have a lot more to lose.

However, I think it is a very good exercise to think about worst cases like this: what if the thing I am most afraid of other people finding out got published all over the Internet? Because a lot of times, that thing actually doesn’t reflect on you – the shame is on the person who did the original act or publicized a private matter. It can be healing to plan what you might do, even if you don’t actually go public with it yourself.

Q. Why won’t you accept my endorsement for CSS on LinkedIn? I taught you everything you know, dammit.

I’d hate to embarrass you by letting anyone else know that you are the source of my mangled <div>’s! [Ed: good point, well made.]

Q. When are you monetising this? How can investors contact you? How big is your Series A and at what valuation?

Actually, that is a great idea. Instead of vetting a political candidate and saying yes or no, you investigate them and then publish everything that might be a problem in a funny blog post.

Or better yet, here is my favorite idea: If I ever run for political office, I’m going to scan in all my embarrassing naked photos, then watermark them with the email addresses of various journalists. Then email them anonymously to said journalists. Then when the photos get published (it’s “news,” someone else would have, etc.), I can expose the specific person who decided that slut-shaming a candidate was “news” and put the shame where it belongs. Sexism-shaming as a service, SSaaS. I’m accepting funding now.