Pictures taken from our Virtual Workshop Roadshow
Early 2021, we put up an open call to event and community organizers to invite us to jointly host a virtual workshop with their organization, society, collective, or a group of friends. These workshops would allow us to unpack topics in ways that are easier to understand for the target audience in a safe space while simultaneously addressing their questions and listening to their views without judgment.
Though there has been an increased awareness of violence against women over the years, we noticed that many still render online violence harmless due to the misconception that it does not have ‘offline’ or ‘real’ impacts. Hence, our first virtual workshop roadshow focuses on the aim to share our knowledge on the issue of online gender-based violence in hopes that more people will recognize its existence and destructive impacts.
To a certain extent, we realized the COVID-19 pandemic helped provide a more enabling environment of conducting workshops online and to be better able to raise awareness of young women, young men, and girls and boys on online gender-based violence-related issues. With the help of our intermediaries, we managed to reach constituencies that would have been difficult to reach if we had to go through the heads of public schools and Malaysia’s Ministry of Education. We were excited about the fact that we got to meet young girls from Sabah, Bangi (a known predominantly conservative Muslim area), and B40 communities who have all taught us valuable inputs such as how we can make human rights information accessible and friendly to individuals outside of our circle.
We wrapped up the Virtual Workshop Roadshow at the end of October. We conducted a total of 12 workshops, ranging from high school students to university clubs. From these 10 workshops, we had a total of 270 participants who were mostly women and girls.
Here is a list of organizations, university clubs, individuals, or groups for who we had organized the workshop:
Special thanks to Women’s Fund Asia for giving us the opportunity for this work.
KRYSS NETWORK 