Early 2021, we put up an open call to event and community organisers to invite us to jointly host a virtual workshop with their organisation, 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 recognise its existence and destructive impacts.
To a certain extent, we realised 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.
This year, we were happy to have the opportunity to conduct a workshop as part of WOMEN:girls’s Goal programme for 100 school girls from Sabah, Bangi and Dignity for Children, which included refugee girls. Additionally, we held two workshops with GoodKids Malaysia. Our session with GoodKids Malaysia led us to create a Malay-language zine on online gender-based violence to further the awareness of the issue and the resources available to help victims and survivors for their children. Read our zine here .
We wrapped up our 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 entities for whom we had organised workshops with for 2021:
If you would like to host a workshop with us, register your interest here and we will get back to you shortly.
