Bijoya Citizen initiative against repression of women

Although we celebrated International Women's Day yesterday, we cannot ignore the fact that violence against women is still quite high in this country.

Amnesty International in its Annual Report 2011 published that according to Bangladesh government figures violence against women topped all crimes reported to the police in the first six months in 2011 alone. Of 7,285 complaints made, 1,586 were rape cases.

To make a difference in this grave issue, a group of people from home and abroad launched an online initiative called Bijoya.

Bijoya (http://bijoya.crowdmap.com) is an online citizen initiative to report incidents against women in Bangladesh with the help of technologies such as SMS, e-mail, tweets, Facebook and web.

This initiative lets people use easy and affordable technologies available to them to report any incidents against women in Bangladesh. Bijoya authorities also keep the identity of reporter anonymous if asked to.

It was launched on December 16 last year to coincide with the Victory Day of Bangladesh.

Shehzaad Shams from UK came up with the idea while he was working in Amnesty International Secretariat in London and approached his colleague Buddha Halder with the idea for his feedback.

Shams said they worked intensively in the role of technology, human rights and social change at Amnesty International (Shams left Amnesty later).

“I had been thinking for a long time on how to transfer what we know better such as technology and social change, for the betterment of Bangladesh. Having worked on various projects on behalf of Amnesty, we thought to take this personal citizen initiative out of our CSR (Citizen Social Responsibility)” Shams said.

The crowdmap identifies most vulnerable locations in the country where incidents against women are on a rise. Law enforcement agencies and local government authorities with other established sources of information and evidence can take actions and preventive measures in order to ensure security and safety of women.

NGOs and women's organisations can also use this map in their development work for women and girls.

With Bijoya, its officials hope to see triumph of women in Bangladesh over social evils such as dowry, rape, harassment, eve teasing, acid throwing, domestic and other violence.

Partha Sarathi Kar, a Sylhet-based open source specialist and editor of the monthly e-Prithibi magazine, set up the technical backbone of Bijoya while Shams and Halder provided the directions from London.

When heard about Bijoya, Fatema Samina Yasmin, expressed her interest to voluntarily get involved with the initiative. She works at the Institute of Governance Studies, BRAC University.

Shams then approached Shahid Uddin Akbar of Bangladesh Institute of ICT in Development (BIID) who agreed to include Bijoya as one of their strategic projects on technology and social change.

Bijoya recently partnered with Maya (www.maya.com.bd) as their 'incident reporting partner'.

Shams also informed that talks are underway to forge alliances with some women's NGOs, blogs and leading newspapers and IT companies.

Bijoya has harassmap.org of Egypt and uShahidi as foreign partners, Shams said.

“This is a purely citizen initiative and we believe it is possible to make this work in the long run if institutional partners join hands in informing and involving general citizens”, he added.