With Suzie Dunn, Interim Director of the Law and Technology Institute and an assistant professor at Dalhousie University’s Schulich School of Law.
Suzie Dunn’s research centers on the intersections of equality, technology and the law, with a specific focus on technology-facilitated gender-based violence, artificial intelligence, deepfakes, and social media. She is a research partner on a four-year SSHRC funded research project on young people’s experiences with sexual violence online, DIY Digital Safety. She is also a Senior Fellow with the Centre for International Governance Innovation, and a member of the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund technology-facilitated violence committee.
Transcript
00:00:01 Andrea
Hello and welcome to Alright, Now What? I’m your host, Andrea Gunraj, for the Canadian Women’s Foundation.
Gender equality and justice, where we live, work, learn, and play is the goal, and it makes life better for everyone. This podcast is our chance to connect with insightful people and explore what it’ll take to get there in Canada.
The work of the Canadian Woman’s Foundation and its partners takes place on traditional First Nations, Métis, and Inuit territories. We are grateful for the opportunity to meet and work on this land. However, we recognize that land acknowledgments are not enough. We need to pursue truth, reconciliation, decolonization, and allyship in an ongoing effort to make right with all our relations.
00:00:51 AwarePod
Let’s say you’re walking home one night, listening to some casual Beethoven, as one does. If you’re a man, there’s a good chance you’ll hear it just like this… If you’re not a man, there’s a good chance you’ll hear it more like this… Because women and gender-diverse people are expected to always keep one ear to the ground to reduce their chances of being attacked. Does that sound right to you? Visit awarepod.com to learn more and help fight gender-based violence.
00:01:29 Andrea
Today I’m speaking with Suzie Dunn, an advisory committee member on the Foundation’s Challenging Gendered Digital Harm project. She provided input on the online course Reclaim Your Digital Space, and the research report on gendered digital harm, both recently launched by the Foundation. Suzie will also be part of our roundtable discussion with gender equality advocates on this issue. Hi, Suzie.
00:01:53 Suzie
Hi, thanks for having me on.
00:01:55 Andrea
Oh, thanks for joining. I think the first question, always was the most important question. You did the quiz. You have been told what kind of gender equality changemaker you are. I’d love to hear your reaction to the results. Are you surprised? Upset? Are you feeling like it kind of resonates? Tell me what you thought.
00:02:15 Suzie
Well, first off, I thought it was really fun to take the quiz. I love these types of little personality quizzes, so I really enjoyed taking it and I had a pretty good balance. I was 30% challenger, 30% connector, 15% collaborator and 23% creator. And I think those really made sense for me because my work is really multifaceted, interdisciplinary, I wear a ton of different hats. I do work as a law professor, I do community education work, I spend a lot of time working on great collaborative projects where I’m working with the tech facilitated violence community. I’m yeah, and I really, I really don’t think you can make a lot of these changes without communities. So, I was a little upset I was low on the collaborator space because I think I’m a great collaborator and I really believe in collaboration. So that was the only one I was disappointed in.
00:03:06 Andrea
It’s so funny. People are often like this mixed bag of yeah, I feel it and I wish I was a little bit more of this or that. I think it’s so fascinating. We are a little bit of all of these things, so you’re right, it’s a blended reality. Let me ask you then about the deepest learnings you bring to the project of growing gender equality in Canada today. It just strikes me that you are so dynamic and you have so many different pieces of your life and your experiences that you bring to the table. If you had to boil it down to a core life lesson, what would that be?
00:03:39 Suzie
You know, it’s really interesting because my main role is working as a law professor and a legal advocate, so a lot of the work that I do is working with these really formal systems. I’m often working with governments and lawmakers and the courts encouraging them to think about these issues from a gender equality perspective, encouraging them to provide resources to come up with really meaningful remedies. And I think that they play such an important role in in helping with these issues, but ultimately I think the lesson that I’ve learned over time is that real change is mostly community-based. And it’s based in relationships. And I think that lesson has been really true because when we think about, not just addressing the harms when they happen, which is often what the legal system does, you know someone’s been harmed and they and they provide remedies or provide a resolution. But when we think about the long term changes that we want to make, it’s about talking to each other, changing the norms in our communities, educating each other, seeking accountability from each other, and to have that real trust and long term accountability, I think the most important work is done in community.
00:04:52 Andrea
I find that’s fascinating because the more I speak to feminist lawyers and people in law looking at it from a feminist perspective, they keep saying this – the action is not in the law, the action is around the law that might feed to the law absolutely. And the law has so much power. Give me a sense, if you had to help us understand, like what those relationships look like, who are the people that we should be reaching out to, talking to, participating with, supporting, listening to – give me a sense of of what that means to influence policy and law but not see that as where the action necessarily lies per se.
00:05:32 Suzie
Absolutely. So the first example that comes to mind is a project that I’ve been working on called DIY, which is a digital youth project, and we’ve been interviewing a lot of teenagers about where they go for help if they’re experiencing online harms. And some of them do go to the law. And sometimes the legal system can be helpful for them and it’s, when they’re speaking about their rights, even to each other, they talk about the law and they say, you know, what’s happening to me is illegal. So I think there’s a really important expressive and normative piece of the law, and it can be helpful for some young people.
But overall, the places where they’ve said help has been most effective is often in like the youth organizations that they go to. So we were working with one particularly amazing queer youth organization, where a lot of their young people were struggling with how to deal with online harms that were, you know, gender based and otherwise, and often the most helpful support they got was talking to adults who trusted them, who loved them, who wanted the best for them, and who also told them what was happening to them was wrong and they deserve support. And often through those pathways they were able to find a lot of the solutions they needed and it was just more in in more severe cases where they actually needed to get that more formalized legal support.
00:06:56 Andrea
Right. I think that brings us to our next question, which I think just comes through in everything you’re saying. Tech facilitated violence, digital gendered harm, whatever term that you use to describe it, I’d love to hear more about this area that you’re passionate about and how it connects up to trying to achieve gender equality in Canada- big, huge problem that we’re trying to put forward to, you know, 10 steps forward, 10 steps back it seems sometimes, tell me a bit about this area here that you’re working in.
00:07:29 Suzie
Yeah. So I really find this such an interesting area to be working on. From a legal perspective, it’s one of the areas in the last 10 years that’s really grown. We’ve seen, you know, new interesting laws come in, such as criminalizing the non-consensual distribution of intimate images. We’ve seen new privacy towards the being introduced. So I love this area of work, but the thing that I think I’m most excited about is really doing basic education with people. So I’m talking to heaps of different groups of people, I’m doing education for judges, for lawyers, for police, for community-based workers, because what I find is that people are starting to really recognize how harmful this behavior can be, and they want to help. They really want to help, you know, but often they don’t know what it is. You know, you’ll talk to judges who are in their 60s, you know, who don’t really know what TikTok is, you know, and you’ll talk to police officers who don’t necessarily, you know, you know, what is the type of digital evidence they necessarily need to be looking for? How do they understand how these harms manifest? So I’ve really been enjoying doing a lot of that educational work and part of that is also creating different resources that are more publicly facing and a bit easier to digest than reading about the law.
So some of the work I’ve worked with in previous years is working with the BC Society of Transition Houses and Women’s Shelters Canada, with the amazing Rhiannon Wong. And we worked on creating a website called techsafety.ca that provides a lot of really helpful information about what tech facilitated violence is, what legal responses are available, how to collect digital evidence. And then more recently, I’ve been working with the Canadian Women’s Foundation on this end gender based digital harm projects, and again they’re producing similar type of content. They’ve got a great report that relies on Canadian based data, which I think is really important. We don’t have a lot of Canadian based data and this report has both qualitative and quantitative data about people’s experiences with gendered digital harms. But then it again has one of these really great people-based resources. So they created a website, an e-learning course called Reclaiming your digital space where people can go on and run through it, they’ve got all these little scenarios and and things that help people learn first, what is tech facilitated violence? You know, how do you manage it? What are various ways that you can respond to it, how to think about digital safety and even some ideas on thinking about if you want to advocate for change, if you want to advocate for change in your community or within the legal system, what are some of the ways that you can you can do that? And so it’s got some just excellent practical resources that are publicly available that I think are going to be so helpful in educating and changing norms in this area.
00:10:21 Andrea
Well, shout out to the team for the incredible work and all the partners that were involved, including you, Suzie. Really thrilled to try the course and and just, you know, get get equipped a little bit more. I am curious if you had to say what’s kind of something that, some tips I guess to equip people? Given the work that you done with the Canadian Women Foundation but with others Women’s Shelters Canada and all the work that you’ve done in, in this area across different organizations, different communities, are there powerful tools and tips that you would suggest people get familiar with, get acquainted with so that they can not just advocate and help themselves when they go through this in like kind of a remedial way, but maybe something proactive that they can do? A lot of people are so encouraging to hear that a lot of people are interested in doing something, and these are legal actors, and these are people who with you know, power, but what about everyday people? Any thoughts, tips about what you can give people as they’re listening now?
00:11:23 Suzie
Yeah, you know, I think there’s all sorts of complicated tips that I could give, but really I think the most powerful thing that people could do is just have conversations, you know, to talk to each other about what these issues are, to make it normal to bring up these these topics at dinner tables. And I think also creating space for people who might not be there yet, you know, often we’ll have these conversations with folks who, you know, disagree with us and and don’t necessarily support the gender equality movements that we’ve made. But I think learning to be a really good communicator and to meet people where they’re at, because so often what I find and I find this particularly true in the work that I do, is a law professor is I’ll often, you know, teach my students about gender equality. And sometimes there’s some in the room who I can tell, disagree with me and, you know, and don’t necessarily believe in the things that I’m teaching them about and often I’ll find that people will circle back later and they’re taking those lessons to heart. So I think making space to have those hard conversations.
Sharing whatever knowledge you have, especially with these interviews that I did with teenagers, a lot of them have incredible knowledge on how to respond to digital harms and, you know, had just had to kind of DIY it and do it themselves and figure out what those solutions are. So if you found tips and tricks and things that work for, you know, navigating online harms sharing that with people. But yeah, I think the greatest thing that we can do is just keep talking to each other, even though that’s a seems like a simple solution to offer.
00:12:54 Andrea
Well, it is a simple solution, but I guess it’s just so dynamic and powerful, so I’m going to go off script and I’m going to ask you a question on on just that idea of what it means to have a conversation that you’re meeting people where they’re at when they’re dealing with maybe gendered digital harm or you get that that feeling that suspicion because they say something happened to them, they’re not sure what to do.
Let me play the role of a person who experienced something and comes to you as a friend, a family member and says, hey, what do I do? So let’s do it like this. I posted something online and people are like just having this negative reaction to me and you know, I thought I was just posting a cute outfit and just what I was wearing that day and like, so many haters came out making fun of my body and saying weird things about me. And it’s getting beyond rude. It’s now getting a little scary. Should I just not be on Instagram anymore? Should I just leave the online space, but I really love posting and I get good responses and I like keeping in touch with people like that. What could I do?
00:14:05 Suzie
Yeah. Well, the first thing I think it’s important to do in conversations like that is just to acknowledge that what’s happening to the person is wrong, you know? And that what they’re going through is a real struggle. And then I think the next most important thing to do is to ask the person, what do they want, you know, like, what is it that they actually want from this? Do they want someone to go in and you know, screenshot those comments and report them. You can be a really helpful supporter if you flag harmful contents for the person so they don’t have to go through and read them all themselves and do them all themselves.
I think you can provide them to different resources that are available. You know the techsafety.ca has great tips and tricks on how to protect yourself from online harms. And then I think checking in to say you know is it something where you want to take a break from Instagram? I don’t think that the recommendation should be that people need to get offline. I think people deserve to be online. And to be safe, you know, but if that’s something that they’d like to do, you know, that’s an option.
But really, I think when it comes to that type of harassment and harm, sometimes the best thing that you can offer to do is to say, hey, how can I be support? Can I get in there? Can I provide supportive commentary? Can we change the privacy settings on your accounts or maybe changing it so that you can’t, people can’t post those types of comments? And then looking in to see, you know, what is the severity of those types of comments? Do they breach Instagrams rules? Can you report them? Can other people flag them? And then if they do reach a level of illegality, asking the person, is it something that you might want to go and talk to the police about? Is it something where you might want to talk to a lawyer about what responses are out there? But ultimately I think the most important thing to do is to let the person know that what’s happening to them isn’t right, and letting them make the right decision for themselves in what will make them feel the most safe.
00:15:57 Andrea
Suzie, master class. What I like about what you just said – that idea of offering to be the one who filters somebody else’s content. Like if they’re close to you and you can be on their phone and say I block I block, I blocked so that they don’t have to see it. A beautiful idea of how you can help somebody be able to manage what can be a very traumatic situation is just piling trauma on top of trauma. Just getting in there to help them. I love that suggestion. Thank you for that.
00:16:26 Suzie
Great, no problem.
00:16:28 Andrea
My last question for you is just the the thing we always end with the alright, now what? Give me a sense is there a powerful take away that you would give to our listeners right now based on your expertise and based on all the things you’ve done and experienced, how can we be better gender equality changemakers no matter where we are? Who we’re with, no matter where we live, work and play. What would you recommend?
00:16:55 Suzie
You know, I think right now and this is a lesson that I’m having to teach myself is to not give up hope in the face of adversity. I think especially right now where we’re looking at the ways that the Internet in particular is changing. You know, there’s the manosphere. We’re seeing social media companies going backwards rather than forwards in their content moderation policies. And so I think it can be difficult sometimes to think, is the work worth it? Should we keep going? And so, I think the most important thing is surrounding yourself with people who remind you that the work is still worth it. Taking breaks when you need it, but ultimately just keeping going because the work is so important.
00:17:33 Andrea
Alright, Now What?
If you want to make sure no woman, girl, Two Spirit, trans, or nonbinary person feels out of options, out of sight, out of time, or out of mind, visit yescountmein.ca today. When you count yourself in, you’ll join over 104,000 people in the Canadian Women’s Foundation’s generous and active community. You’ll get tools and opportunities to advance gender equality. This movement needs you. Visit yescountmein.ca and count yourself in today.
Please listen, subscribe, rate, and review this podcast. If you appreciate this content, please consider becoming a donor to the Canadian Women’s Foundation. People like you will make the goal of gender equality a reality. Visit canadianwomen.org to give today and thank you for your support.
