IGF 2010
VILNIUS, LITHUANIA
14 SEPTEMBER 10
SESSION 73
1130
SEXUAL RIGHTS, OPENNESS AND REGULATORY SYSTEMS
Note: The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during Fifth Meeting of the IGF, in Vilnius. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> JAC SM KEE: We are just going to wait for a couple of minutes. Maybe like five minutes and we will start to pick up. Thank you. Good.
Welcome to one of the most interesting sessions. The core organisers of this session is the Association for Progressive Communications and Centre for Internet and Society and my name is Jac. We organised the session around section sexuality because in our experience of dealing with Internet governance and freedom of expression and privacy. Even though this is not usually articulated or recognized preservation of norms is used to mobilize sexuality is one domain of life that becomes central. And regulated content from a criminal justice perspective are tabled for debate. At IGF despite the open format it has quite a poor track record in dealing with sexuality in a positive way. Needs to protect from harm in terms of pornography or child protection. So this session actually aims to also facilitate debate.
And we also aim to inform policy debates through research that sounds analysis from the perspective of users and in particular groups of users who have less access and resources and power in physical spaces and multiplicity and concerns as well. The two areas of research is from exploratory research on sexuality in five different countries and as well as the Onscenity Network which is academics based in UK is looking at this issue. And without any further ado let me introduce the first speaker, Tamara Qiblawi. She has a master's of science in foreign service focusing on international relations and security from Georgetown University. She has published extensively for the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon. She is part of the editorial team.
>> TAMARA QIBLAWI: Hi. So I am here to present our findings for the project in Lebanon. I am here to talk to you about the queer women's movement in Lebanon and the relationship with the Internet. I am really excited to tell you because I think this is a very important case and offers a lot of lessons for discussion that we are trying to have. Now the interplay between the development of the queer women's movement and the development of Internet in Lebanon is one that is very tight and in a country with where sex, homosexual identification is criminal and punishable by a year up to a year in prison, the Internet has proven to be a core component of career strategizing. And so this is so I am going to show you how this how the Internet has proven to be a really critical space for queer women in Lebanon. I am going to first talk to you about the history of the queer movement and the LGBT movement in Lebanon. And then I would like to focus on the virtual spaces that Lebanon's queer women's group has created because that will show you the model, a very unique model that it has created for sexual citizenship for group empowerment.
Okay. So the queer movement in Lebanon really begins at a very individual level and it begins with consumption of information about queer issues, about LGBT issues. Internet search engines is pretty much the only source for information on LGBT issues. The traditional media in Lebanon doesn't discuss this at all. There is no Arab production of knowledge on this issue. And there is certainly there hadn't been any importation of knowledge from the West in the form of traditional media about this issue. And so many of the queer people that we talked to talked about how they pounced on the Internet when this came out and the first thing they searched for is homosexuality and scouring the Internet for hours and especially in the beginning the Internet was very slow in Lebanon and also very expensive. What happens at the same time is queer individuals also use the Internet as their own form of communication with other LGBTs in Lebanon no. Sorry. LGBTs anywhere.
And so I actually I want to read you a quote about one member of her first experience meeting another lesbian online. And this is an excerpt from an entry in Meem's book, Bareed Mista. The entry is called My Quest to Find Lesbians. So this is the quote. "The popular chatting programme at the time was called ICQ, which I immediately downloaded, created some romantically morbid nickname and set out to find other lesbians. There was some method of searching through lists of people and I spent hours looking till I found someone with a nickname like 'sexy lesbian 4u'. Oh my God. I thought a sexy lesbian for me. I messaged her instantly and said hi. I am a lesbian, too. She said hi back but with far less enthusiasm. And then asked me if I wanted her to bite my ear. I wondered why she was saying that but was so excited about meeting another fellow lesbian that I just started babbling on with details about my life, the suffering I've been through, the identity crisis, the broken heart and other teenage lesbian drama." And then she goes on to say, of course, she was not interested. So she disappeared.
So this kind of shows you the shock and trepidation queer people first approach in this World Wide Web LGBT arena, arena which then led to which led a lot of queer people that said no, I need to meet queer people in Lebanon. So you have the chat programme called MIRC where you can easily create a chat room. So a group of ten queer men decided to create a chat room. It started off with ten men and then quickly grew in a matter of weeks to 50 and then 100 and then social groups began to form in this chat room and then subsequently decided to form a mailing list because the mailing list would be the first gateway in to an emergence in to the physical world, physical meetings. And so these meetings were formed, of course, with very strict screening processes because there was a very deep fear at the time that families would find out, that the police would find out, relatives, neighbors. You know, the fear of prosecution was really thick back then. And so they began to meet. And slowly for awhile they are meeting in these local spaces, they are also communicating via the Internet with Internet gay groups.
One day they suggested that gay people in Lebanon form a gay group and make that entity a member of ILGA. And so this very rough group called Club Free was formed. And they began to meet in people's houses until one day they decided to turn it in to an entity. A lot of communication with gay groups all over the world and set up a group called Henam and they applied for NGO status which they got by default because the Government the Government didn't actually process the application. So they became an NGO by virtue of the fact that the Government didn't the Government bureaucracy didn't have the time to look at the application.
And so around 2008 a group of lesbians in Henam felt that Henam NGO was becoming extremely dominating and women's issue were being subcumed by male issues and they felt there was a big difference between gay male issues and female issues and they couldn't be dealt with in the same sort of space. And so they broke off and they formed Meem. Okay. And so Meem was started. Some of the founding members of Meem were really involved in audio visual work and technical work. And so ICTs became a really important tool for the groups from the very, very beginning to deal with to address the gender issues that they were coming across in Henam. You kind of see the physical structures that they created happened in parallel with the creation of other virtual spaces. And so when they created their first social office space called the Women's House at the same time they also opened this Web site.
And so I want to show you a video. One of the first videos that they created because it really shows how I think I think how the the first attempts of Meem to just incorporate the queer issue with political and socio, geo political and gender issues in to their activism.
(Showing of video)
Okay. I want to go through these virtual spaces. They also have an account on twitter and they have Facebook pages. I want to show you their main Web site because I have some important information to show you just how big how much they have managed to expand and also to give you a sense of the content that they work with. The content that they produce and also their editorial policies which also speaks a lot to their strategizing. So this main Web site. See over here on the left that Meem is two years old. We have 312 members. 726 nonmembers are subscribed to the newsletter. The Web site gets an average of 286.42 visits per day.
More than 9,800 have seen our Youtube video. So I mean that's quite a lot considering Lebanon is a small country. 4 million people. This is hesus.com, their weekly online publication which tries to be a Forum for queer issues in Lebanon. It is the subject of queer women's issues in Lebanon is sort of like this you want like the epicenter of the publication. Different subjects like politics, like apartheid in Israel and also to talk about diversity within the queer community. So I would encourage you to look at this. Also as some interesting topics, Web site has had 223,933 hits since almost exactly just a bit over a year ago. They just celebrated their birthday a few days ago.
So I just want to talk a bit about content and editorial policies in that sort of play out in these virtual spaces. They speak to the model that Meem has created. In terms of content, Meem tries to incorporate a lot of different sorts of realities that queer women in Lebanon deal with and these issues are geopolitical. There is a lot of talk about Israel and Palestine. There is also a lot of talk about religion. The different religious minorities that exist. Diversity in how people perceive tradition and sex. And so it is just so you see that there is a real effort to stay in touch with the realities of Lebanon with civil society in Lebanon as a means to integrate in to Lebanon and also to do something that they call queering and that is trying to get queer issues on the larger civil society agenda which having this sort of content dialogue between the queer issues and these larger issues.
Some things about the editorial policy, you look through the articles. You will see that the articles are printed under nicknames and/or first names because anonymity is a core part of Meem's strategy. In order to ensure that people can come in they need to ensure Meem's members that their privacy is being protected. What happens is there is a fine line that Meem's straddles in trying to get the visibility that they need to empower the group and integrate in to civil society but at the same time protect the anomnimity of certain members that are not wanting to be outed. That's Meem's model.
Now why some things about Internet, the Internet as a space in Lebanon. In sharp contrast with the traditional in Lebanon there has not been any censorship and that's why they have been able to express views. And the second factor, the queer women that we have spoken to don't fear that they are being that they are underserved by the Government and by third parties and there has not been a reason to fear that. There hasn't been any precedence for that. And because anyway the security sectors is quite weak and they haven't yet expanded to the Internet. However, that's not to say that this condition will stay this way forever. Actually it looks like it might change very soon because there are two threats that we have identified. The first is that religious the religious institutions in Lebanon are quite strong and they have been the driving force behind censorship in traditional media. So we think that the reason they haven't yet spoken about what's going on online is because the Internet is still not a very important space to them in the traditional sense and their sort of traditional arenas and probably because the queer movement is not quite large enough yet and the rate of expansion has been quite vast, they might pick them up under the radar screen and we are worried there might be a big backlash.
And in the second reason to fear the Internet might change as a space for queer people is there has been there has been a new legislation that's been drafted to expand the security sector in to the Internet. So via, you know, e transaction laws by the security sector is now becoming digitalized. There is a fear that these things would be a gateway to a larger surveillance over the Internet. Internet space changes. In this way it comes under the watchful eye of the Government and if the censorship in the traditional media does encroach on the Internet then we think that the queer movement could change fundamentally. It is not to say they wouldn't survive it because they have gotten really strong but there will be a fundamental change and I think that's something to think about. Thank you.
(Applause.)
>> JAC SM KEE: Thank you for that Tamara for showing us a side of the Internet that we rarely explore. We have two more presentations and we also have Mr. Antti Peltomaki to give a response to the issues of competing interests and rights on this area. And we haven't actually managed to well, set out all the different areas since we only have the first presentation but the intervention should provide interesting food for thought. So a quick introduction. Mr. Antti Peltomaki is the deputy director general of the directorate general for the Internet Society. DG INFSO for the European Commission. He is responsible for promoting international cooperation and information technology research and for representing the commission in negotiation on ICT development, the regulatory environment and the availability and accessibility of ICT based services.
>> ANTTI PELTOMAKI: Good morning, everyone and I think I will try to be very brief and try to introduce the views of the European Commission and European executions, that they are trying to differentiate all kinds of issues including human rights and I think we have the responsibility in place, the charter of fundamental rights is much more established. Kind of a regulatory guidance for all of our work and I think that now on the basis of this treaty there is a mandate exceeding the convention of human rights for the Council of Europe, but I think that now we can say that human rights are embedded in our everyday work. What we are doing is inherent and we pay great attention to human rights, are really respected in all our activities. But I think that whenever we then try to see that the challenge that we are having in front of us I think it is really to find right type of the balance between different types of the rights and the needs, like the right to express one's self freely, transparency of public institutions, the right to control one's own private information, rights to information about what is important for one's life. Like I think now introduced in the previous speaker, sexuality, sexual health, et cetera, but on the other hand we are having the right obligation to protect from violence and crime. And there I try to illustrate what we have been doing the last years in relation to the protection of our children's right on the online environment. And I think there, of course, the previous speaker and I think the Chair was indicating that there might be that kind of controversy from time to time how to see that kind of interest of protecting illegal say distribution, for example, of material documenting the sexual abuse of the children, the scope of any kind of really respecting sexuality or sexual identity but I think that, of course, we can easily identify that there is that kind of a gray area but where we have to be very careful that where we are protective. Where we are really I think that taking a very strict stand on say all different kind of basic rights that we are having including the sexuality. But I think that trying to say what we are actually doing in information society and media that in general I think that we have really tried to so far let's say prevent or to not go to the hard measures. I think that whenever we try to focus on children's right to protection we see the instruments where parents, children, teachers have the information and tools that they need to manage their own lives and then to stay safe.
And I think we have together with the stakeholders established safe data centres and they exist in the 27 member states and mainly responsibile to member states and I think they are supported by our safe Internet programme. And I think that's very much on awareness raising with the parents, children and teachers about ways to manage their children's online lives. And I think that then we have tried to really have the independent review of the availability of filtering solutions where, of course, I think they can be used in all different ways. I think that where we are really thinking of safer Internet programme with a view of improving the quality and then giving the parents and other careers a choice. But all in all we must say we are bound by treaties, our strict commitment to our human rights and I think we are open minded and strictly regulated on the EU level. I think we try to invite the stakeholders and especially I think in this case the telecom operators as well as the networking service providers, self regulatory approaches and I think that so far we have been rather satisfied that this has found some kind of a balance how and what type of measures are available for the people really to protect themselves or protect their children. And I think that then finally I would say that our previous commissioner, Madam Redding is responsible for IP Justice and I think that's kind of her watchdog for human rights for the European Commission and I think definitely whenever we try to find how these kind of rights are really protected in the online world I think there we have fortunately previous commissioner or the commissioner who was previously responsible for online world so that is now having the most assets on her at her disposal and then we believe that we tried to find the delicate balance always in our actions. Thank you.
>> JAC SM KEE: Thank you.
(Applause.)
>> JAC SM KEE: Thank you, Mr. Peltomaki For giving us concrete examples in how to approach these range of competing rights and interests and it is centring the right framework and hopefully in this conversation we are able to come up with some suggestions or ideas in a conversation to see how we can also enable different kinds of users in these processes to try to become actors in ensuring that privacy, safety and security and openness is being preserved.
Our next speaker is Clarissa Smith. She is a programme leader of the MA Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sunderland in the UK. Her focus is on institutional practices, strategy uses and meanings of pornographies. And she also researches history of pornographies and the way representations of sex have entered mainstream media. Her research employs audience in order to understand the pleasure she is interested in a practice in the development of audience studies and with a broad cultural framework and is a member of the editorial bord.
>> CLARISSA SMITH: Thank you. My work, yes. Okay. I want to explain a little bit about the Onscenity Network that I am part of and I am here representing today. It is a new network which has just been set up in the UK but it has an international focus. And it had been funded by the arts and humanities research council in the UK one of the last things to get on to the wire before funding was cut. We have an intention really to examine what it is that's going on now in the 21st century with regard to sexuality, sex, media and technology. And taking this actually as something that needs to be explored in all its detail, there is no doubt that there are concerns about who is accessing what, what's available that day, who gets to make it, how much money it is making, what people are doing with it, et cetera, et cetera. One of the problems it seems to us within the network and we are around now, what, 100, 120 across the world is that there has been a real shying away actually from trying to examine pornography in all its detail. And I think in particular what has happened is that pornography has become a way of exploring all what's wrong with new technology and I am talking about new technology as something to be feared and not as necessarily a tool that people can use in particular ways that actually it has no one unitry use and that's particularly true of pornography itself. To read some of the recent publications one that came out called Everyday Pornographies I think there is an absolutely singular use of porn and I am going to talk briefly about why I think that's a problem in a minute.
We have got an explosion of online sexual communities and new forms of sex work that's being facilitated by the Internet and is there a proliferation of pornography. It is possible to find anything sexual online now from clown porn to pushy to queer to puffy as people would understand that in terms of gay and lesbian. Did I say queer to puffy? I didn't say that. Fluffy and plushies. Okay.
If you don't know what that is I can tell you that at the end. But one of the things that's quite interesting about plushy porn people dress up as animals and there may be no signs of genitals and indeed anything that's recognizably sexual in the imaginary but clearly functions as some form of pornography if what we take pornography to be is material for sexual excitement. So I am not just using that. I know the outer reaches of the Internet better than anybody else but actually it is an indication of the ways in which we can't know what pornography is just simply by looking at it. There are ways in which it speaks to particular sets of interest, particular sets of communities and that that may well be very opaque to outsiders who don't understand anything about it.
That becomes increasingly problematic to think about specifically in the ways in which regulation is now talked about. That actually it is about protecting people from things that they clearly don't understand or protecting children, protecting the family, ways of life, et cetera, et cetera. These all become ways in which you want to identify a particular problem in particular ways and pornography is, of course, a very easy scapegoat for all kinds of problems. Very much linked it seems to me to questions around sexualization which has become increasingly popular in American, Australian and UK discourse and I am sure that it is going to leak everywhere else and has been pornography has been hooked to questions around violence for a long time but sexualization is also being hooked up to that, too.
What is sexualization? It is the process apparently by which we have all become sexualized beings. There is a very nonpejorative way. We talk about people's progress from childhood to adulthood. But in particular the way it has been taken up by the APA, American Psychological Association and also within the Australian counterpart and in the UK the real problems about what sexualization means. Actually they don't have a definition of sexualization because that suits them very well not to have a definition. So have something vague and obscure which you can just apply to the Internet and say this is the problem. And I would like to talk to you that actually most of the alarm around pornification, sexualization, the use of these terms is actually incredibly plical and very prejudiial.
I am going to talk about pornography. I think the desire to regulate pornography is an issue for everyone who is interested in any notion of sexual rights but not to say that I am uniformly proporn and the very fact I have to say that is an indication in which these arguments become so deeply embedded. There are lots of things that I don't like but may well be things I don't like from many different reasons from anybody else in this room and I am not going to go in to those at this moment.
So I think one of the key problems that we have when people are talking about pornography and other sexual explicit materials online, whatever these are, is that there is a failure to actually engage with who is using it, who is producing it and why. The assumption that it is produced for profit, produced for men and it is produced for sexual excitement. Actually we don't, in fact, know that. Certainly there are companies out there who are producing pornography for money. They are producing it with a male audience in mind and they may be predominately male employees in the particular business but that would be to take one area of pornographic production and apply it to every form of pornographic production and there are myriads of pornographic productions and in particular to reach many audiences. And this is something that's conveniently ignored in the debate about whether or not something should be done about pornography. And also I would like to argument that it has been actually capitalism and interest making money that have produced all kinds of things that we can say have been really important to people in their everyday lives, in their sense of self and their construction of communities, et cetera. The fact that money is made does not necessarily mean that it is a problem but that it is made by men does not necessarily mean it is a problem or it is directed to men. But equally online when I first started researching pornography which was in about 1992, that was my second incarnation as an employee. So I am much older than I might look. Not that you need to know that. Why am I saying that? So it was very little available for women and in the UK. In the UK case there was six magazines launched in 1992 which targeted women. By the end of 1993 only one of them survived. Didn't seem be to a market for them. Institutional problems that meant that they went out of circulation. But one of the things is very key about those magazines was that they were produced by male pornographers within a capital system but read by women by particular forms made available to them in particular ways. That's one of the problems that we have been talking about pornography, who makes it and this idea there is a singular pornography. So one of the problems as well about debates that we have around pornography and sexually explicit detail, there is a very narrow conceptual understanding of media and consumer interest. Interest and pleasures of myriad, there is no one kind of pornography that might appeal to women. And once you start to talk about other identifications, for example, sadomasochistic lesbian women, then you are not going to find a particular pornography that appeals to them in terms of necessarily their gender and there is no one way of responding to this material.
Sexual excitement or interested is not limited to materials which are overtly targeted at sexual relations. For example, just because something appears to be educational, for example, that doesn't stop someone finding it potentially sexually exciting because, of course, it may open up ways of thinking about sex that someone hadn't thought of before. So something that seems to be entirely premised on the educational can become in of it erotic. This is one of the problems about regulation is that it doesn't understand that a sense of expression and some of them may be difficult and problematic and vocalizing of emotion, sexual discourse allows and is really important to people and not about bad attitudes or learning to see women as sexual objects, for example, which is one of the key claims or that it is going to reproduce acceptance of rape myths in theories. Matter of considerable dispute.
So what did I find in terms of research, interests that women expressed in terms of their use of pornography? Various things. Sharing with other women. Like minded women. Women who are in an exploration of sexual interest, sexual excitement, fantasies, the possibilities of exploring in their company, shared sense of experience. Yes, I had that experience, too. That I was I mean I think your confessional quotation earlier was a really good example of that kind of sense of wanting to find a shared story of coming out, for example, but it doesn't have to be a coming out story. It could be the first time I was kissed or the first time I had an orgasm and that expression of sexual feeling that one has with other people.
Testing one's self is a clear pleasure that people talk about in terms of their use of sexual materials. Would I like to do that. Would that feel good to me. Ooh, that looked hideous. Finding out about other people. It was not always entirely positive and I am going to show a short video clip that I had, show some of that. It can be about acquisition of knowledge. About imagining sex. Imagining sex happening to other people. Happening to one's self. Watching other people doing it. Taking risks imaginatively. Discussions around porn which has come from many activists against pornography. GNSO stands for all pornography but also the relationship between views and that kind of pornography is probably much more complex than anti porn activists would argue but it is simply enacting violence against women. There is the possibility of taking risks imaginatively. Is an important element of pornographic use and definitely comes through when you talk to gay and lesbian viewers.
Taking that first step in to the possibility of engaging with another person of the same gender, same sex so that you are moving outside of the norm, the normative. All pleasures of looking at men's bodies, women's bodies and sharing that look with other people and being turned and needing to be turned on and many women who talk about looking at pornography and it is sharing in women's liberation and I have the right to look and I want to seize that right to look and I don't want to lose it to anybody else.
So what does this mean? I think in terms of rights, for example, the key issue at the moment especially in the UK seems to be around children and what they should be able to see. And I think that there are very real problems about what children may stumble across, what they may be looking at inadvertently and don't want to see and, of course, there is questions we need to ask about children's intentional uses for sexual material and pornography. What are they looking for? A lot of it is information. Children need to have as much good sex education as they can and I certainly don't want to argue that it is not important. Equally it is. We need to be asking them the questions what is it you are doing and for many I think we will find that they are doing things that we don't expect they are doing. For example, researches that were done two years ago, an awful lot of people look at pornography that looked at urination. Awful lot of outrage from parents and the arguments are being that this is teaching young people that scatological pleasures, that these are normal pleasures that everyone ought to be engaged in. Unfortunately the research didn't pay attention to what they were looking at which was two girls and one guy. What is the question and why does this have to be asked. This isn't two girls and one cop. It is not a reaction to two girls and one cop. Two girls well, I can explain that later. Oh. That's another fetish all together.
(Laughter).
>> CLARISSA SMITH: Actually what this is if it comes up I hope is the reaction video to Spankwire (coughing), Spankwire, this is a subject of a core case very recently. Can you hear that? (Music).
>> What?
>> (Music) (screaming and laughing).
>> Oh, my God. Are you shitting me? (Screaming).
>> CLARISSA SMITH: Okay. You find there is about a thousand of these reaction videos to this particular video Spankwire and it is called Spankwire which is a Web site and it is a porn site and this is quite labeled as an extremely bizarre video and it was a subject of a case under the immigration act which was brought in to the UK last year which seeks to criminalize the possession of what it terms extreme pornography. As an expert witness in that case and so Spankwire video along with two and a half million other people who have viewed it, the prosecution tried to argue that, in fact, the guy had watched this video, had downloaded it and had it in the possession for the purposes of sexual gratification. He may well but actually whether or not they the video was could be judged obscene and came under the view as it is. The ways in which it was cut, the ways in which it was put together and the soundtrack which you hear there which was a version of Destiny Child's, "I am a survivor", what is interesting about this video it shows that children are accessing pornographic material but what what we are seeing here is a form of self scaring and of taking risks in group situations because a lot of these videos are group situations. It is about joining and participating with other people in ways that the Internet is made possible. Something else they might have done in the corners of playground but now you can share this over the Internet. I had a couple of other points but I will leave it there. Okay. Thanks.
(Applause.)
>> JAC SM KEE: Thank you, Clarissa, for that very interesting insight in to pornography I will be interested to talk to you later on what this would mean on the .XXX move and when you try to push everything and defining pornography in to one particular space online. So next up unfortunately Dorothy Atwood is not able to join us today. So next up we have Joy Liddicoat. Joy is a lawyer based in Wellington, New Zealand. She is a commissioner with the Human Rights Commission. And she is a lawyer for the commission for work on human rights and the Internet. She is member of the Internet zNET and Chairs the board of the Domain Commission, Limited which oversees the domain registration of. Sorry New Zealand and a board member of creating resources for empowering action, a Nongovernmental Organisation based in New York.
>> JOY LIDDICOAT: Thank you. And welcome everybody. I just wanted to before I begin just acknowledge Jac who is the reason that I got involved in sexuality, gender and human rights on the Internet because about four years ago we were sharing a panel together and she said to me you call yourself a human rights activist. Where are you on the Internet and Internet Governance? Why aren't you in these Forums and I thought ooh. That's a really good question. So now I am here, Jac, thanks to you.
>> JAC SM KEE: Thank you.
(Applause.)
>> JOY LIDDICOAT: Keep up the great work. So just very quickly I am going to share with you an overview of what I am going to talk about. I am going to talk a little bit about sexuality, gender and regulatory systems. I am going to give examples of forms of engagement that I have done working with the New Zealand Human Rights commissioner. I am going to draw from implication of the IGF and the pictures that you are going to see of people what are pictures of transgender and intersex people of New Zealand that are part of an inquiry that I did against people with transgender. We are a sexually and diverse country. We have lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender and intersex people. And so there is a huge diversity of sexual and gender minorities. The Human Rights Commission that I am a commissioner of is an internationally accredited institution. It is accredited under the United Nations principles. In general terms where we are hitting is way beyond the constructs, binary constructs of sexuality and gender. Beyond male, female in to sexually diverse people who can form to neither one nor the other sex and also beyond constructive binary constructs of gender.
Some of the defining principles in our work apart from the international human rights framework you can find out more at asiapacificforum.net. They are principles that state the in terms of we are currently consulting on the human rights status of sexual orientation and gender identity in New Zealand. If you want to know anything about New Zealand it is either online or I got copies for you.
To be who I am, this is the first example of dialogue I want to talk to you about. To be who I am, it was an inquiry that our commission conducted in to the day to day life experiences of transgender people in New Zealand. We began this inquiry because in the course of our work we did transgender people challenged us about the reality of their lives and the fact that they were marginalized, subjected to violence, subjected to harassment and unable to get health services they needed and they wanted someone else to take a closer look. And we began our inquiry with a clear message about transgender people and headline in the media that said they were circus show freaks. I was subjected to discrimination, harassment and violence.
So we asked the simple question, do trans people experience equality and dignity and security at least to the same extent that other New Zealanders do. Look at discrimination and accessibility to public and barrier to legal citizenship. We had about 200 submissions from very diverse trans people from health professionals, from law enforcement officers, from the civil society groups. Four out of five submissions highlighted discrimination against transgender people and we were quite shocked as a national human rights institution at the high level, the prevalence and depth so much so that one transgender person said basically I come to accept discrimination as part of my daily life. I know if I walk out of my house to go to the library or go to buy food I am going to be spat at and assaulted and people are going to cross the road to avoid me. In terms of accessibility of health services I go to my doctor and I get laughed at. The doctor won't see me or tries to cure my problem by reading from the Bible. This really worked to resonate with trans people and talk about constructive pathways forward. And I have a copy of the transgender inquiry if anyone wants to have a look.
The second example I want to talk to you about is a dialogue we did called Voices. Modeled on the work of queer which is talking about sexuality and gender and human rights. What are the conversations they are having. And we did this by collaborating with other sexual and human rights and gender organisations. Essentially what we found in terms of our overview of sexuality, gender and regulation was that regulatory systems already exist everywhere all the time in relation to sexuality and gender. Social, economic, political. They are cultural and they have religious and anti sexual and that's before we get to law. So but all of those regulatory they start at birth. Do I want a boy or girl or a son or a daughter but what happens that the baby that's born to you it is not actually possible to tell and how do you deal with it and how do you raise that child. And the regulatory systems are also illegal. It is a combination of either underregulation. In other words, there is nothing in the law books in New Zealand about lesbians. It is just a complete absence. I am not saying there should be anything but there is an absence.
And then we get overregulation. Same sex, prescriptions around colonial times, what people could wear when they went out. Those sorts of things. Or poor regulations. In other words, targeting the wrong groups and sweeping up in to identity laws around putting F or M on your passport and people who don't fit in to either category. What do you do then and also obviously restrictions and violations and human rights. Behavioral or other regulatory restrictions on sexual and gender minority by the virtue that they exist. And my friend from Lebanon has mentioned the situation in her country and others have similar instances. When I say we I am speaking as lesbian but also as a human rights advocate. Sexuality and gender is relevant to regulation and it is relevant to regulation on the Internet and the way I will demonstrate soon. Very much our way to promote and protect people's rights. We protect their ability to assert their rights. They are a model of third gender and I think in the Pacific and South Asia region there is opportunities for leadership, but that requires movements. And the most recent stunning example of movements boarding a relation to regulatory system is voices against the campaign over to the Indian criminal code on which others are probably more experienced than me.
So just going to talk about the third area of dialogue that we focused on and that is in to relation to .NZID and the statistics about Internet users in New Zealand. And the interesting thing there we have got a significant but small proportion of users who are ex users of the Internet. My thought was why not bring the international administrators together with human rights advocates. Bring the people who are running and the people who are operating the registry and the people who are running the dispute regulatory this happened just a month ago. And this is just an example of some of the sorts of issues that bubbled in areas of mutual interest. So one of them, for example, was the proposals for ISP filtering for children pornography. We got a voluntary system where ISPs can opt in to a filtering system that sounds good except that we have only really got probably the top three, four ISP providers cover the bulk of the mark. If you get the top three or four you have protectively covered the most users. Like elsewhere we are fighting a battle in relation to termination of user accounts for copyright violations and we have got some infrastructure issues and we are currently doing a public consultation on DNC. What was remarkable was the huge amount of overlap of interest between human rights advocates and Internet administration. And very much Internet administration were using the language of rights around their policy issues. So they were talking about the rights of registration to termination of ISPs and why you use the language of rights they sort of said I don't know actually.
Okay. Let's talk about that. Some of the things that came out of there was tension around human rights and administration, but the Internet administration is not a moral vacuum. There is influences all the time about decisions that are made about Internet administration that are quite loaded and that no paradigm shift is made. And there was some particular pathways forward that we thought would be used in our domestic context. Let's try and articulate the human rights of the Internet and get some consultation about that, challenges and promote the idea of digital citizenship. Not protect people but protect their rights and look at technology and neutral application of human rights standards. So why are we using technology to fight technology? Let's look at minimizing intrusion on rights.
So some regulatory implication just again in the spirit of the panel and then I will get to some IGF implications and some practical actions. First is don't simply graph existing modes of regulation in to the Internet environment. Social, political, religious, economic and other regulatory models haven't worked. There is a poor history at best with legal systems of regulation. Don't simply translate over. We need to be creative and we need to think literally but human rights do apply for the process for developing regulatory systems. That's why I want to know as what human rights activists are saying about sites. If law enforcement comes to me and says I want to shut down this site and I say no, I want to get a court order. Who is monitoring the, for example, filtering system and what are the forms of accountability and in our view the human rights approach is key.
In other words, the process by which you go about developing the human rights process is equally important as the outcome that you are trying to achieve. In terms of other implications the Internet is already a but regulation happens in the space all the time. And counterweights are needed. The system of mutual cooperation on which Internet as an administration is based needs counterweights so there is no single body with control or autonomy. And we think in terms of our context we need to create a Forum that fits us. So don't look at template models, very many ones that will fit.
So some implication for the IGF. The human rights approach is critical to. But if we are going to ask about balancing and security and rights then whose security are we talking about. Are we talking about the fact that parents feel better if they think their children are not going to accidentally stumble on pornography. If you come across something that I don't like or don't know about what do you do. And the situation, the experience of sexual and gender minorities in democratic participatory systems is that marginalized groups have less access to power and those that exercise rights, the majority don't always do so. We need to ask whose security and whose rights in balancing. Practical actions I think that No. 1 it is all states must ratify all core human rights instruments and we have members of the UN and members states who have not ratified all international human rights instruments or have reservations to them and that goes to the heart of, for example, if you have got platform providers or Internet intermediaries.
We are thinking about developing a New Zealand governance and Internet report. Engage with critical Internet resources to promote the rights of transgender and intersex. And steps that countries such as Malaysia and Australia and Jordan other practical actions critically reviewed Internet administration and build alliances and learn off each other and publish that stuff. And in terms of movement bringing human rights and sexual and gender minority together as part of thinking about movements. And there is talk about a Pacific region IGF that may happen next year. One of the processes that's going to happen before that there is an Asia Pacific outgaming human rights conference that I encourage you to register for and we have some amazing speakers. We are going to be looking at practical action that can be taken across the region in relation to the rights of sexual and gender minority. Lastly some interesting resources on line. I suppose in sort of reflecting on this panel and trying to bring it together for us it is really being about there may not be a clear pathway forward but we can walk backwards in to the future and know what in the past has worked and at least learn from that. Jac?
>> JAC SM KEE: Thank you very much. Thank you to Joy, Tamara and Clarissa on some interesting insight on your work, which can at first appear to be such contradictory things but in fact, lies at the heart of regulation. We have about 45 minutes for discussion and I would like to open the floor for questions or points or comments that you would like to raise. Yes, sir.
>> My name is John. I work for Freedom House in southeast Asia. In countries, specifically in southeast Asia and I think it exists all over the world when governments say we have to censor the Internet usually they say we have to protect the children. We have to stop the there is all this horrible stuff and that's why we need these Raconi laws. And then when you see them implementing these laws it is very rare to see them blocking porn and child pornography and porn sites. Even that's the excuse I can say in Thailand. It is statistically insignificant to political sites. I am curious to know if there has been any research and actually counting or monitoring all these laws that are in place to stop porn, how this is actually being implementing because often my anecdotal sense we are talking about porn but what we mean is political (Off microphone). In the widest sense of that term. So I am curious if there has been any research done on that or any numbers that indicated or just being shown as a lemon. This is being for links that you showed but it is being misused for Governments.
>> JOY LIDDICOAT: I can share some research. One is the open net research. We are looking at laws and having a technical test to see how filtering technology works and what they block out and I am doing one with some partners in Malaysia and there is also one that's one that's being done in India and looking very specifically at what's happening here and what is being censored and removed and what's the discourse around it and how does gender and sexuality fit in this debate. Definitely there has been an effort in trying to do monitoring. The EROTICS project that I shared, for example, Brazil is looking at the memorandum of understanding with Google. Actually on the ORKT situation as well as the civil rights framework and USA. I can't remember the name of the act, the act that actually COPA, COPA, CIPA where they are looking at public libraries and they receive public funding from the site and they are to put filtering in to the public computers and they are seeing how it is being implemented in to the different public libraries in the states and the different processes of which this is being enforced, operationalized.
>> CLARISSA SMITH: As part of the Onscenity Network some colleagues are beginning the process of looking at criminal justice and in Britain that's going to be about censoring information that in ways that are recognizably (Off microphone). States I haven't got the same dedication. (Off microphone). But I think there are some interesting cases, recently Facebook but where in terms of use to invoke to close down Web sites that have pages, Facebook pages that have an expressly feminist element (Off microphone). SH exclamation mark, a feminist site taken down last week (Off microphone). Porn Harm which is actually a really unpleasant group homophobic, transphobic, all kinds of phobic has been able to remain (Off microphone).
>> I am Marian Frank Goldsmith from the UK. If one of your panelists could flush out your stories about changing public we have an international perspective here, especially when you are talking about the early '90s. Has there been a shift to less tolerance? There was a time when one could be more sexually explicit and more open. I am interested to hear the three different views. Thank you.
>> I would like to know if I if I can have five minutes to explain a little bit about the Brazilian end of the EROTICS research? Is it possible?
>> Sure.
>> Okay. Okay.
>> Thank you, Chair. This is Rajesh from Nigeria. We have 180,000 server cafes there. We are all medium and low income families are accessing the Internet. In my opinion which is the major cause of defeat of broadband, the (Off microphone) is required. In India we are talking about the digital divide between the Google but in my opinion it is not a digital divide between urban. Majority of the families still don't want their child involved to access the Internet on the fear of pornography. Recently in to the ICANN meeting, (Off microphone) is now coming out officially. I am very much surprised if my name, Rajesh, how it can be accepted by my countrymen, how I will be able to put my pictures or anything on the .XXX. Everybody in the IGF starts from the view. We are talking about stopping the online Chair but when the international monitoring section is coming, the response coming from the country, I will not name the country, I will say the visiting country, in our country it is official. How we can stop. Because some rules can be official for some country but some rules are not official for the other country. It is a cultural abuse. Why we are not taking action through the IGF platform? We start the international monitoring and policy from my country, if any response is coming that these sites are good for the people of the India. We should take immediate action as our social responsibility to stop it. What I would suggest is that if we will be able to curtail 10 percent of the pornography right now happening in to the Internet cloud we will find that at least 50 percent of the broadband policies will increase and this digital divide between the open mindedness and the conservative will reduce. The basic thing what some guys tell in to the fora how you can interfere in to our privacy, but in my opinion if someone's privacy or someone's openness is harming a culture, things of any person we should take immediate action to stop that and we should think how Internet reaches to all. Not to the limited guy who are very much open about the sex and pornography. Thank you.
>> JAC SM KEE: Thank you very much. This is in direct response? Okay. Go ahead.
>> I am Priscilla from New York. To South Africa and Lebanon and Brazil, it is about all these blogs and Web sites that have been created and enable communication. I am wondering and we also talked about the risk of censorship if they adopt new legislation but I am also wondering what about the safety situation. For instance, in western countries or in some African countries each time there is a sexually oriented chat room there is always some risk of deviation or hateful speech. Simply speaking if we take an example of Lebanon there might be risk of hateful speech. Are these issues at all considered parallel to this development of sexual rights, and this revolution on or are these countries taking in to account the experience of western countries that have already been through this many years ago obviously because the LGBT situation is different? We have only been in South Africa and maybe we have a chance to hear more about Brazil because it is interesting where the situation, the society is different, maybe more sexualized and more open and how looking at legislation of MOU with Google. As far I know I don't think there is any LGBT or anything on in MOU. Inform us about it. But what else is it any risk of hateful behavior also in all these chat rooms in Brazil or other type of risks, like trafficking or I don't know, I don't know. Just an open question. Thank you.
>> JAC SM KEE: Thank you for the comments and I would like to invite responses from the speakers as well as EROTICS Brazil and South Africa. So the comments that came out how is it possible, can we change the public around sexuality at large and then concern about balancing some of the things that Mr. Peltomaki was talking about earlier and there is actual harm that happens online and how do we deal with that at the same time that we promote sexual rights and freedoms.
>> JOY LIDDICOAT: Thanks. And thanks for the questions and challenges. Firstly in relation to the first question, I think in 25 years New Zealand has gone from a country where homosexuality homosexual activity was illegal to one that actually promotes tolerance and understanding around sexual diversity. And its Government and foreign policy now max out its protection of the rights of sexual and gender minority as a point of difference for it in its international foreign strategy. So how do we get from the here to there. I think one of the strong things is movement building. And the way in which you have to create movements for social justice and social change. Which we are all offline. They were a mess of social justice movement and we are seeing those movements moving in online worlds as well. First thing, social movements and connecting those things and secondary in relation to transgender and an inquiry we began in a very hostile media environment, very hostile political environment. So we made some strategic decisions not to promote the fact that we were doing this inquiry. We didn't hide it but we didn't go out to our media strategy. You can't argue with 400 documented pages of day to day life of sexual and gender minority. The media environment has changed in three years and part of it was also online strategies. We have same practical outcomes. It is not a linear path. We go forward. We go back. We go sideways. Suddenly something happens. So just sitting with the fact that process are not linear is also an element. And also being willing to let new leadership come forward was also a significant point. The leaders of tomorrow, we are now of what schools are they in and how are they being influenced was another sort of factor as well. I will give the others an opportunity to comment before going to the other questions.
>> TAMARA QIBLAWI: I just thought I would respond to the comments by kind of giving you more of the context within which this queer movement works because it sort of shows you how the path that the queer movement in Lebanon has is really different from the west, from that which the west has taken or the global north. Anyway, so the thing about Lebanon, it is a place that's constantly influx politically, socially, culturally, because we had 15 years of war and that rendered the state really weak. So most of the activism that's happened at least especially with the queer women's movement has been on a discursive grass roots level as opposed to addressing actual policy and I mean there is this great awareness of, great potential to social and political sensitivity because there is so many things in the terrain to navigate and map out. So I think I am not sure exactly what I'm addressing now which is the comments but yeah, to answer your question about controlling hate speech in Forum, that are created all of the Forum that have been created by Meem are moderated but there hasn't really at least on, you know, the their Forums that hasn't been homophobic hateful speech and what's moderated is outing. Meem moderates people mainly in order to protect the privacies of certain individuals. They don't want certain information to come out but hate speech is something that we are sort of anticipating, but it hasn't yet happened. And I think that the stand on that right now is that we kind of not to say welcome it but we kind of think that if it starts if we start to receive it that means we are reaching a wider audience and then that's actually a good thing. It is going to be a difficult thing to deal with but I think there is enough energy in the group and that the group has become strong enough to be able to deal with these challenges. Yeah.
>> JAC SM KEE: Thanks. Can I invite the responses to be brief because we don't have a lot of time left and we would like to get another round of questions. Whatever you feel like you want to respond to, Clarissa.
>> CLARISSA SMITH: I feel like I ought to respond to what you are saying about the Indian situation and to be honest with you I don't know. I think that there are very real ambience intentions around certain very how and why pornography is available, in what spaces and to whom and I think that there are real questions that need to be asked (Off microphone). Domination of production. I think that there are I have less problem actually with cause for censorship that talk about morals. These are questions that then get the basis within a particular environment and can be argued against, for example, what constitutes the (Off microphone). The problem I have is when we talk about harms which are problematically defined and often don't recognize individual points. That hasn't answered your question.
(Laughter).
>> Maybe, Mia, this would be a good time for you to intervene and have a comment. Mia is one of the core researchers for the EROTICS project.
>> MIA: I want to respond about what you were saying about India and there were a lot of generalizations that were made about people. We just concluded this EROTICS research in Bombay and we interviewed young women from the ages of 18 right up to the age, older women of age 54 and young men as well. Questions from 150 young people. I don't think that people have very strong moralistic responses to things like pornography. On the contrary we found that people were saying pornography is a part of life. It is there. As an adult I have a complete right to access this content and material and parents recognize there is content on the Internet that makes them uncomfortable when they know that their children can watch it but they also realise that the responsibility is to educate their children. They clearly feel that blanket filtering don't work. Many parents talk about how they restrict Internet access. Children have mobile phones and there is ways to get around regulation. So they recognize that it is more important to talk to your children and arrive at some sort of mechanism or system by which you can educate rather than saying you are not going to access any of this. And I think we live in an age of images and I think we need to understand this is where we are in India right now. And all these ideas about culture and morality I think we have to perhaps stop talking about this one unified sense of what is India culture. There is a lot of diversity in our country but we only talk about very superficialized languages. We are going to publish this research very soon. So I think that when we are developing Internet policy even in terms of cyber cafes, ISP regulation we need to have some kind of evident base. On what basis are we making policy, IMAI comes out with research but it is very quantitative data they get. And I think that's what I mean this is like one way to start talking to users and listening to users and seeing what is actually out there. Yeah.
>> JAC SM KEE: Thank you. One second. Okay. We are actually running very short of time and I have one question that I would like to ask everyone before we end the session. Before that, Morina.
>> MORINA: Actually I prefer to read. I wrote an explanation on EROTICS Brazilian findings. Very short. Okay. So a section from the Brazilian secretariat, one of the organisations involved in the EROTICS research project. SPW was responsible for the investigation and political debate and what we did was to monitor the debate on the Internet regulation in Brazil which has been a complex scenario but in the same time leaving a strong and special process of debate. Since the discussion on the creation of the civil framework for Internet regulation. Summarizing, some of our observations, are complex and 15 scenarios. We started our study in May 2009 and considered in time with the co operation conducted by the federal policy which was part of the public sector and parliamentary to investigate child pornography on the Internet and besides this beginning was marketing by (Off microphone) against the (Off microphone) on cybercrimes, subjected too much because of criminal and authoritarian. But even if these mobilizations, it was approved in the Brazilian state. The executive in October 2009 proposed drafting a framework for Internet regulation which inevitably would become one of the main focus of our research. This is a debate to try to (Off microphone) on Internet regulation changing from a criminal approach to a civil perspective as a framework for users and Internet providers and the Government and the secretary of ministry of justice presented a proposal and it was made a public (Off microphone) to build foundations of Internet regulation.
Consultation with states and finished in May of 2010 but initially the idea of sending this proposal to the Congress has changed and because in this moment we are leaving we are not in an election year Brazil which indicated that the attacks will be tabled in 2011 when a new legislature starts. And during this period we observe it, we realise that the (Off microphone) with many actors mainly from the law enforcement agencies and conservatives, politicians presenting their arguments especially defending the children's rights and managing to convert their online child pornography. Also apply the short research, explored the perceptions of feminists and the the proposal regarding Internet regulation, but didn't identify the participation of these actors and the Internet regulation debate. So sexuality, meaning the fight against a web based child pornography is definitely at the centre of the Brazil related debates and the connections between these worlds are not yet in place and investments should be made for them to happen. We are starting to think in ways to promote these meetings. To create a space to share the studies of various communities. Just sorry, it is just a short summary but I can talk better with you and we can talk specifically for the details. Okay?
>> JAC SM KEE: Just so you know the initial findings of the EROTICS is published on gender.org. The reason why we did this EROTICS research, we begun entering in to this debate and very specifically on violence against women and how it is so embedded in to everyday life and dimensions on to violence against women and looking at issues of cyber harassment and then inevitably we will have to engage with the issue of pornography and that's sort of where policy congregates around. There is very little research that is being done in this area that looks at the experiences and definitions and meanings given to all of these debates by users themselves and users that are already in to the Internet governance Forum. We are talking about young people and it is extremely difficult to do research with children. Around the age of 18. How they use this, in fact, realise the whole range of their rights, not just sexual rights.
So the next question that I wanted to ask you is unfortunately because Dorothy Atwood is not with us today I was curious to see the increasing role of the private sector in the role of governance and also as manager of certain kinds of rights that we would like to exercise on line. So we are looking at the right to expression, to information, to privacy and also to safety and security and to mobility and increasingly this is being let go or managed more and more by people who are by the private sector. So what actually how then can the private entity be able to create certain kinds of decision making processes that is transparent that enables research based policy making and also enables participation by users directly in to these kinds of, you know, other solutions or technical processes that actually defines how you can interact or not interact within a space. So if you have responses I would very much like to hear from you.
>> I am Karen Banks. I am glad you asked that question and it was brought up yesterday in the our pre event and that is the role and responsibility of Governments as the custodian and the protector of human rights. I don't see how I think that has to be addressed very seriously because I don't see privatization and delegation of rights of Governments in the private sector is ever going to work. And I sort of feel like we have to really focus on that, why that's broken down. Why Governments have delegated that responsibility to largely unaccountable private institutions. And I think that some of the workshops that are happening here would be very interesting for these participants to attend. Intermediary workshops, for example, that's going to be looking at rights and responsibilities for intermediaries and how we can bring accountability to those processes and I struggle with that very top level of role of Government in all of this.
>> JOY LIDDICOAT: Thanks, Karen, for the question. A couple of observations. One is that as I see it we have taken the approach that human rights do apply to Internet administration. And in the New Zealand context it is quite clear that the implications of that haven't been thought through. If Internet, if human rights applied to the administration and if there is increasing grounds well to articulate Internet access as a right and as some countries have done then the rights framework says the states have rights and duties. You must provide me with access to the Internet. Although some are arguing for that but rather the state has a duty to stay out of regulating or mediating Internet access. So it shouldn't be trying to control Internet. Now one of the so I talked about counterweights in this system of mutual recognition around Internet. So we I am thinking about working with Internet administrators to say if you want to include intermediaries and platform providers, if you want the Government to stay out then you need to start democratizing your rules. Don't give them to your 100 strong legal sections who are all commercial and contract lawyers to work out. Have an open process. Vote on them. Get feedback about what disputes, resolutions. Use the human rights approach to get meaningful participation in development of rules of engagement and it is possible to go to the Facebook operators in New Zealand around local content disputes, but the point is to say the state is staying still, in other words, resisting the imperative to act. It is not a passive state. It needs to be forced to stay there and the principal human rights application by private providers, it is irrelevant I think.
>> JAC SM KEE: Before we continue is there any feedback or questions from remote participation?
>> Actually I got a question from someone who is following from a twitter feed. He wanted to say it is important to realise how we deal with Internet. He wants to stress that it is very important to (Off microphone). This is a special comment from one of the friends on twitter.
>> JAC SM KEE: Can you repeat? I didn't quite hear.
>> I should make my voice higher. One of my fans on twitter was saying that there is a need to localize the laws regarding the regulation of pornography. Because each country has their own set of values and rules. So he had this comment that he wanted to share. Okay. I have a question which is are there any official efforts to create safe online pornography spaces where people can find actually safe porn that is virus free and violence free and that doesn't have this educational type because eventually now the main concern that porn is loaded with viruses and someone who works with IT I am really sure of this. Can we create this place where people can find porn without being followed and tracked and also shared with ISPs and not being blocked? Like you can have based on your age maybe you can have like a log in there and everyone is free to watch porn. Maybe like this we can create a space where we can compromise somehow.
>> That's very interesting. A white list of safe pornographic sites that we can share with filtering content people.
>> CLARISSA SMITH: Twitter, to the twitter I think one of the real problems about simply talking in terms of each country or each place has its own set values is that actually one of the things that seems to be really clear is they are not willing to engage the values of those people who do, in fact, watch pornography. So one of the no other kind of evidence based research, would it be appropriate to have someone that disputes the right of pornography to exist. Be the person who pounces upon what it is that people do with pornography. So, for example, you are talking about trans people, the fact that the reason that they may not have had full sets of rights, et cetera, has been because people have talked for them in the past and once you allow them to speak for themselves they have something else to say other than objectification or what I want to do is I like to see domination of a woman or whatever. There is an absolute assumption, in almost every account of pornography that men identify with males in the porn that they are viewing and that they take nothing from it other than the possibility of sexual arousal. We don't know that at all. There are simply ways of talking about pornography. (Off microphone).
So if Governments were going to start with evidence based policy that actually engaged with users of porn, I would be saying well, perhaps there could be something they could do about regulation. The fact is they are not near the only people who are likely to know what it is that they do because let's be clear about people who watch pornography have discriminating taste just in the same way of one who is a wine aficionado. They know what wine they want to drink and what year they want to drink from and they have particular choices they make and the idea they are sitting there is nonsense and that's the problem with discourse around porn and how people are bombarded by material that they have no capacity or understanding.
>> Yes. I am Stewart Lory. Chief executive of ICM Registry. In fact, the company that is bringing .XXX. Hopefully it is on the Internet this year. I wanted to put a bit of color to the discussion because there is some misunderstanding of what .XXX is. It is a voluntary space for those members of the adult industry who wish to self identify and self regulate in conjunction with the other stakeholders. Some of the basic policies for .XXX every site must be readable with a machine readable tag. We are much more in favor of desktop level filtering. And we were in discussion with browser manufacturers for the W3C power to standards. Every site will be labeled. The adult industry, we have a foundation, $10 of every domain name we sell and we expect to sell half a million or more, we are talking potentially $5 million a year go in to a non profit foundation where there is a nine member adult council, representatives from child protection groups, privacy and security groups and free expression as well that sit down and make policies on a global basis that will be adopted in .XXX. I think that does answer some of the questions within the room about how the private sector can do what Governments can't do and probably clears up some of the myths about what .XXX is and what it isn't.
>> JOY LIDDICOAT: Can I just say that there are some issues about .XXX which I think are really important to recognize and that is, in fact, people lose their jobs for looking at porn at work. You could play Suduko for hours and nobody would complain about that. There are real issues about people as privacy in terms of very identifiable and
>> STEWART LORY: Yeah, it is a voluntary top level domain. It is voluntary for the producers and consumers. They can look for a .XXX and hopefully the code of conduct with .XXX. The more people will look in the .XXX space but the market will sort that out. (Off microphone). The foundation that we have is everything it does will be public and will be open and we will take input from the public that's for sure. Okay.
>> Okay. (Off microphone).
>> I wanted to get back to the experience in Europe and I think the differences in values and also in regulation within countries has led to the mix that we have developed in Europe for the self regulation, sort of minimal basic regulation and really tools to empower children and that's within the programme we assess these filtering tools and provide the information to the parents so they can make their choice and I think this I mean that's what was really one of the reasons why we led to this mix of measures. And this other point about evidence based, also wanted to point out, I mean in the area of research that we are funding the big kids on line research and that is a first, come out in October and that's a big survey of parents and children of 25 European countries and here we will be looking at risk and harm and also including for pornography. For example, if children from 9 to 16, if they have encountered pornography, if they were looking for it and how they have reacted. How they cope with those risks and also the views of their parents. And I think probably look for further discussion and evidence in this and we want to actually rely on this kind of evidence and knowing what happens really in the usage of the Internet.
>> JAC SM KEE: So thank you for your attention and for participating in this space. Just to summarize a few key points that we have talked about. Basically when we are looking at the issue of sexuality and sexual rights it is really a range of rights that we are talking about. We are not talking about in terms of framework from harm or from the possible kinds of discrimination but in positive ways. And the Internet has a very key role in terms of realisation of a broad range of rights. I really liked what Joy talked about in terms of emphasizing on the way to deal with this issue is to really centre the framework of rights and look at it in terms of protecting rights instead of protecting people because I think that's where we have our downfall and we look at people with no agency and people who are not able to make decisions. But if you look at people having interdependent, interalienable rights and then we look at it and go about it in different ways. We can't ignore the fact that it is getting more and more complicated and that the public/private divide maybe is not as clear as before but in order for it to work effectively that it is transparent and open and it enables really participation from users themselves in determining what can or cannot be done on line. Thank you very much to the speakers.
(Applause.)
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