A-Infos (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria #468 - CONTROL OF WOMEN'S BODIES. - Stalking 2.0 and gender-based technoviolence (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Those who still pay attention to the frequent reports of stalking women 
will have noticed the new and convenient drone practice. The two recent 
cases, in Naples and Friuli, of men intent on tracking their ex-partners 
by using drones to avoid being caught and to acquire details and 
reusable material, seem to mark a new stage in gender-based stalking. 
--- In both cases, the women realized they were being monitored and 
followed due to the unusual presence of the drone, which to this day 
remains an annoyingly visible tool and loud enough to attract attention. 
While the Naples case involved a maneuvering accident in which the drone 
crashed into the window of the room where the woman was located, in the 
Moggio Udinese case, it was more of a combination of factors that 
prompted the victim to file a complaint, aroused by the drone's 
persistent presence. This complaint later proved to be well-founded, 
indeed central. What emerged was a two-year period of stalking, during 
which the woman's new partner was also followed and spied on. Numerous 
images were captured through this practice, some of which were even 
shared with others.

It's likely that while some are left speechless and unable to avoid a 
sense of discouragement and social anxiety, there will also be those who 
are taking inspiration from these infamous initiatives to replicate 
them, arguing, "I'm not as stupid as those guys, and I won't get 
caught!" Expecting, therefore, to see a flurry of so-called stalking 2.0 
cases, we can't help but connect all this to incidents like Mia Moglie, 
Mia Moglie 2, and Phica.net (which we covered in previous issues). These 
incidents, just as they aroused much public opinion, saw a grotesque 
surge in requests to join Group 2, an offshoot of the former, which had 
been shut down by the postal police.

The most obvious similarity, however, lies in the targeted use of 
technology for the purposes of abuse and control. Indeed, while for a 
decade now there has been relentless discussion about overexposure to 
harmful, dangerous, and violent content through technology, little 
attention has been paid to the controlling aspect that it offers, 
facilitates, and in some cases suggests. From apps to geolocate teenage 
children, to home cameras installed to "see what dogs do when we're 
away," to cheap so-called bugs that anyone can equip and use in any 
context, unbeknownst to those they interact with, there is a vast array 
of devices designed to allow us to monitor, record, and observe the 
people around us.

This undoubtedly corresponds to a new form of violence, which, 
regardless of the nomenclature that justice will refine over the years, 
must be viewed in real time and labeled as such: a "technoviolence" 
that, if used against women, is "gender technoviolence."

An unknown and by no means easy scenario unfolds before us. Trying to 
empathize with a woman who was secretly photographed by her husband 
during their domestic life and posted on a virtual dating site (the "My 
Wife" case), it's not hard to imagine the overaccumulation of pain 
stemming from the very concealment, making the trauma much more complex, 
since the shock of having been secretly stolen from her, and by the last 
person she could imagine protecting herself from, plays a large and 
profound role in an already jagged wound.

Similarly, it's not hard to understand that a woman whose ex insists on 
getting back with her is certainly facing great difficulty, but 
discovering she's been followed by a drone, photographed, and therefore 
spied on forces her to be a woman in the face of a much larger and more 
murky reality, precisely because of the complex psychological 
repercussions it entails.

The anxiety that comes from enduring these forms of persecution, the 
severe level of mistrust typical of anything generated by cyberbullying 
(be it bullying, stalking, or otherwise), the feeling that anyone around 
us could be doing those things, even those closest to us, or the 
perpetrator's uprooting from direct and therefore perceptive experience 
of what they are making the other person go through because they find 
technology a means to keep themselves at a distance and not feel truly 
involved in what they are doing, thus belittling and normalizing it, are 
all unexplored aspects, which add to the already known ones and 
materialize in the heavy emotional and psychological consequences that 
victims end up experiencing.

In the specific practice of using drones for these purposes, it's 
inevitable that we also glimpse the metaphor of war, as this is the 
primary instrument of war. Drones are everywhere; we are undoubtedly 
surrounded by them; they crowd the planet, almost always for despicable 
reasons, too often to perpetrate or facilitate numerous forms of 
violence. Without slipping into the rhetoric of the machines that have 
become our sovereign, it's no exaggeration to assert that when you find 
a drone nearby, you inevitably wonder what it's doing and who's behind 
it. That this question must now become "that question" for women, that 
is, a specific concern for the female gender, is yet another 
confirmation that habits, customs, laws, and tools can change, but just 
as imperialism and capitalism will never stop grabbing land and 
resources until they collapse, so too will patriarchy never stop 
treating women as assets to be possessed, land to be conquered, 
objects/resources to exercise its power, and will do so by any means, 
until it is completely eradicated.

Désirée Carruba Toscano

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