On day three of our ‘Sixteen Activists or Organisations Around the Globe Fighting to End Digital Violence Against all Women and Girls‘ campaign, Hera Hussain discusses how a personal act of solidarity sparked Chayn, building intersectional feminist digital futures and the power of tech for survivors.
Hera Hussain is the founder and CEO of Chayn, a global non-profit organisation that provides online resources to support survivors of gender-based violence, including technology-facilitated forms. Chayn’s multilingual content is co-created with, not just for, survivors and has reached over 400,000 people worldwide. Born in Pakistan and now based in the UK, Hera has been passionate about ending violence against women from a young age.
She is a strong advocate for harnessing the potential of open-source technology, trauma-informed design, and hopeful, empowering narratives to tackle some of society’s most urgent challenges. Hera has been recognised on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 and MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 lists. In 2020, she was awarded the British Empire Medal (BEM) by Her Majesty The Queen for her services.
Hera didn’t intend to start a non-profit, despite having spent her teenage years “dreaming of ways to speak up for women’s rights.” Her business ideas, volunteering and writing efforts were born from this “quiet rage” that lived inside her. In this interview, Hera outlines how Chayn itself was an unintentional consequence of struggling to support a friend suffering from domestic violence, as well as the difficulties of running an NGO, the power of technology and intersectionality, necessary systemic changes to end digital violence, alongside the context in Pakistan.
What motivated your decision to build a non-profit organisation like Chayn?
Chayn happened by accident. I had just graduated from university in Scotland. I was trying to help two Pakistani friends escape abusive marriages in Pakistan and the UK, but struggling to get them support.
My friend in Pakistan wasn’t allowed to leave the house unaccompanied. And she came from a powerful family, so the police would not have helped her. My friend in the UK was a migrant. Because she wasn’t sure about her visa status, she didn’t want to call the police in case her details ended up with the Immigration authority. She was afraid of being separated from her child. Though she spoke English, it was hard for her to talk about the abuse in her own voice. She wanted me to explain it instead.
I must have called a dozen or more helplines, and there were roadblocks at every turn. Either the helplines weren’t open when her partner was out, or they wouldn’t let me speak on her behalf – and she wouldn’t talk. So, I had to pretend to be her. Even then, many organisations could not support her because of her immigration status.
We scoured over 200 websites searching for answers to questions she had around how she was feeling, why she had experienced abuse, what was domestic and sexual violence, and how she could she be safe from her abuser. In our online search, we found websites where the language was convoluted, and everything was locked away in hundred-page-long PDFs. When we did manage to find simple material, we encountered racial stereotyping: happy women were always white, and the sad women running away with bruises were always black and brown. If translated content was available, it contained critical grammatical errors – like incorrect gender – and the advice had a patriarchal framing.
It made me restless. I had to do something. I couldn’t have women, like my friends, turning to the internet and being let down. That’s why I founded Chayn.
What has the experience of starting a non-profit organisation in the digital sexual violence space been like? Have you come across any barriers?
Starting Chayn wasn’t easy though if you ask me now, nothing is harder than sustaining a non-profit. Starting is the easier bit. As someone who had no family or personal background in entrepreneurship or working in non-profits or activism, I discovered many surprising barriers (and champions).
The lack of collaboration in the violence against women’s sector shocked me the most. I tried to collaborate with well-established charities, but I got really demoralising responses. Mostly, they said things like, “Who are you? What experience do you have?” I didn’t have any. I just really wanted to do this, so I got frustrated and did it anyway. Though Chayn now works with hundreds of non-profits globally every year, I still wonder about this “culture.” How do we work, not just with each other, but in a way that builds on top of each other’s work?
The other issue I was not expecting was around power dynamics. One of the foundations of Chayn is co-designing with survivors. Though most of the women’s movement was started and sustained by survivors, somewhere along the way, corporate capture and the industrialisation of the sector has made some unfavourable cultural changes (though there are also upsides like health and safety standards). When other more established non-profits would learn about our model (at that time, volunteer and survivor-run), it signalled a lack of expertise and maturity to them. Chayn flipped the model of expert-written, survivor-consulted upside down.
Fundraising was a whole different and painful learning curve. Thankfully, since I ran Chayn as a volunteer for the first seven years, I was able to leverage knowledge and experience from my day job on how to approach fundraising with Chayn too.
What services and tools does Chayn offer to survivors of digital sexual violence?
Chayn creates multi-lingual resources that helps survivors identify the abuse they are experiencing, how it is affecting them and giving them the language to identify it as well as the knowledge to begin their healing. This can be from supporting their mental health and recovery from our Bloom courses (we have one on image-based abuse) to more practical things like staying safe online and connecting with local organisations.
What impact do you anticipate the survivor AI tool will have?
We want Survivor AI to support survivors in generating effective letters that capture violation of platform policies, so platforms take non-consensual and harmful images down immediately.
What’s interesting is that though this was not our goal, we’re already seeing that just going through our Survivor AI tool is helping survivors understand the policies of big tech platforms better, so they are able to make informed decisions about whether to pursue action and how.
(Survivor AI is a secure, trauma-informed tool that guides survivors of image-based abuse through creating personalised takedown request letters)
I’m aware you’re conducting some fascinating research about expanding the definition of intimate image abuse within different cultures. Is there adequate visibility of diverse voices within research and advocacy work on technology-facilitated gender-based violence?
I believe there are so many amazing efforts happening globally around tech abuse, but {diverse voices} aren’t always the loudest or heard as intently. With this research, we’re hoping to disrupt that and really focus on the experience of image-based abuse in the context of consent, intent and harm and how that manifests in different communities. An image that is non-consensual (real or forged) can be harmful even if it has no semi or full nudity. If you’re a woman who usually wears a hijab, your hair showing can be harmful.
How do efforts to address and end digital sexual violence towards women and girls differ in Pakistan and the UK?
Though there are many similarities such as the experience of shame, victim blaming, lack of support from State institutions – there are sadly, grave differences. Romantic relations between opposite sex (let alone same-sex) are strictly forbidden outside of marriage. If you’re being stalked, it’s assumed that you must have done something to make yourself the target and if that means you taking the bus to college or work, then that’s the thing that will stop. No more college or school.
If you’re assaulted by your boyfriend or someone you were flirting with, you’re not supposed to be dating in the first place, so the survivor has to weigh what is worse – telling parents or police that you were dating or that you were raped. Both unleash a different kind of hell. However, if your ex- or current husband threatens to or actually releases pictures of you without your consent, the police and court apparatus springs to action perhaps much faster and more strongly than it would in the UK because that is seen as a clear violation and unjustifiable.
Overall, the police is not trained to deal with these issues. While content moderation teams on platforms are getting much better and more culturally aware (thanks to the efforts of survivors and campaigners), takedowns are often slow. There are very few charities that exist to support. In Pakistan, our partners Digital Rights Foundation are doing amazing work. They have the world’s first or one of the first cyberharassment helplines.
What needs to change on a policy, platform and societal level to address digital sexual violence?
We actually wrote a whole report on this, called Orbits, in which we looked at how responses to tech abuse can be trauma-informed for preventing abuse but also to get accountability and healing for survivors.
Our streets, homes and online spaces need to be safe for everyone.
Overall, not only should we be calling out the problem, we should work together to prevent it from happening altogether and find ways to address it that are not retraumatising, while delivering justice for survivors (whatever this may mean to them).
If we just take tech companies for instance. Through prevention, accountability, supporting survivor healing and transparency/collaboration, tech companies can root out abuse from their platforms and change internet norms. If the tech sector can collaborate with policymakers and civil society to address child sexual abuse across platforms and jurisdictions, why can’t the same coordinated effort be made to tackle abuse against women?
When it comes to governments and civil society, if we can’t future proof our programmes, advocacy and laws, we won’t be able to stay ahead of the various ways technology is going to be used nefariously in the future. We need to have the space to do preventative and imaginative work, as well as holding people, institutions and markets accountable.
What are your hopes for ending digital violence towards women and girls and the part Chayn will continue to play in such a complex task?
Chayn is part of the movement to dream up and make feminist digital futures a reality. For this to happen, we need a transformative shift. And Chayn’s working on that shift with our peers. We have to change market dynamics – from profit to safety, from polarisation to pluralism, from neutrality to accountability and from extraction to privacy.
If the internet is a garden, I want Chayn to be the corner that invites everyone to help sow seeds of resilience, solidarity, love and hope.
The web should be a place where we can all thrive, get information, build businesses, study, make friends, fall in and out of love, explore our identities, be entertained and build communities.
Chayn is doing its part in three ways:
- Prioritising the healing of survivors
- Discovering, modelling and documenting best practice
- Building new technology that is based on our trauma-informed design principles.
