Bodily autonomy is the theme of this year’s 16 Days of Activism against Gender-based Violence, which is scaling up to become a year-long campaign. The ability for every person to have control, power and agency over their own body is a fundamental human right. But as our lives increasingly shift online, what does bodily autonomy look like in the virtual world?
Spotlight Initiative posed this question to Uldouz Wallace, an actress, writer, producer and influencer with more than 10 million social media followers. After her iCloud was hacked in 2014, she established Foundation Ra to support victims of image-based abuse and ensure that the laws designed to protect the rights of women and girls keep pace with technology. Ms. Wallace created the Protect Act in an effort to address this critical need.
What does bodily autonomy mean to you?
Bodily autonomy, to me, is the right of every person to make choices about their body and live free of fear and violence, both online and offline.
How is the bodily autonomy of women and girls challenged in physical and increasingly, virtual spaces?
Technology is advancing every day. Women and girls’ rights to bodily autonomy online and offline have been, for the most part, disregarded. Even though we have several bills to hold the personal uploader accountable [for non-consensual image sharing], we still don’t have any laws to block women and girls from being exploited in the first place. Why are laws protecting women and girls only after the fact, [when] they have already been exploited and lost all rights to their bodily autonomy, dignity and been profited off of?
What can we do to ensure that women and girls have their bodily autonomy respected everywhere?
We need laws like the Protect Act to block any non-consensual content being uploaded by demanding age verification and consent from the uploaders on adult sites. Most platforms already have this technology and could easily implement it. They’re implementing it for movies and music but not women and children that are being exploited.
