#NiUnaMenos: Data Activism From the Global South

Data Activism as Producer of Sociotechnical Imaginaries

Preexisting power relations and dominant imaginaries tend to reproduce themselves through technological changes. However, the uses of technology by grassroots actors, sometimes innovative and unpredicted, may enhance its emancipatory potential. Big data may favor large companies and dominant states, but big data also allow for the emergence of new forms of expert activism based on the capacity to collect and analyze these data to be used in advocacy and protest. Data activism, in particular, includes all sociotechnical practices that question the dominant paradigm of datafication; it produces counter-hegemonic imaginaries whereby data are used for emancipation purposes (Milan and van der Velden 2016).

To understand how activists make sense of big data, we turn to the notion of sociotechnical imaginaries, defined as “visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understanding of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology” (Jasanoff and Kim 2015, 4). The concept has already been used to understand social movements in relation to media and technology (Barassi 2015; Milan and ten Oever 2017; Treré 2018a; Treré et al. 2017). Indeed, the analysis of the formulation of, and competition among, sociotechnical imaginaries allows for an understanding of the production of hegemony in the digital age (Chenou and Castiblanco Carrasco 2018; see also Treré 2018b). Focusing on the production of alternative imaginaries around the advent of big data enables us not only to understand the initiatives of activists in specific local contexts but also to shed light on everyday practices of resistance based on information and technology, and on the processes of meaning-making by social movements as they deal with these issue areas (see also Milan 2016).

The case of #NiUnaMenos shows how data activism can offer alternative sociotechnical imaginaries on big data, change the frameworks of reference, and propose emancipatory uses of technology. This case epitomizes data activism as a new form of civic participation (Milan 2017), something that does not occur in “empty places,” but within political and social structures characterized by processes of strong and successful social mobilization in the country. The following section outlines the social context of Argentina, locating data activism to a specific national/regional context, thus, contributing to a reflection on data activism in the Global South(s) (Milan and Treré 2019).

Social Mobilization in Argentina: An Enabling Frame for #NiUnaMenos

Argentina has a strong tradition of social mobilization: unions, human rights and women’s organizations, unemployed workers, students, middle class assemblies, and popular education organizations, among others (see Merklen 2010; Pereyra 2003; Sitrin 2012; Svampa 2008). These actors participated in the transition to democracy during the 1980s and in demonstrations against neoliberal policies since the 1990s. The negative effects of the neoliberal reforms, added to the recovery of collective rights after the dictatorship under the lead of human rights organizations such as the Madres de Plaza de Mayo ² (Bosco 2004; Gorini 2006), created the conditions for a cycle of protests (Tarrow 1997) in the country, which increased in subsequent years as unemployment, poverty, and inequality rose significantly.

The first protests in this cycle, at the end of the 1980s, were organized by workers’ unions from the railway, transport, and oil industries. However, the mid-1990s witnessed the reappearance of social and popular movements on the political scene (Algaranti et al. 2004), such as workers, the unemployed, students, teachers, and solidarity organizations. In 2001, the cycle reached its peak with the resignation of the then president Fernando De la Rúa, who had maintained neoliberal measures due to pressure exerted by international credit organizations (Pereyra 2003). Argentine society became more politicized, leading to the emergence of new protest strategies and innovative groupings: cooperatives, assemblies, and community work strongly rooted in the neighborhoods (Villalón 2007). According to data from the Instituto Gino Germani, the number of protest events was significant in the period 1989–2003, increasing between 1999 and 2001 (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Number of social protests in Argentina 1989–May 2003.

A broad repertoire of social tactics continued to be employed, including the taking over of public buildings, road blockages, rallies in public squares, marches, and strikes. Toward the beginning of the 2010s, some demonstrations were not explicitly linked to human rights or to anti-neoliberal demands, but were framed within topics such as urban security, participation in the national economy, and the rejection of the government of the left-wing populist Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (Svampa 2011). The protest outbursts were, however, sporadic and associated with issues such as corruption and security, without much political articulation, but they presented a significant increase that could be understood as the prelude to the victory of Mauricio Macri (Cambiemos, a right-wing coalition) in the 2015 presidential elections.

According to Retamozo (2011) and Svampa (2011), this sociopolitical panorama has contributed to the fact that much of the work on social movements focused on organizations reacting against neoliberal policies, and human rights organizations, with hardly any mention of women’s organizations. This absence does not mean that women’s organizations were not active in the protests. On the contrary, the last decade, in particular, has been characterized by an expansion of women’s mobilization. Women’s organizations in the country may be grouped into three facets: human rights, popular sectors, and feminist movements, according to their agenda of political demands and practices (Di Marco 2010). Data activism contributed to stimulate the emergence of such mobilizations, as we describe next.

#NiUnaMenos: Social Networks and Analogue Protests

A number of mobilizations for the legalization of abortion and condemning violence against women started in November 2012. The following testimonial of a militant belonging to the organization Frente Popular Darío Santillán, named after an unemployed worker killed by the police in 2002, illustrates a reaction from different sectors of the population regarding the situation of women in Argentina:

We are participating in a national campaign . . . against violence towards women . . . We are going to launch [it] on November 6th in the Plaza de Mayo with everything it represents, there will be open radio broadcasting with the abortion campaigners, thinking about institutional violence with something we call the bombachazo. We gather panties (bombachas) and we get people to write slogans on them, then we hang them on a line . . . with the idea that what happens to us in private is also political . . . Panties have a very intimate symbology for women and are very striking visually. ³

This mobilization took place on November 6, 2012, with massive participation of social organizations and supportive citizens. It was followed by a variety of smaller scale initiatives, until 2015, when the activists used social media to generate and circulate information, formulating alternatives to the dominant language on datafication. The campaign began as a reaction to a wave of femicide, that is to say, the killing of women and girls on account of their gender. ⁴

On March 26, 2015, the activist and writer Vanina Escales organized a reading marathon following the murder of a nineteen-year-old unemployed woman, Daiana García (SurCapitalino 2015). The marathon gathered writers, journalists, activists, and the friends and families of victims of domestic violence in a public square in the capital, Buenos Aires. Participants exchanged testimonials and disseminated the demands of women and activists. In May of the same year, the discovery of the body of Chiara Paéz, a pregnant fourteen-year-old girl buried alive, was added to the long list of murders of women in the country, reinforcing the sense of public outrage. Facing the lack of institutional action, journalist Marcela Ojeda tweeted a message that truly launched a mobilization both on social networks and on the streets:

Actresses, politicians, artists, businesswomen, social representatives . . . women, all of us, bah . . . are we not going to raise our voices? THEY ARE KILLING US.

The mobilization went quickly viral on social networks. It was also firmly anchored in traditional mobilization strategies with a long history in the country, such as marches. However, the use of technology was key in the mobilization, virtual and physical, of people beyond activists and feminists (Annunziata et al. 2016).

Data activism tactics allowed for significant media coverage (see also Milan 2018). Back in 2008, the women’s rights organization La Casa del Encuentro had created a Femicide Observatory, publishing yearly national reports on femicide, to offset the lack of official records. Thanks to the availability of these figures, the press coverage of the #NiUnaMenos campaign focused on the accumulation of cases of femicide since 2008. Headlines such as “In Argentina, a woman dies every 30 hours due to gender violence” (MinutoUno 2015), “Five women a week killed” (Carbajal 2015), and “Femicide: In Argentina one child is left without a mother every 26 hours” (Suárez 2015), gave the campaign statistical legitimacy and contributed to the extension of the mobilization. This indicates a strong link between data activism and journalism, which seems to be typical of Latin America (Milan and Gutiérrez 2018).

The campaign disseminated information about disappeared women on the Internet (niunamenos.com.ar) and on social networks (mainly through Facebook and Twitter accounts), organized events and talks, coordinated local groups of action, and fueled the mobilization throughout the country (Table 1). Between 2015 and 2018, a march was organized annually. The first took place on June 3, 2015, with the participation of between 150,000 and 300,000 people in Buenos Aires and dozens of thousands in other cities across the country (Annunziata et al. 2016, 57; Iglesias 2015). The movement presented five demands: the implementation of a national plan to counter violence against women as planned in a 2009 law, the warrant of access to justice for victims, the creation of a Single Official Register of the victims of violence against women, the extension of sexual education, and protection for victims (NiUnaMenos 2015).

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Table 1.

Timeline of #NiUnaMenos.

Date	Mobilization	Central issues	Strategies	Central actors
November 6, 2012	Bombachazo	Women’s rights	Performance marches with “bombachas” (women’s underpants), broadcast on community radio stations	Feminist organizations; women’s organizations; progressive organizations.
March 26, 2015	Reading marathon	Femicide	Reading rally: symbolic stories and messages (call through social networks)	Women’s rights activists; influential actors (writers and journalists); victims’ friends and family.
June 3, 2015	#NiUnaMenos March I	Femicide	March (call through social networks)	Women’s organizations and feminist organizations.
June 3, 2016	#NiUnaMenos March II	Femicide; state complicity; demands for prevention, care, equality, and social justice	March (call through social networks and mainstream media)	Women’s organizations and feminist organizations.
October 19, 2016	“Miércoles Negro” (Black Wednesday) strike	Femicide	One-hour strike in all work environments; march, and rally	Women’s organizations and feminist organizations.
June 3, 2017	#NiUnaMenos March III	Femicide; women trafficking; right to abortion; state complicity; workforce mapping; and state-church separation	March (call through social networks and mainstream media)	Women’s organizations and feminist organizations.

Source. Authors’ content analysis of press coverage.

A year later, on June 3, 2016, another march was called under the slogan #VivasNosQueremos (We want us alive). On June 3, 2017, the march used the slogan “no more machist violence and state complicity.” Symbolically, the official protest document was read in the central Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires by the journalist Liliana Dauness jointly with Nora Cortiñas, a key figure in the country in her quality of leader of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo Línea Fundadora (La Nación 2017). Besides condemning the patriarchal system and violence against women, the document also mentioned the need for equality and social justice, emphasizing the socioeconomic conditions that strongly affect women, including productivity demands and the increase of foreign debt associated with austerity policies (Página/12 2017). In 2018, this trend continued under the slogan “¡Vivas, libres y desendeudadas nos queremos!” (We want us alive, free, and without debts). This illustrates the convergence of the #NiUnaMenos campaign with the social mobilizations that characterized the country in the previous decades.

The long tradition of social mobilization in Argentina provided a strong framework for the organization of the #NiUnaMenos campaign. The originality of the mobilization, however, is to be found in its ability to expose the lack of official data and statistics on gender violence. This became the fundamental demand, and, subsequently, an important achievement for the campaign, and also opened a different channel of political participation by means of the production and use of reliable information.

The trajectory of the #NiUnaMenos mobilization, and the construction of a social collective around it, has a number of expressions (Table 1). First, it is possible to notice a combination of different mobilization strategies that extend the action repertoire. Marching is the most recurrent strategy, but it is always accompanied by calls to action and the broadcasting of information through social networks and mainstream media. Performance, the strategy behind the bombachazo and the reading marathon, is useful in presenting problems and enlarging the audience by raising awareness on a symbolic level. Work suspension was also appropriated by women’s organizations, beyond the exclusive field of workers’ movements, to make different types of claims and demands that are deeply rooted in daily life.

Second, the agenda has widened since 2012. Initially, it was centered on women’s rights and the reports of femicide. Because of the repressive and inoperative response of the state to the first demonstration of 2015, demands shifted to pointing out state complicity, the detention of activists, and the state’s lack of collaboration in processing the claims. The campaign focused on centralizing and producing information on the topic. In fact, femicide increased in the country despite the mobilizations (Gaffoglio 2017), as this media interview highlights:

. . . to our movement, the state responds with repression. To our demands, with manipulation. . . . And, not only do the demands made on the 3rd of June remain unanswered, worse than that, the rate of femicide and murders of transvestites has accelerated. (Página/12 2017)

The 2017 mobilization also shed light on the lack of commitment of the Macri government to #NiUnaMenos. After the first protest in 2015, the then presidential candidates agreed to deal with the claims of the campaign. However, by 2018, the Macri government had done little to fulfill these agreements while activists received repressive responses and had to face the closure of spaces for interlocution with the authorities.

Last but not least, the #NiUnaMenos mobilization suggests that there has been a great participation of activists who have opted for what Pleyers (2010, 123) refers to as way of reason. These activists have technical knowledge of the different issues, are familiar with specialized language, and are usually able to produce and disseminate data about their causes, allowing direct dialogue with decision-makers, academics, and other influential actors. However, this approach emphasizing expertise may separate activists from their social basis, creating a gap between the two groups (Pleyers 2010). However, the #NiUnaMenos experience challenges this argument, illustrating how expert knowledge is reinterpreted to eliminate the gap between experts and the social basis to create alternative political participation channels.

The “Contá la violencia machista” Index

Faced with the nonresponse and ineffectiveness of state institutions, the #NiUnaMenos mobilization resorted to data activism to deal with one of its original demands: the creation of a Single Official Register of the victims of violence against women. The register was believed to be both a necessary tool to understand the structural nature of male violence and an instrument to fuel long-term social mobilization. Thus, the initiative “Argentina cuenta la violencia machista”(Argentina reports on misogynist violence) was launched (http://contalaviolenciamachista.com).

The creation of the index “from below” illustrates the possibility of uniting experts and grassroots activists around the same project with the mediation of “big data.” While grassroots activists denounced the complicity of the state, experts focused on the need for information and data to foment action by the state. As the researcher Martín Romeo argued,

What is the state doing to resolve this issue? How come the state does not know and does not have information nor official statistics on the issue? How is it going to solve this issue if it does not know about it? . . . These initiatives push for and accelerate the processes that must be implemented internally by states in order to design public policies to solve the issue. ⁵

The initiative, thus, was triggered by the insufficient response of the state as well as the meeting in December 2015 between Romeo and Íngrid Beck, leader of #NiUnaMenos, which gave rise to the idea of seeking alternative ways to impose the fulfillment of the promises that resulted from the first march. In fact, six months after the march, information on what leads to femicide, that is, male violence against women, was still insufficient. ⁶ In March 2016, Romeo launched a pilot experiment on Twitter, asking users whether they had ever been afraid of being raped. They were also asked to indicate their gender. The volume of answers, around 8,000, showed the possibility of obtaining an important mass of data through online surveys. The conclusions were clear: 20 percent of males reported having experienced this fear in comparison with 80 percent of females.

Encouraged by this pilot, with some relatively simple technological tools but no external funding, activists and individuals skilled in survey design drew a self-report survey based on an online form. Given the lack of models, it was necessary to explore the different dimensions of the problem through a series of in-depth interviews. ⁷ The survey was launched on June 3, 2016; for the three months it lasted, expert activists such as graphic designers and data analysts voluntarily helped to publish the results.

The creation of a male violence index “from below,” without the participation of state entities or private companies, represents an important case of data activism in the South as it uses both some tenets of the mainstream sociotechnical imaginary and some big data techniques. However, the object of the survey and its insertion into a wider mobilization helped to create alternative imaginaries of big data. The Executive Report of the Index establishes the relationship between the cultural and social transformations fundamental to reducing and eradicating violence against women, and the need to generate data on the reality of such violence:

Women naturalize situations of male violence because the idea of male supremacy over women persists, the patriarchal conception, the idea of women as men’s property. And if women naturalize male violence, they can’t talk about it, they cannot verbalize it, they do not defend themselves. As such, we need to think about tools that raise awareness about the unacceptability of male violence for women and for men . . . All of this is impossible without the appropriate public policy. And public policy is impossible without information. (Beck and Romeo 2016, 18)

The report proposes a review of the existing indexes and surveys “from above,” such as the state initiatives created after the 2015 mobilization, and the participation of companies such as Google. Conversely, the index “from below” responds to the particular needs of civil society and some local Argentine specificities. For example, it replaces the concept of “gender-based violence,” common in this type of survey and used by, among others, Google, with the expression “male/machist violence” (machista). This change was triggered by a survey by the Universidad Nacional Tres de Febrero, which established that only 20 percent of people surveyed defined gender-based violence as “the aggression suffered by a woman at the hands of a man,” while 71 percent considered that it was the “abuse received by women and men alike” (Beck and Romeo 2016, 16). Thus, an index designed to oppose violence against women in the Argentinian context required the use of the stronger expression “male/machist violence.” Instead of using the universal language formulated in the Global North, data activists from the Global South generated context-specific languages.

Another important element of the index is the autonomy of the civil society initiative. The index was developed without any external funding, “only with collective goodwill and the selfless collaboration of specialists, journalists, and volunteers” (Beck and Romeo 2016, 19). This preference for autonomy is consistent with the #NiUnaMenos mobilization that emerged “spontaneously” from civil society, in response to the growing public outrage.

At the end of the three months in which the online survey was open, the index gathered 59,380 cases. Analysis of these data permitted the crossing of indicators relating to the five sections of the survey elaborated by #NiUnaMenos activists (in addition to general information, the sections are harassment, discrimination, domestic violence, obstetric violence, and responses from the surroundings and the state) with variables relating to location, gender, education, economic activity, occupation, and income. The report gathers the results in figures and, for the most relevant indicators, also in percentages. This elaborate (more than a hundred pages long) report presents a multitude of statistics with geographical data that give a precise idea of the situation of violence against women in Argentina. For example, 97 percent of participants suffered at least one situation of harassment in public and private spaces; 90 percent of victims did not report this to the police. Moreover, 67 percent of participants suffered at least one situation of physical abuse by their partner, and 77 percent were victims of obstetric violence. Regarding state complicity, only 7 percent of the victims of violence—95 percent of the sample—were able to file a formal complaint, 71 percent abstained from doing so, and 7 percent faced push-back from the authorities.

In sum, the #NiUnaMenos campaign was able to conduct a survey based on “big enough” data without external funding, to establish a clear methodology for data analysis, and to produce figures and conclusions to disseminate an alternative knowledge “from below” on violence against women in Argentina, notably through the media. The index became a political tool and allowed for the extension of the mobilization by establishing a dialogue between feminist activism and socioeconomic activism. Thus, activists of the way of reason were able to close the gap between experts and grassroots activists in the appropriation of information and its use in a context of fierce social mobilization.

Big Data from the Global South: Some Conclusions

The analysis of #NiUnaMenos gives rise to a number of reflections that can be grouped into three lines: data activism from, and in, the Global South; the construction of imaginaries; and the relevance of the local context.

One of the most important achievements of this campaign has been the creation of a National Index of Male Violence, the effects of which are twofold: first, gathering sufficient information to understand the structural nature of violence against women, and second, equipping the women’s rights mobilization with easily verifiable empirical content. In this case, activists did nothing different to what historical social movements had already done: they used available technological resources to promote vindications and pursue their interests in social change (Tilly and Wood 2010). However, the way in which information was produced in this example of data activism allowed the broadening of political participation channels for women who were not accustomed to participating. It also reduced the gap between experts and grassroots activists.

Although a good part of the work of activists is to gather and produce reliable information on local and global problems (Keck and Sikkink 1998), the creation of the index is an interesting case of data activism in that the activists themselves searched for the information using tools such as surveys, and with it created opportunities for the real and symbolic inclusion of the victims that typically lack the mechanisms to make their situations public. In this sense, “big enough” data contributed to the creation of alternative imaginaries on information and technology. The collaboration of grassroots activists with social science and later technology experts illustrates how these innovative alliances allow marginalized actors from the Global South to employ big data in their exercise of resistance and struggle (see also Milan and Gutiérrez 2018). Technology creates a bridge between the needs of social movements and the technical and scientific capabilities of expert activists.

Data activism in the #NiUnaMenos mobilization epitomizes a trend by activists in the Global South(s) to appropriate technologies and adapt their use, and the imaginaries that accompany them, to local needs—a tendency already observed in other movements in the Latin American continent (e.g., Treré and Carretero 2018; Treré, Magallanes-Blanco 2015). In particular, this campaign emerged in the context of the exacerbation of violence against women in Argentina, but especially against women from working-class sectors, with a common and fundamental feature: their situations of precariousness and marginality impede them from reporting their condition either individually or collectively, unless they have the support of other actors. Second, the organizations that participated had few material resources but were able to use them efficiently. They were also able to create new symbolic resources, which resulted in the ability to put pressure on political actors and in effective media presence through news and opinion pieces.

Learning from other experiences of social mobilization has a fundamental role. Social movements and organizations in Argentina have achieved important results in the last decades, such as the pressure exerted on the military government to transition to democracy and the implementation of social policies to deal with unemployment. This trajectory has undoubtedly allowed the construction of an imaginary on the importance of social mobilization, popular power, and the popular sectors’ capacity to influence political decisions. The #NiUnaMenos campaign exploited these lessons learned and the opportunities created by other mobilized sectors to build a debate around a specific problem that had direct repercussions on the public agenda. The human rights discourse also played an important role, in that it was used by campaign activists and others that joined it, such as the Madres de Plaza de Mayo Línea Fundadora, which framed the struggle for women’s rights and the respect for these rights within a broader discourse with strong historical roots in the country.

Finally, the #NiUnaMenos campaign was able to shed light on the importance of women’s movements and organizations not only in the political sphere but also in academic literature on social movements. There is a general tendency to focus attention on popular and human rights movements, at the expense of topics and actors associated with the fight for women’s rights, even when these are part of the agenda of the above-mentioned organizations.