Skip to main content

Safety for voices

Safety for Voices (SfV) is a Global South–based initiative implemented by a consortium led by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), in partnership with Urgent Action Fund Africa (UAF-Africa), Urgent Action Fund Asia and Pacific (UAF A&P), and IM-Defensoras (IMD). Supported by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs , the initiative aims to ensure greater safety for women human rights defenders in the Global South. Led by a consortium of women-centred and women-led organisations, and informed by the Feminist Holistic Protection (FHP) framework, SfV recognises the structural and systemic inequalities that shape the realities of WHRDs’ lives and work. The programme places WHRDs’ safety and wellbeing at its core, operating not only across the regions represented by the consortium members but also globally, through cross-regional collaboration and strong feminist networks.

Grounded in a feminist holistic security approach, SfV works towards three interrelated goals:

  • Prevention: Reducing risks and unsafe situations faced by Women Human Rights Defenders (WHRDs) through the provision of holistic safety resources.

  • Protection: Supporting WHRDs at immediate risk, including during crises and in conflict contexts, through timely and adequate assistance.

  • Legitimisation: Strengthening the recognition and legitimacy of WHRDs’ work through the enactment and implementation of gender-sensitive laws, policies, and institutional support structures.

To achieve these objectives, SfV implements a range of interventions across physical, digital, legal, and policy spaces, integrating an intersectional feminist lens throughout its design, methodologies, and assessment processes. This ensures that both external and internal factors contributing to WHRDs’ safety challenges are systematically identified, documented, and addressed.

 

Coming Soon: APC Research on the Digital Repression of Women Human Rights Defenders

Publications

What happens when digital spaces become tools of surveillance, censorship, and control? For women human rights defenders (WHRDs) in Brazil, Ecuador, India, the Philippines, Uganda and Tanzania, this is not a hypothetical, it’s a daily reality. 

APC’s upcoming research, “Online Challenges, Offline Realities: A Feminist Analysis of WHRDs’ Digital Experiences,” explores how digital authoritarianism is accelerating across these six countries, and how WHRDs are targeted at the intersection of gender, power, and technology. From doxxing and smear campaigns to arrests and threats of violence, WHRDs face coordinated attacks aimed at silencing dissent and reinforcing patriarchal norms. 

This research draws from a feminist holistic protection framework to map how digital repression is deeply connected to offline violence, and how state and corporate actors are complicit. Surveillance laws, cybercrime regulations, content moderation failures, and extractive tech practices all converge to create hostile environments for WHRDs, particularly those from Indigenous, rural, and marginalised communities. 

Key insights from the research highlight how gender, sexuality, and race are weaponised in online attacks; how digital violence often escalates to physical threats; how legal systems are used to criminalise dissent, and how big tech and state surveillance tools facilitate unrestrained repression. This research emphasises on the need for gender-sensitive cybersecurity laws, urgent response systems, and platform accountability, especially from companies like Meta and Twitter. 

Despite escalating risks, WHRDs continue to resist, adapt, and organise. This research provides timely analysis for committing to feminist digital rights and holistic protection. 

Online Challenges, Offline Realities will be published soon as part of APC’s Safety for Voices Initiative. Stay tuned.

Coming Soon: APC's Anthology Narrates WHRDs’ Experiences of Violence and Resilience

Publications

"With tiny seeds in the broken grounds, we connect the future to our roots and breathe life towards the sky, unyielding in our shared manifestations, where the root, the trunk, and the flowers bloom as one. Online." – Kalkidan Tesfaye (Ethiopia) 

What does it mean to hold the line when the world demands your silence? 

In this anthology, Unyielding – Personal Essays from WHRDs, women human rights defenders from across the Global Majority speak the unspeakable. They write from exile and ancestral lands, from underground networks and forgotten courtrooms, from the deep fatigue of burnout and the unrelenting will to keep going. 

This anthology, developed through APC’s Safety for Voices initiative, captures the stories rarely included in policy reports or human rights frameworks: the psychic cost of disinformation, the humiliation of body-shaming attacks, the pain of losing your homeland to war, and the injustice of being rendered voiceless unless you translate your trauma into Western palatable formats. 

The essays, spanning Syria, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Pakistan, and beyond, reveal the shifting forms of violence WHRDs face: surveillance and smear campaigns, political repression, legal persecution, displacement, and digital hate. Yet these stories also uncover what persists: the quiet power of community, the memory of justice movements, the longing for futures where dignity is non-negotiable. 

Here, vulnerability is not weakness, but a method of resistance. In Unyielding, these WHRDs narrate their own stories in their own terms, through reflection, rage, humour, and heartbreak, and insist that power must always be held to account.

Subscribe to