Bumble, the women-first dating and social networking app, today announced its partnership with The Dialogue, a research and public policy think-tank based in New Delhi, to support their research towards creating a safer Internet for women in India.
The Dialogue, with support from Bumble, published a report titled “#BreakTheSilo: Streamlining Gender Safety in the Digital Space” and launched a multi-stakeholder responsibility framework to build public discourse towards tackling Technology Facilitated Gender Based Violence (TFGBV) in India. .
Research conduct and publish by The Dialogue reveal that while a number of organisations across policymakers and non-profit organisations have working to tackle tech-facilitate gender based violence, there has fragmented interventions and disproportionate focus, hence there is need for greater harmonisation across multiple stakeholders which will enhance the impact for the community.
To tackle this, The Dialogue’s report presents a comprehensive framework that outlines various stages at which harm originates and perpetuates, which is often interrelate: access, prevention, intervention, response & redressal, recovery and research.
It will help to close these gaps, by facilitating conversations between multiple stakeholders, enabling a unified and more holistic approach to tackle TFGBV in India.
Bumble will support The Dialogue as it holds multi-stakeholder consultations with key policymakers and leading experts, to work towards a unified response based on a victim-survivor centric approach to handling online gender-based violence in India.
Kazim Rizvi, Founding Director, The Dialogue said :
Mahima Kaul, APAC Public Policy Director, Bumble, said :
At the launch event in New Delhi, Dr Shamika Ravi, Member of Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, and Secretary to Government of India shared :
Extending her support, Dr. Heena Vijaykumar Gavit, Member of Parliament and Chairperson of Committee on Women Empowerment, said :
In a letter of endorsement, Prataprao Jadhav, Member of Parliament and Chairperson of Standing Committee on Communication and Information Technology shared :
The framework has also been endorse by many credible non-profit organisations who have been working on online safety for decades, many of whom were also part of the stakeholder consultation process, including:
- Centre for Social Research,
- Safetipin,
- Responsible Netism,
- Woman of Elements Trust,
- Red Dot Foundation,
- Breakthrough,
- Internet Freedom Foundation,
- Social Media Matters,
- Sayfty,
- Imaara Survivor Support Foundation and many more.
This is not the first time that Bumble has taken a stand on gender-based cyber violence.
The women-first app has long been advocating on products and policies to combat misogyny, harassment, and toxicity online.
Bumble was one of the first apps to explicitly moderate for cyberflashing with Private Detector, a feature that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically detect and blur unsolicited nude images.
Last year, the company released an open-source version of the Private Detector model to help the wider tech community combat cyberflashing.
In 2022, Bumble became the first dating app to partner with StopNCII.org, to help stop non-consensual intimate images from being share online.
In 2023, Bumble was one of the founding members to work with Partnership on AI on the first framework for the ethical development, creation and sharing of Artificial Intelligence.
Bumble in an industry-first partnership with Bloom also provides complimentary online trauma support to members of its global community who experience sexual assault or relationship abuse.