Feminicide & Machine Learning presentation at MD4SG '20

As part of MD4SG '20 4th Workshop on Mechanism Design for Social Good (August 17-19, 2020), CIM doctoral student Helena Suárez Val will be participating in the presentation of a work-in-progress paper: ‘Feminicide & Machine Learning: Detecting Gender-based Violence to Strengthen Civil Sector Activism’, co-authored with Catherine D'Ignazio, Silvana Fumega, Harini Suresh, Isadora Cruxên, Wonyoung So, María De Los Angeles Martínez and Mariel García-Montes.

Abstract: Gender-related violence against women and its lethal outcome, feminicide, are a serious problem in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), as they are in the rest of the world. Although governments have passed legislation criminalizing feminicide, these laws have not been accompanied by relevant policy nor by robust data collection that measures the scope and scale of the problem. Drawing from Data Feminism, we situate feminicide data as "missing data" and describe the work of activists and civil society organizations who attempt to fill in the gaps by compiling incidents of feminicide from news reports. Activists doing this work face challenges: lack of time and financial resources, difficulties in accessing official data, and the mental health burden of reading about violent deaths of women. The paper describes ongoing progress on a participatory action research project designed to help sustain activist efforts to collect feminicide data by partially automating detection using machine learning.

Full details of the programme and registration for the event here: http://www.md4sg.com/workshop/MD4SG20/program.html