Social media: the black market for women

But if the platforms can sell girls, Jess Tomlin says, it can also save them.

Back in October, while my young daughter was planning her Halloween costume and building a Lego dragon, a young girl in South Sudan was sold on Facebook for 500 cows, a few cellphones and $10,000.

Selling a child bride to the highest Facebook bidder, as if she were a designer purse or a pair of fancy shoes, is obscene. All the more so because child marriage around the world is still as quotidian as a status update. It is impossible to imagine my own daughter, who is not yet old enough to own a cellphone, being a transaction on Facebook.

Sadly, the question isn’t, when did the internet become an auction house for little girls, but why we are surprised. Social media holds a mirror to gender inequality in the real world. It’s where the ugliest biases, the longest-held beliefs, and the most entrenched behaviours surface and multiply. All too often unchecked.

Certainly, it would be easy to blame the internet. Studies show that social media are more harmful to the mental health of girls than that of boys.

And it’s ironic that the very platforms that have censored images of women’s naked bodies during childbirth would allow a girl’s body to be sold for cows.

But gender inequality has long preceded the “angry” emoji, and if social media can sell girls, they can — I’ve seen firsthand — also save them.

As the CEO of Canada’s only global women’s fund, I have witnessed incredible feminist movements spark and catch fire online. #Metoo is a well-known example. Others are the social media campaigns #Tooyoungtobemarried in South Sudan or #Mydressmychoice in Kenya. Women at the grassroots are combating child marriage and rape culture, and they’re doing it via these platforms that have the power to reach people where they are and forge connection.

Sometimes it’s subversive, as is the case in South Sudan, where public protest is against the law. Other times, it’s a battle cry, such as in Saudi Arabia when women posted videos of themselves driving a full seven years before women won the right to be behind a wheel.

This International Women’s Day, my own organization is undertaking an online campaign: to raise awareness of global gender inequality and the women who, despite the odds, are making history. This campaign demands that women not be treated as livestock — or traded for it. Not online. Not anywhere.

My years as a mother, an activist, and a champion for women’s rights have taught me this: Even with its feed of baby pics, silly quizzes and endless cat videos, the internet will not be a safe place for women until the real world is a safe place for women. Gender equality will come when we demand it, work toward it, and support the brave women and girls on the front lines.

That is something I’ll be doing on my own social media feed — until the cows come home.

Jess Tomlin is the president and CEO of The MATCH International Women’s Fund.