Love Matters is an international multimedia platform that encourages young people to discuss love, sex and relationships. Launched first in India, Love Matters focuses on regions where discussions about sexual and reproductive health is censored or taboo, and their content is available in English, Hindi, Arabic, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese. Their aim is to offer young people a space to learn and ask questions they can’t ask elsewhere.
“There are a lot of myths and misconceptions based on religious or cultural perceptions that make it very difficult to speak openly about love, sex and relationships,” Stephanie Hasse, coordinator of Love Matters Africa, told Index.
The idea was first piloted in India in 2011. Love Matters India has now had more than 12 million visits and they have over 700,000 followers on their Facebook page.
“Talking about sex and anything related to sex continues to be a taboo in India,” said Vitikha Yadav, coordinator at Love Matters India. “People continue to live in shame and silence with respect to sexual health issues.”
Last year Love Matters India launched a campaign called BearNoMore targeting intimate partner violence among young unmarried couples. The campaign was run online, through their website and social media channels, and offline through film screenings in three villages of Rajasthan, each attended by over 1000 people.
“The response was amazing,” said Yadav. “We reached about two million people in two months.”
“That really encouraged discussions about intimate partner violence. It was a different kind of campaign, had huge engagement and was something that was not looked at by any organisation before, so it was hugely empowering for us as well.”
Love Matters Arabic covers the Middle East and north African region, with a specific focus on Egypt. To mark their first anniversary, the group held a stand-up comedy event in Cairo on love, sex and relationships. “We created a new space to talk about this sensitive subject in public,” Michele Ernsting, head of the Love Matters Global Project, explained to Index.
“Love Matters Arabic is actually the only dedicated platform in the Arabic language that discusses sexual health and sexual health of young people, in their own language. That’s why it’s unique,” Abir Serras, coordinator of Love Matters Arabic told Index.
Love Matters Africa launched the Love Matters Music Awards: the first music awards in Kenya dedicated to providing young people the chance to produce songs on themes related to pleasure and sexuality.
“In the region that Love Matters Africa works in, topics around love, sex and relationships aren’t easily discussable,” said Hasse.
“Young people often don’t have the information they need when it comes to making choices about their sex lives. That has to do with the fact that sexual health education is missing at schools, or it’s focused on abstinence only,” she said.
“Last year in May we ran a special campaign for International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia, trying to make the topic more discussable.”
Across all their platforms, Love Matters now has over 100 million page views. “We now have persuasive data to show how to improve the effectiveness of sexual health education by directly addressing the uncensored needs of young people,” said Ernsting.
“It has been wonderful to see Love Matters to scale up to all these countries and in really challenging settings where the need of this work is immense,” Vitikha Yadav said of the impact that Love Matters has had on young people. “We are hoping to reach out to many more millions in the country and many more across the world.”
Gökhan Biçici is a Turkish reporter and was one of the most active reporters of the 2013 anti-government Gezi Park protests in Istanbul. While covering the protests Biçici was beaten severely by police and then dragged through the streets. Observers in apartments overlooking his arrestcaptured footage of the attack, which quickly went viral.
“The censorship in Turkey is stronger now than ever,” Biçici told Index. “There is no period in history where political power had reached this level of domination over the media. And there is no period in history where disinformation has reached these levels.”
Biçici’s arrest and the Gezi Park protests became a symbol of the state of democracy and free speech in Turkey.
The wave of public engagement was huge, Biçici says, and after the protests were over and people left the streets, he sought to build something more permanent.
“It was necessary to go through the resistance protests and realise the size of the censorship and the imposition of self-censorship and the corruption in the press.”
“In these resistance protests, millions of people went out to the streets. Hundreds of thousands, or even millions, went out to the largest square in Istanbul, Taksim Square, and when they came back home a penguin documentary was on TV instead of the truth,” he said.
“The younger generation was politicised by Gezi. At the same time, their relationship with the social media became politicised, too. All conditions were ready to appear citizen news agency in Turkey.”
Dokuz8Haber aims to be just that.“Dokuz8Haber is a foundation that brings together the journalists and the national reporters of digital activism, in a unified network,” he said.
Launched in March 2015, Dokuz8Haber is a journalism network that gathers various independent citizen journalism outlets to create a common newsroom. Volunteers and citizen journalists send their stories to professional editors, and the news stories are then broadcasted domestically and internationally via Dokuz8Haber. They understand the importance of disseminating news in new, modern ways – using social media, video and live-stream coverage and translation to get information out to the people of Turkey.
They have also organised numerous training programs for potential citizen journalists in all regions in Turkey, to train a network of reporters around the country.
“Freedom of expression is a right we will never give up on,” said Biçici. “It’s an nonnegotiable right and it’s also a pursuit that requires hard work. Personally speaking, it’s what I’ve spent my whole life working on. This is why I chose this career.”
Awards Gala tickets“I may lose my life anytime,” Zimbabwean human rights campaigned Nkosilathi Emmanuel Moyo told Index. At the time he was still hiding in South Africa, having fled after news of his last action went viral – he sent Robert Mugabe a birthday present that consisted of a prison outfit marked ‘crimes against humanity’, plus handcuffs.“I started receiving death threats through anonymous calls. My office and my home were visited by suspected state agents who were looking for me. Then I realised that my life was and is in danger and I went into hiding,” he said.
Born in 1987, the same year Mugabe became president, Nkosilathi Emmanuel Moyo was political from a young age. “It’s more of an inborn thing. I remember when I was growing up at that stage where most kids would be interested in watching cartoons I could be seen watching news from CNN to BBC,” he said.
And Moyo watched as Mugabe, who originally fought for independence and assumed power as Zimbabwe’s anti-colonial hero, imposed an increasingly dictatorial regime. Mugabe’s ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), and Zimbabwe’s security forces, went on to oversee systematic human rights violations. In the post-2000 era, during Moyo’s teenage years, Zimbabwe witnessed unprecedented political violence, leading to an economic freefall, with year-on-year inflation exceeding 1,000%.
Growing up in a small mining town, Moyo saw the young people around him manipulated by politicians to perpetuate this political violence, at the same time that they were pushed to the peripheries of political leadership and policy making. “The youth became ‘willing’ tools of abuse due to economic hardships,” he says, which included “victimising the electorate in election times.” So in 2010, at the age of 23, Moyo set up the Zimbabwe Organization For The Youth In Politics (ZOYP), along with Jasper Maposa, a community leader from his town. “We sought to enculture the youths to resist being used as agents of politically motivated violence,” he said.
ZOYP has now trained a small army of over 2,500 activists, with a new brand of peaceful politics to counter 92-year-old Mugabe’s violent regime. He has also trained 80 human rights defenders in a grassroots programme called the Community Human Rights Defenders Academy, working in remote areas of Zimbabwe.
Now author of four best-selling political books, Moyo has become an important critic of a regime notorious for disappearing, intimidating and arresting dissenting voices – criticism that has not gone unnoticed.
After publishing his book in 2015, Robert Mugabe: From Freedom Fighter to the People’s Enemy, Moyo faced increased state surveillance and death threats. He fled to the Netherlands for three months, staying with Shelter City in Utrecht, an initiative set up to protect human rights campaigners. As soon as he returned to Zimbabwe he published another book, criticising Robert Mugabe’s wife, Grace Mugabe: “Africa’s upcoming first female dictator.”
He’s been arrested in the past for his politics, after organising a youth event where former US Ambassador to Zimbabwe Charles Ray was a speaker. Charged under the Public Order and Security Act – a repressive law used to silence dissenting voices, particularly from civil society organisations and ZANU-PF opposition – he was sentenced to six months in prison, later getting off with a fine.
“My arrest did not come as a shock,” he told Index. And likewise the reaction to Mugabe’s birthday gift is not surprising, but Moyo remains defiant. “I don’t regret what I did, indeed President Mugabe must answer for crimes against humanity which he committed. Justice must prevail in Zimbabwe.”
Moyo has now set his sights worldwide, working to establish an international platform for young with political aspirations. “Looking at what is happening in Burundi, Syria, Uganda only to mention a few, I think there is a need,” he says. “Developing young people in politics is a step towards creating a peaceful world.”
One of China’s leading human rights lawyers and free speech campaigners, Pu Zhiqiang is known particularly for his way with words. “Whether in court or online, he is adept at mixing classical erudition and street vernacular,” said Chinese scholar and a friend of Pu’s Perry Link. “Twitter was made for him, but Twitter is banned in China.”
Since May 2014 Pu’s voice has been silenced, after he was arrested and charged for a series of blog posts. His trial drew huge international attention with many observers calling it a litmus test for freedom of speech in China. He was released in December 2015 to house arrest, and has made no public comment since.
Index asked three of Pu’s friends to tell his story for him.
“He was born on 11 January 1965 in Luanxian, near Tangshan, Hebei Province,” said Tong Yi, who has been a friend of Pu’s since meeting him in 1988. “His father was categorized as ‘landlord’. Therefore, when he grew up in his village, he was discriminated against because of his father. He experienced the devastating earthquake in Tangshan in July 1976.”
“Despite all the hardship he faced in those years, he grew up with an imposing physical build, as well as a standout student with a keen intellect and a photographic memory.”
As a student Pu became involved in the Tiananmen Students’ Movement. He was at Tiananmen Square in 1989, and witnessed the massacre of many of his friends and fellow campaigners. That was a turning point for him, says Link.
“He felt especially bad about the ordinary workers who protested and then died. They were not famous like some of the students and intellectuals, but were called ‘riffraff’ by the government, then slaughtered and forgotten. That experience has haunted Pu and, I believe, has been the anchor for his devotion to human rights law.”
This devotion saw him become a leading human rights lawyer in China, taking on controversial campaigns that earned him a “Robin Hood” reputation.
“Over the past decade, Pu has defended right to freedom of expression in a number of well-known cases,” Professor Hu Yong, China’s leading academic authority on the history of the Internet in China told Index.
His defendants include earthquake activist and writer Tan Zuoren, dissident writer Wang Tiancheng, fellow human rights lawyer Zheng Enchong, Tibetan environmentalist Karma Samdrop, banned writers such Chen Guidi, Chun Tao and Zhang Yihe, and artist Ai Weiwei.
“He also rescued a dozen of villagers facing harsh criminal charge for disclosing local corruption and criticizing officials, and defended a number of outspoken whistleblowing journalists and liberal media outlets against defamation charges,” said Hu Yong.
This work obviously earned him a place on China’s closely-watched list, but Pu knew the law so well he’d always managed to stay on the right side of it, said Link. That was until last year, when he was arrested after attending a small meeting about Tiananmen Square. Pu was later charged with “creating disturbances” and “inciting ethnic hatred” via seven comments posted on the microblogging platform Weibo between July 2011 and May 2014. The posts criticized the central government’s policies in Xinjiang and Tibet that repress minorities’ religious and ethnic identities.
Pu was detained for 19 months, with many prepared for his trial to result in an 8-year-sentence. On 22 December 2015 Pu was finally released, with an unexpected 3-year suspended sentence.
Xinhua, China’s official news agency, claimed Pu had been given “a light punishment…as he confessed his crime honestly, pleaded guilty and repented his guilt.”
“The government’s goal in persecuting Pu was to to quell freedom of speech on the internet,” said Link. “It was as if the government was saying, ‘Look, if we can take free speech away from the country’s leading advocate of free speech, then what can’t we do? EVERYBODY TAKE NOTE.’ It has worked, to some extent. But the story is not over.”
Hu Yong agrees that Pu’s arrest and sentence, even though less harsh than expected, marks a huge step backwards for freedom of speech in China. “Many people saw Pu’s case as a touchstone that would demonstrate whether the rule of law in China has been moving backward or progressing,” Hu Yong wrote for ChinaFile.
“In terms of levels of the government other than the judiciary, some thought that if Pu were to be convicted, it would serve as a weathervane indicating that China is returning to a ‘second Cultural Revolution.’ In fact, there is no need for a touchstone, and the weathervane has long been pointing in the same direction.”
As for Pu’s own future, Hu Yong believes he could lose his right to practice law. Whether his voice as the Robin Hood of China is lost forever is also still to be decided.
“What happens to Pu will depend mostly on how he decides to play his cards from now on,” said Link. “ If he accepts the government’s muzzle, the authorities will leave him alone. If he chooses to speak out again, they will try to re-imprison him or punish him in other ways.”
