Session
Organizer 1: Stella Anne Ming Hui Teoh, NetMission.Asia
Organizer 2: Luke Rong Guang Teoh, NetMission.Asia
Organizer 3: Bea Guevarra, 🔒NetMission.Asia
Speaker 1: Saba Tiku Beyene, Intergovernmental Organization, African Group
Speaker 2: Lia Hernández, Civil Society, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)
Speaker 3: Aji Fama Jobe, Technical Community, African Group
Speaker 4: Marko Paloski, Technical Community, Eastern European Group
Speaker 5: Luke Rong Guang Teoh, Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group
Stella Anne Ming Hui Teoh, Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group
Bea Guevarra, Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group
Bea Guevarra, Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group
Round Table - 90 Min
A. How does mentoring help shape an individual’s journey in advocacy, e.g. online gender-based violence?
B. What is the potential for youth as mentors or emerging leaders, in topics like online gender-based violence?
C. How can we sustain youth engagement and encourage youth into career pathways connected to fighting against online gender-based violence through trust?
What will participants gain from attending this session? Explore the value of work-related mentorships, as well as the important potential of youth as mentors or emerging leaders. The session will also discuss best practices for mentoring, and future strategies for sustainable mentoring relationships.
Description:
The mentorship process can be defined as “a professional relationship” where an individual with experience guides someone else in development of specific skills and knowledge, which hopefully enhances the mentee’s growth transformation (Kopera-Frye, 2020). Mentoring can happen in more formal settings, or through self-selection, where mentees identify potential mentors on the basis of similarity in interest and need. Generally, benefits of mentorship include knowledge transfer, learning and leadership opportunities, as well as “expanded thinking and facilitation of a collaborative culture”.
Meaningful mentor-mentee relationships bridge gaps and help facilitate in-organisation coherence as individuals work to progress more inclusively. Research has shown that presence of strong mentors helps female athletes interact with issues of sexism and problematic behaviours (Vaggalis & Kelley, 2018).
Taking into consideration the ever-changing nature of technology and its use, there is a substantial lack of presence of mentors confident in offering mentorship on how to contribute to the fight against online gender-based violence. It can be broadly distinguished between two situational needs for mentoring; one where the mentor is for a victim of online gender-based violence; the other is for mentoring individuals who aim to work to end online gender-based violence.
Harraf (2021) stated that “gender inequality is also a main consequence resulted by the absence of mentorship”. Lack of mentoring may lead to reinforcement of unconscious gender biases online, and this would be a major hindrance while tackling online gender-based violence.
There needs to be greater mobilisation of “bystanders” when it comes to tackling such culturally-ingrained problems, and discussion about guidance and continued knowledge sharing is vital.
NetMission.Asia hopes to publish the session’s outcomes in form of article and infographic as well as leverage new connections into a more long-term partnership with the local partners (to achieve better representation of East Asian(Japanese) perspective among NetMission.Asia network members) We hope to continue to work on previous work by NetMission.Asia alumnus on the topic of online gender-based violence. We plan to facilitate knowledge sharing across youth communities to achieve inclusive, trusted and meaningful youth representation at policymaking processes for a safer Internet.
Hybrid Format: Short input statements from speakers and youth initiative representatives will be provided in advance to participants via the IGF programme website for a common starting ground. Session report will be published in article and infographic form. We plan to partner with interested youth initiatives as min-hubs. The moderator will also adhere to a strict time management and encourage participants online and onsite to take the floor. This will be supported by at least one moderator taking care of input from the local and regional hubs and of the chat as an additional channel for participation. Miro Board will also be used to collect input from attendees or interested parties (pre-event), and some input there may be discussed during the session, the input and the output will be shared publicly via NetMission.Asia’s website, newsletter or social media platforms.