How are African feminist activists navigating the potential and the power dynamics of communication in the digital age? Jennifer Radloff surveys the field in her introduction to Feminist Africa’s latest edition, “e-spaces : e-politics”.

The advent and development of the internet have expanded the frontiers of feminist activism. Feminist Africa is itself a prime example of the audacious digital engagements of women’s movements all over the world. Established over 10 years ago with the support of Africa’s resurgent feminist community, Feminist Africa (FA) is the continent’s first open-access online scholarly journal, and still the only one dedicated to publishing and promoting independent feminist scholarship as an activist project.

Unless challenged, information and communication technology (ICT) access and reproduce not only gender inequalities but also historical, linguistic, geopolitical, economic, cultural, racial and other interconnected axes of privilege and power. As access and use of the internet mirror the sex/gender, class and other power dynamics offline, so do the violations. State control, censorship, surveillance, invasion of privacy, curtailment of freedom of expression and association, and violence against women are some of the issues that internet rights organisations are taking up, and which United Nations structures are also attempting to address.

Enter Feminist Africa’s latest edition on e-spaces : e-politics – offering perspectives on the implications of global digitisation that emerge out of feminist praxis across the continent; keeping pace with the rapid expansion of cyberfeminism by presenting the latest on African women’s ongoing and remarkable contribution to this global arena.

Historical evidence reveals that it was a woman – Ada Lovelace (1815–1852) – who wrote the first computer programme. Lovelace also originated the concept of using binary numbers, and was an early visionary – seeing the potential of the earliest computer models to develop far beyond simple number-crunching. Xide Xie (1921–2000), banished during the Cultural Revolution, was key to the development of solid-state physics in China. Rose Dieng-Kuntz (1956–2008), Senegalese scientist, was one of the first scholars to understand the important of the Web and to map how it would evolve to specialise in artificial intelligence and knowledge management.

"We have a very long history of effectively saying, 'If she's in prostitution, then what happens to her does not matter,'" said Kaethe Morris Hoffer, executive director of the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation. "This conviction stands firmly against that proposition, and we applaud it."

The research shows that men who pay for sex often believe that they buy the right to do anything they want, Morris Hoffer said. Friday's verdict conveys that no one has that right, she said. She praised prosecutors, noting that having the state stand up for the woman sends a "profound and important message to the community at large."

"The other message that we would hope it sends loud and clear is that prosecutors can achieve convictions, even when the victim of the sexual assault is a woman who has been prostituted," Morris Hoffer said.

Women in prostitution have long faced a stigma when it comes to sexual assault, said Jody Raphael, a visiting law professor at DePaul University who has written about violence against women. Her latest book, "Rape is Rape," was published last year.

"Women in prostitution, because of what they do, are rarely believed," Raphael said. "They have told me they don't go to police with these kinds of complaints because they feel they will be abused and … are afraid to come forward and to make a complaint."