Ellen Phiddian
Cosmos science journalist
Camera traps, drones, and audio recorders have exploded in use for conservation over the last decade.
But it’s been discovered these surveillance tools have darker uses.
In a forest in northern India, they’re being used to spy on and control local women – sometimes with deadly consequences.
“Nobody could have realised that camera traps put in the Indian forest to monitor mammals actually have a profoundly negative impact on the mental health of local women who use these spaces,” says Dr Trishant Simlai, a researcher at the University of Cambridge, UK.
Simlai, who spent 14 months interviewing 270 people living around the Corbett Tiger Reserve, is lead author on a paper describing use of the surveillance equipment, published in Environment and Planning F.
The interviews revealed a number of practices that “reinforce patriarchal norms and propagate gendered structural violence”, according to the paper.
Rangers have been deliberately flying drones near women to intimidate them, while other locals have been using camera traps to watch them.
The cameras police women for behaviours deemed taboo, like smoking, and can serve as nastier forms of harassment.
“A photograph of a woman going to the toilet in the forest – captured on a camera trap supposedly for wildlife monitoring – was circulated on local Facebook and WhatsApp groups as a means of deliberate harassment,” says Simlai.
The village the woman was from – where all residents came from marginalised caste groups – saw this as deliberate discrimination.
“We broke and set fire to every camera trap we could find after the daughter of our village was humiliated in such a brazen way,” one interviewee is quoted as saying in the paper.
The monitoring technologies have changed the way women behave in the forest, saying they sing and talk far more quietly. This makes the forest less safe for them: singing reduces the risk of surprising elephants and tigers.
“I discovered that local women form strong bonds while working together in the forest, and they sing while collecting firewood to deter attacks by elephants and tigers,” says Simlai.
“When they see camera traps they feel inhibited because they don’t know who’s watching or listening to them – and as a result they behave differently – often being much quieter, which puts them in danger.”
One of the women he interviewed has since been killed in a tiger attack.
Local women rely on the forest for resources like firewood, but also for privacy and to meet with other women, according to Simlai’s interviews.
“Women feel free in the forest, they don’t have to tolerate the prying eyes of their father in laws and suffer the taunts and violence of their husbands,” one female interviewee is quoted as saying in the paper.
Conversely, local men – particularly those employed by the burgeoning tourist industry – were often unhappy about women’s forest activities.
“I go as a tourist safari guide to the tiger reserve every day and tell tourists about all the disturbances in the forest, it is embarrassing to sometimes come across my wife collecting forest produce with other women while I am explaining such things, the other guides make fun of me,” another interviewee told Simlai.
The researchers say that these technologies need to be critically assessed in conservation. Researchers and conservationists should consider if less invasive techniques, like surveys, can give them the information they need.
“These findings have caused quite a stir amongst the conservation community. It’s very common for projects to use these technologies to monitor wildlife, but this highlights that we really need to be sure they’re not causing unintended harm,” says collaborator Professor Chris Sandbrook, also from the University of Cambridge.
“Surveillance technologies that are supposed to be tracking animals can easily be used to watch people instead – invading their privacy and altering the way they behave.”
