Chayn

A global tech nonprofit empowering women & marginalised genders facing abuse. Feminist 💖 Survivor-led 🌈 Intersectional Chayn means solace in Urdu.

To empower women against violence and oppression, Chayn - a global volunteer-led digital network - was created. Started from one laptop in London, the volunteer network now spans more than 75 volunteers across the globe. Chayn’s founding team of volunteers believes that leveraging technology and digital media is a secure and innovative way of reaching vulnerable women. Our first project took us to

build a crowdsourced website to support women experiencing domestic violence in Pakistan with the help of 75 volunteers globally in 3 months. Since then we have held events to engage people from different backgrounds in brainstorming solutions to violence against women; enabled charities to empower more women through developing content and training manuals; and run campaigns to raise awareness for the problems women face. If you would like to work with us, give us a shout at [email protected]

31/05/2026

This story shows how the narrative around image-based abuse operates and why the behaviour has always existed, long before tech advancements and the policy protections.

In 1970, Mustafa Zaidi printed topless photographs of Shahnaz Gul and labelled them “Christine Keeler of Pakistan”. These were potentially ready to distribute and designed to destroy her reputation publicly. She had tried to end the relationship.

When he died, Pakistani newspapers spent two years reporting the intimate details of her personal life while the flyers in his garage were barely mentioned.

22/05/2026

The horror in Obsession isn’t the wish. It’s that he knew she didn’t feel the same way and did it anyway. He only felt guilty when she made him uncomfortable, not when she was suffering. That even when she begged him to undo it, he altered it instead, still wanting to keep her. Image-based abuse follows the same logic. It’s not about the image. It’s about using something intimate to possess someone who never fully agreed, and the control that comes after.

06/05/2026

Our statement on the recent cancellation of RightsCon 💛

03/05/2026

The disparities in the data raise questions about whether existing policies and support systems are actually working. Knowing what abuse is and being able to leave it are different things.

Consent education gives people a vocabulary. It does not change the conditions that make abuse possible, the social pressures that make it hard to name, or the reason why certain dynamics can feel normal rather than harmful when you are living inside them. If you have questions about abusive dynamics, or just want some support, check out our sessions on relationships or reach out through our free messaging service 🤍

23/04/2026

“Boys will be boys” is one of the most consequential phrases in the history of gender-based violence, because it shapes the entire framework through which we understand consent.

When we tell each other that aggression, boundary-crossing and entitlement are simply part of what it means to be male, we are constructing a permission structure telling boys that their impulses are inevitable, and telling girls that managing those impulses is their responsibility.

Consent education cannot work in a system that has already decided, before it begins, that some people’s desires are natural forces and other people’s boundaries are obstacles.

If you’ve grown up in a culture that taught you your boundaries were negotiable, Bloom is a space to start rebuilding that foundation. We have a session called “society, patriarchy, and sexual trauma” at bloom.chayn.co 💛

🏷️ pakistani drama women’s safety

20/04/2026

A viral essay that started on Substack and was republished in Slate this week described a woman finding her boyfriend’s ChatGPT history; months of private conversations in which he had been documenting his doubts about her body, her past and her worth, and asking an AI that had never met her to help him decide if she was worth keeping. Most of the conversation online has been about whether she was wrong to read it.

We’re more interested in what it means for how we understand intimacy, processing and who gets to have a voice in the story of a relationship. Swipe for our thoughts. 💛

This post is based on an article by Lindsey Hall.

16/04/2026

We spend a lot of time talking about healing. This session is about feeling it. Join us on 12 May for a free one-hour introduction to somatics — body-based practices that can help survivors shift out of survival mode, build capacity to cope, and begin repairing even intergenerational wounds. Led by somatic practitioner Bhargavi Raman and hosted by Chayn. Warm, gentle, participatory. No experience needed. Just come as you are. 💛 Register via the link in bio.

14/04/2026

Most people assume that setting their Strava to private means their data is private. Researchers at North Carolina State University found that’s not always true; in less populated areas, it’s possible to identify someone’s home address using nothing but the app’s heatmap. A recent investigation used the same publicly available data to track nearly 19,000 French military personnel across 100 sites worldwide. This isn’t about paranoia. It’s about understanding what everyday apps are quietly sharing, and who else can see it. Swipe for the full breakdown.

13/04/2026

Most of us use end-to-end encryption every day without thinking about it. But for survivors of abuse trying to reach a shelter safely, for activists organising in countries where dissent is dangerous, for women accessing healthcare that has been criminalised, it’s a lifeline.

Governments around the world are pushing to weaken it. Chayn’s policy brief makes the case for why this is a feminist issue, and why the communities with the most to lose are the ones least represented in the rooms where these decisions get made. You can read the full brief at blog.chayn.co 💛

12/04/2026

When governments push for backdoor access to encrypted messages, they frame it as targeting criminals. But a technical backdoor cannot distinguish between a criminal and a survivor, between a terrorist and an activist, between someone who deserves surveillance and someone who deserves privacy.
Weakening encryption means weakening it for everyone. And the communities with the most to lose from that weakening are always the ones already most marginalised, and the ones whose safety depends most on the state not being able to see what they’re doing, who they’re talking to, and where they’re going.

Read more at chayn.co 💛

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Chelsea
SW3 4

Website

https://chayn.co/

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