ABSTRACT
Introduction – the need for feminist perspectives? The advent of cyberspace has given rise to new challenges and debates for the legal world, and even the most traditional areas of law are finding that they have to consider its effects. For the law, cyberspace is seen in a technical, functional sense: a kind of tool that has useful social applications. On this technical understanding, cyberspace is the virtual ‘space’ that is created by computer networks. The global framework of computers that creates this space is known as the internet (interconnected network). Using the metaphor of the body, the internet represents the backbone. This ‘backbone’ of interconnected computers supports a number of services, such as email and the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web is the system that links together electronic documents (or ‘web pages’). Digital information and communication is the lifeblood of the system, and networked computers represent fixed points of entry.2
