By Mariama Bah
With the rapid rise of technological developments, social media, and global digitalization, new forms of harassment and violence towards women and girls have emerged. This year’s theme for the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence campaign is urgently focused on digital violence against women and girls. Those most at risk and who are disproportionately likely to experience forms of online harassment are young women, women with disabilities, Black women, Indigenous women and other women of colour, migrant women, LGBTIQ+ individuals, and women in the political and public sphere.
How its increased in recent years
The rise of digital life has coincided with an alarming surge in online gender-based violence, transforming platforms meant for connection into spaces for abuse and harassment. This escalation was particularly evident with the COVID-19 pandemic. The global shift to an online lifestyle provided new opportunities for perpetrators to act with impunity. For instance, Australia saw reports of image-based abuse increase by a devastating 210% during the Covid-19 pandemic, signaling an intensification of digital Gender-Based Violence (GBV) as women’s digital lives became more central. Digitalization increased the exposure to threats, harassment, defamation, and overall making the experience of technology-facilitated violence increasingly common. The UN Women global report, Accelerating efforts to tackle online and technology facilitated violence against women and girls, synthesised various studies and found that the prevalence of online violence against women and girls ranges from 16% to 58%. Illustrating the massive scale of this challenge with a call to address the impunity enjoyed by online abusers is now a critical human rights imperative for the global community.
The UN Women comprised a list of digital tools used to stalk, harass, and abuse women and girls include:
- Image-based abuse: revenge porn or leaked nudes
- Non-consensual sharing of intimate images
- Cyberbullying, trolling, and online threats
- Online harassment and sexual harassment
- Hate speech and disinformation on social media platforms
- Doxxing: publishing private information
- Online stalking or surveillance
- Online grooming and sexual exploitation
- Catfishing and impersonation
- Misogynistic networks: manosphere, incel forums
- AI-generated deepfakes: explicit images, videos, & audios & deepfake pornography
With digital Gender-Based Violence being fairly modern and hard to monitor, countries and researchers have been struggling with the indefiniteness of digital violence, collecting data, and creating and enforcing preventive measures.Despite the challenges to collect data, there are still increasing alarming records of digital violence all over the world with findings across Europe and the USA of 23% of women aged 18 – 55 reported at least one experience of online abuse or harassment. Reports are even higher in other parts of the world, reaching up to 60% of women experienced online violence.
Digital Harassment & Violence to Real world Harassment & Violence
Technology-facilitated violence against women and girls is often casually dismissed with harmful comments like “it’s not real” or “just get off the internet,” yet this ignores the profound, real-world consequences that extend far beyond the screen. The very nature of digital abuse, which frequently involves cyber-stalking, the relentless gathering of personal information, and doxing, creates a state of perpetual hypervigilance. This constant, unseen threat makes the victim feel unsafe and unable to gauge the true extent of the perpetrator’s surveillance, a chronic stress that’s been reported to contribute directly to severe mental illness. Most critically, this is a dangerous continuum of violence that often spills into the physical world: a UNESCO survey found that 20% of the 73% of women journalists who experienced online violence also reported being attacked in real life, with the abuse directly connected to the harassment they first faced on digital platforms. This seamless and dangerous transition from online threats to physical harm requires that digital violence be taken seriously as a fundamental security and human rights issue, not merely as a trivial nuisance.
Sources:
Accelerating Efforts to Tackle Online Technology Facilitated Violence Against Women and Girls
16 Days of Activism 2025: End digital violence against all women and girls
Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence and Mental Health Outcomes in Tunisia
UNESCO’s Global Survey on Online Violence Against Women Journalists
