Digital spaces have become a breeding ground for gender-based violence. With rising digital technologies such as AI adoption- heralding the world into a new era of unlimited social and economic opportunities- harm has naturally become an inherent experience of users in many online platforms around the world. It is particularly concerning to see how women’s and girls’ experiences have been reduced to shame, silence and stigma. 

This International Women’s Day- we’re unpacking how this form of violence is spanning all corners of the virtual world from doxxing to cyberstalking, surveillance to harassment and how it’s disproportionately affecting women and girls. 

Technologically facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) is defined as ‘any act that is committed, assisted, aggravated, or amplified by the use of information communication technologies or other digital tools’.  It results in or is likely to result in physical, sexual, psychological, social, political, or economic harm, or other infringements of rights and freedoms, and has been growing as a continuum of violence experienced by women, girls and people of all genders online.  

Big Tech profits over safety

According to statistics from UN Women, between 16 and 58 per cent of women have experienced some form of digital abuse. They have been targeted publicly and even privately with some ‘outed’ for their sexual orientation and gender identity while constantly navigating threats. This is more compounded on women and gender diverse people who hold public facing roles such as politicians, journalists, content creators/influencers and human rights defenders. 

Safety by Design has become the latest push for Big Tech platforms to not only be accountable to safety online standards in practice but designing products such as apps and new platforms that centre safety and security- protecting users from harms such as abuse, harassment or harmful content.  

We continue to witness platforms prioritising profits over safety.  For example; X’s AI chatbot Grok recently introduced a new feature that sexualises images without user consent and Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses where concerns have risen over users being secretly filmed and trolled online. 

Through our campaign: Reboot the online system, make it safer, we are launching a new publication: A feminist playbook for responding to technology-facilitated gender-based violence in response to the emerging threats from TfGBV. This playbook anchors on our research: Unsafe by Design- An Analysis of the TFGBV continuum. It shows that women and gender-diverse people with intersecting identities – including Indigenous, Black, disabled, LBTQI+, migrant, religious, and rural women – experience more frequent and more severe online abuse. 

Our call to action

In this playbook, Womankind is calling for:

• Redesigned technology prioritising safety over profit through adoption of Safety by Design standards 

• Strengthened content moderation and enforcement especially in Global South countries where language coverage is not extensive 

• Enforced transparency and accountability through international regulation standards that extends duty of care to users 

• Digital literacy focused on helping users to understand risks, and make informed choices of how to engage online 

‘’This playbook is designed for feminist organisations, partners, donors, and human rights practitioners responding to technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV). It is grounded in evidence and lived experiences of grassroots women’s human rights activists and defenders based in Womankind’s focus countries: Kenya, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Nepal and Uganda. And it aims to support survivor-centred responses, strengthen collective care, and sustain feminist movements under growing digital threats.’’ – Disha Sughand and Diana Njuguna, Co-CEOs, Womankind Worldwide

Our campaign is a global push for accountable online platforms and feminist advocacy approaches that centre the voices of activists in designing a feminist digital future. This is making provision for alternatives such as digital spaces built by feminists and for movements, grounded in feminist principles rather than profit