What two days of global evidence told us about Unsafe by Design 

Earlier this month, we took our analysis, Unsafe by Design: An Analysis of the TFGBV Continuum, to the Centre for Protecting Women Online’s Annual Conference at the Open University – now in its second year as the Women and Girls’ Online Safety Conference. Over two days, researchers, practitioners, technologists and survivor-advocates shared evidence from every corner of the world. 

We went in with a report that draws on the voices of our partners and feminist movements across Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nepal, Uganda and Zimbabwe, arguing that technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) is systemic, gendered, and inseparable from offline inequality. We left having heard that same argument made independently, in entirely different contexts, session after session. That convergence is worth dwelling on – because it is one thing for Womankind to say this, and another for a room of researchers working on five continents to arrive at the same conclusion without having read each other’s work. 

Smartphone bans don’t remove harm – they hide it

Professor Jessica Ringrose’s opening keynote took on a debate currently dominating UK headlines: school smartphone bans. Her research is unambiguous that bans are overly simplistic and unsupported by young people themselves. Removing the phone doesn’t remove the harm, it displaces it. One deputy headteacher told her research team that incidents reported in school had dropped by 96 per cent after a ban – but the abuse hadn’t stopped, it had simply moved to where staff couldn’t see it, and where a 17-year-old girl described having nowhere left to turn but her phone, to call her mum. It’s a smaller-scale version of the same pattern our report describes: remove the visible symptom without addressing the structure producing it, and the harm doesn’t disappear, it just becomes harder to hold anyone accountable for. 

The same gaps, thousands of miles apart

From Nigeria, TechHer’s Amina Salaudeen shared findings from their “Keep Me Safe” pro bono legal network, now active in every state, with lawyers who have handled over 85 cases. She was blunt about the gap this work exposes: in a country where same-sex marriage is illegal, where can LBTQI+ people safely report abuse at all? Her data showed 90.5 per cent of queer people surveyed had experienced TFGBV, and the harm compounds financially as well as emotionally – survivors lose income when they can’t work, then pay again for new SIM cards, legal fees and therapy, on top of the abuse itself. It is, almost word for word, the account our own partners give us: legal systems that weren’t built for digital harm, survivors who pay twice, and community organisations quietly absorbing costs that governments and platforms should be carrying. 

Representation isn’t the same as institutional change

Dr Hazel Sayer’s large-scale survey of European women reinforced a point we make constantly: the field knows far more about the harms than about how to prevent them. She highlighted the particular risks facing women in visible, public-facing roles — especially those in political spaces — and a recurring lack of trust in formal processes, including the police, as a route to safety or redress. 

Another session, drawing on the work of the Red Dot Foundation in India, shared a finding that stayed with us: a higher proportion of women serving in the Haryana police force did not translate into more empathetic responses to online violence. Many of those officers, having navigated their own experiences of domestic violence, did not necessarily see digital abuse as equally serious. It’s a useful corrective to an assumption we sometimes lean on too easily: that getting more women into an institution is enough to change how that institution responds to women. Sometimes the institution itself has to change 

What this confirms

None of this is comfortable listening. But it is, in its way, reassuring: the pattern our partners describe to us isn’t specific to our focus countries, or to any one region’s legal system, platform, or cultural context. It is structural, and it is global. That means the fixes have to be structural and global too – which is exactly the argument at the heart of Unsafe by Design, and why we keep making it in every room we’re invited into.