Online violence against women is soaring, a new report finds

Globally, one in three women—or 736 million people—have experienced violence of some sort, whether from an intimate partner, sexual assault, or both. Much of that offline violence is linked to online habits, according to a new report from Dutch NGO Rutgers, which was launched today at the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland.

The study highlights the extent to which abusers are utilizing new tech in order to perpetuate their control and violence against women and girls. The research was carried out in collaboration with a number of support services helping women in countries including Indonesia, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Rwanda, South Africa, and Uganda.

Yet, the report authors warn, “technology-facilitated gender-based violence” (TFGBV) is often not seen as a serious form of gender-based violence. That lack of recognition of the gravity of tech-enabled abuse can result in insufficient reporting and inadequate legal protection for survivors. In Uganda, for instance, 49% of women reported experiencing online harassment, yet awareness and reporting mechanisms remain woefully inadequate—meaning that only 53% of women were aware they could report it to authorities.

“This is something we have been closely observing for the past decade as technology evolves and as we start seeing more and more people signing on to platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp,” says Kinda Majari, program coordinator at ABAAD in Lebanon, a gender-focused nonprofit that worked with Rutgers on the report.

Violence against women and girls has always been an issue, says Majari, but has been “booming” in the past few years. Yet despite that, many people don’t believe it’s a real issue, she says—meaning complaints when they arise are not dealt with seriously. “Unfortunately, it is quite underreported at this stage,” she says. “A lot of people that have to come to experience TFGBV online don’t necessarily know that they have been victimized by this phenomenon.”

One of the motivating factors for publishing the report was indeed to raise awareness around TFGBV, says Loes Loning, a researcher at Rutgers. Loning, for her part, wasn’t surprised by the prevalence of TFGBV, nor was she surprised that online and offline abuse often intermingled or bled from one area to another. That’s simply the nature of abuse in a digital world, she says. But Loning was surprised that there were so many commonalities of how the abuse was encountered across the seven countries studied. “Some patterns that emerge that kind of apply across countries,” she says. “Of course, we know technology knows no borders. And this type of violence is also, I guess, across borders.”

While those experts in the field are aware of the severity of the abuse that can be suffered, some authorities have still been slow to take digital abuse seriously. “It’s still very much brushed off by different actors,” says Loning.

TFGBV can run the gamut of issues from harassment—which 58% of adolescent girls across 32 countries have experienced on social media platforms—to outright abuse. A staggering 38% of women worldwide reported personal experiences with online violence, according to the report, and 85% have witnessed digital violence against other women. Those belonging to LGBTQIA+ communities, especially in hostile environments, face heightened risks of both online and offline violence.

Victims aren’t just impacted in the immediate moment of their abuse. They’re often affected in the long run, because they become less likely to access the platforms that they’ve been abused on for fear of further issues. Often these are platforms that are integral to life in the 21st century. Women entrepreneurs in Uganda told the report authors they stopped their online business activities due to persistent harassment, illustrating the economic toll TFGBV can take.

And the law isn’t keeping up with how tech-enabled violence is being perpetrated against women, reckon the authors. The report highlights how women who are victims of nonconsensual intimate image sharing—rather than the men who shared the images—have been prosecuted under countries’ anti-pornography laws.

Change is needed, says Majari—and it needs to come from all of society. “We definitely need public sector institutions [to change],” she says. “The judiciary, law enforcement, but also legislators.” While there is some legislation designed to tackle these issues, Majari says it’s often full of loopholes that make it easy for the perpetrators to wriggle free. 

Tech companies also need to act to help address the issues before they snowball. ABAAD has closely collaborated with Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, to explain the issues they’re seeing their users encountering online. “This has been very helpful,” Majari says, “because when . . . those tech companies are willing to listen to practitioners and people who are involved directly with providing services to survivors, they’re able to get a better contextualized understanding of the space in which their products are operating.”

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