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In 2023, I was one of the organisers of the #SitakiShari campaign to create awareness on violence against women and girls on digital platforms, across three East African countries; Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.
My colleagues and I did this through videos cartoons, vlogs, blogs infographics and dialogues. Some of our findings were that cultural norms made many reluctant about speaking out, while other young people expressed fear, not only of online harassment, but of potential offline consequences, including, reputational harm, community exclusion and threats.
This year’s theme for the 16 Days of Activism against Gender Based Violence is specific to Technology Facilitated Gender Based Violence (TFGBV). Yet, as digital access increases, safety, privacy, and gender-aware designs remain low priorities for many legal systems and governments, creating space for unchecked abuse.
TFGBV which has been defined as an act of violence perpetrated by one or more individuals that is committed, assisted, aggravated and amplified in part or fully by the use of information and communication technologies or digital media, against a person on the basis of their gender includes, but not limited to; sextortion, hate speech, online grooming for sexual assault, non-consensual sharing of intimate images, cyberbullying, online sexual harassment and doxing.
Far from being “just online harassment,” TFGBV severely impact survivors’ psychological, social and economic well- being and in some cases, escalate into offline, physical violence.
However, and this is critical, there is a striking lack of reliable, comparable, and disaggregated data on the prevalence, forms, and impacts of TFGBV globally. The terminologies and definitions are still inconsistent.
You find that for a lot of people but also institutions, terms like “cyber violence,” “digital abuse,” “online harassment,” and “cyberbullying” are often used interchangeably. And what’s more, these do not necessarily capture the full spectrum of gender-based harms enabled by technology.
Because of this definitional ambiguity, measuring and comparing TFGBV across different contexts is difficult. Researchers, including UN Women’s knowledge hub, have noted limited data on the commonness, forms, impact, and drivers of TFGBV across different global regions and social intersections.
There is even less data on how often online violence translates into online-offline continuum or if the perpetrators are intimate partners, acquaintances, strangers, or organized networks.
Many studies are small-scale or localized. For example, a survey in Malawi among women in one district identified cyber harassment, online defamation, revenge pornography, cyberbullying, sexual exploitation, and hate speech as forms of cyber violence but even then, only 67 participants responded.
As a result, our understanding of the scale, patterns, and consequences of TFGBV remains limited. This hampers effective policy formulation on prevention and survivor support despite that the problem is real and growing.
Although there is not yet an exclusive International Instrument dedicated to tech-enabled GBV, existing frameworks, combined with some newer regional and national laws, provide relevant normative grounding.
The Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (DEVAW, 1993) recognizes violence against women as a violation of human rights and underscores the right to security, dignity, and equality.
The more comprehensive Istanbul Convention (Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence) sets a strong international standard for state obligations, such as; preventing violence, protecting victims, prosecuting offenders, and establishing support services.
The Government of Uganda, in its 2020–2025 GBV framework, recognizes the growing issue of violence amplified by ICT. In our neighborhood, Rwanda has also, since 2018, had a law addressing technology facilitated violence and is working with regulatory and ICT agencies to prevent online abuse of women and girls.
This should serve as a reminder that digital spaces are not lawless and human rights and gender-based violence protections are expected to expand to online, as well. Law enforcement, such as the Police, Judiciary and social support systems should be equipped to handle digital GBV, with let’ say, guidelines for collecting digital evidence, supporting survivors while ensuring their privacy and dignity.
In some contexts, authorities may themselves be perpetrators or complicit. Ahead of 70th Session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, I urge global and African leaders to explicitly recognize TFGBV as a form of GBV in international frameworks and to fund the research and disaggregated data needed to close the existing evidence gap.
I further call on them to push for national laws that criminalize all forms of technology-facilitated violence, starting with tech companies that operate profit- driven-models that surpas individual privacy concerns.
The author is a lawyer.
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