The Abuse That Knows No Borders
How technology is being weaponised to silence women – and the global fightback against it.
Also see
Digital Abuse Knows No Borders
This is a global issue that crosses national borders and spans contexts, although with grimly similar consequences.
“The Space for Abuse Seems Endless”
Gender disinformation aims to create a hostile environment for women with the goal of shaming, intimidating, silencing and excluding them.
Kompromat is Back in Azerbaijan
The regime is exploiting social media to inflict reputational damage on its critics.
Romania: Defying Kompromat
“I couldn’t be bribed or stopped with death threats, but maybe I was supposed to be embarrassed enough by intimate pictures to be silenced.”
Welcome to IWPR’s Frontline Update, your go-to source to hear from journalists and local voices at the front lines of conflict.
THE BIG PICTURE
As technology becomes an ever-more integral part of daily life, it is also being weaponised to harm women. This abuse can take multiple forms, from online harassment and cyberstalking to sextortion, and can often spill over into real-world violence, with terrible consequences for women and their wider communities.
VOICES FROM THE FRONTLINE
“An overwhelming response to digital abuse is self-censorship. Women feel that they have no choice but to silence their voices,” wrote IWPR Middle East and North Africa country director Nadia Samet-Warren, in an article published this week on how such violence was being used to exclude women from public spaces.
“Years ago I dealt with the consequences of a digital attack, and I completely disappeared from the public space because of it,” recounted one IWPR Armenia colleague she interviewed for her piece. “Along with other activists, we were labelled and accused of all sorts of lies to silence us and back then, unfortunately, it worked.”
“A significant percentage of young people in Azerbaijan are online, making them vulnerable to online violence and digital harassment,” said another IWPR colleague. “The main problem is the lack of mechanisms to deal with or even identify these cases, and the mentality and stereotypes in our society.”
WHY IT MATTERS
Regimes have long targeted activists and opponents by circulating intimate photos, videos or personal details to inflict reputational damage.
The use of kompromat - faked or real content, most often involving sex or pornography – is a classic technique used by intelligence agencies to embarrass or discredit opponents. Social media now provides another avenue, with malign influence campaigns exploiting these vulnerabilities.
“When you want to humiliate a woman, you delve into her sex life. It’s a given,” said a Moldovan colleague, describing the intense disinformation efforts that have long targeted pro-European President Maia Sandu over being unmarried and child-free.
THE BOTTOM LINE
If women’s voices are silenced, democracy is weakened.
Recognising this danger, global initiatives - such as a landmark 2024 UN convention - are supporting national governments, civil society and the private sector to prevent and combat digital violence. Individual countries are also taking measures, such as recent US legislation on deepfakes.
Samet-Warren wrote that survivors should “feel assured that there is now a growing national and international consensus that digital violence must be addressed and perpetrators held accountable”.
She concluded, “The same technology utilised to spread harm can be harnessed to find justice; this abuse knows no borders, but neither does the fight back.”
