Digital Abuse Knows No Borders

Imagine waking up to find your inbox spammed with death threats, harassment and extortion attempts. Imagine receiving messages from an unknown source with intimate details of your personal life. Or imagine seeing digitally-altered visual content splashed across the internet with the sole intent to shame and hurt you and your loved ones.

These are not hypothetical scenarios of abuse; they are the actual frightening reality for millions of women navigating the digital world today. Technology has become more a crucial, integral part of our daily life. It has also become a tool that’s been weaponised to harm women and children in many alarming ways.

I have experienced this abuse myself, and it was the most awful thing that I have ever endured. I am not alone; my conversations with IWPR colleagues underscore that this is a global issue that crosses national borders and spans widely varying contexts, although with grimly similar consequences.

An overwhelming response to digital abuse is self-censorship.  Women feel that they have no choice but to silence their voices.

“Years ago I dealt with the consequences of a digital attack, and I completely disappeared from the public space because of it,” an IWPR colleague from Armenia told me.  “Along with other activists, we were labelled and accused of all sorts of lies to silence us and back then, unfortunately, it worked.”

It is also used as a political tool.

“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 campaigns that have long attacked pro-European President Maia Sandu over the fact that she is not married and does not have children.  

And the impact can often spill over into real-world violence, ranging from domestic abuse and self-harm to so-called honour killing. The effects of technology-facilitated violence can ripple through entire communities.

Tensions can be triggered by cases of digital abuse targeting women in conservative environments, sparking violence between different groups and families. In conflict-affected areas, where trust and social cohesion are already fragile, it further undermines stability and safety, perpetuating cycles of violence and harm.

My Armenian colleague continued, “The patriarchal system and those supporting and feeding the system are so well aware of women's vulnerabilities even in the digital world that they perfectly use them to silence us, diminish the value of our fight for equity and discredit those women who are visible and vocal.”

Where the abuse targets children, the consequences can have a much longer-term impact.

“A significant percentage of young people in Azerbaijan are online, making them vulnerable to online violence and digital harassment,” another IWPR colleague told me. “We have a law on domestic violence, which was adopted in 2010, with several amendments made afterwards. But digital violence is not part of this– and in any case, the main problem is the lack of mechanisms to deal with or even identify these cases, and the mentality and stereotypes in our society.”

And yet times are changing. Individuals and institutions alike are becoming more aware of the issue, stripping the perpetrators of the leverage they wield over their victims. Survivors are speaking up, and national and international mechanisms to promote accountability are beginning to be put in place.

Last year was a landmark for the establishment of global norms on technology-facilitated violence against women and children, with numerous treaties and resolutions unprecedent achievements.

The adoption of the UN Convention against Cybercrime saw the first comprehensive treaty to provide governments with a raft of measures to prevent and combat this phenomenon including digital violence against women and children.

Many countries have already ratified it, and others will follow suit, further strengthening international cooperation in sharing electronic evidence on cybercrime.

Another 2024 initiative - The Global Partnership for Action on Gender-Based Online Harassment and Abuse - brought together multiple countries, including the UK and US, with support from a multi-disciplinary advisory group drawn from international organisations, civil society and the private sector.

Individual states have also started to strengthen their legal frameworks to combat online violence. In the US, the recent TAKE IT DOWN ACT now holds online platforms accountable to promptly remove deepfakes upon receiving notice of their existence. It also ensures that violators are subject to mandatory restitution and criminal penalties. 

“It was a long fight, but we recently introduced the category of digital violence into legislation, adding it to categories of sexual, economic, psychological and physical violence,” my Moldovan colleague told me. “We don’t know how it will work but at least we have it and can work on its implementation.”

“The positive element about social media is that these cases of violence are more disseminated among society and made more public, and this creates a kind of resonance and also a reaction,” my Azerbaijani colleague added, describing a recent initiative between the UN and the education ministry that saw awareness raising sessions on digital violence in schools.

My message to the survivors is that there are millions of us, and we are here for each other. It takes an enormous level of courage to speak up but that this is the only way we can heal.

Find support in your own community, friends and family, as well as the many organisations and institutions providing legal, psychosocial, digital and other types of help. And feel assured that there is now a growing national and international consensus that digital violence must be addressed and perpetrators held accountable.

The same technology utilised to spread harm can be harnessed to find justice; this abuse knows no borders, but neither does the fight back.