Behind the Screen: How Digital Tools are Fuelling Gender-Based Violence
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- by Lesego Sekhu
Behind the Screen: How Digital Tools are Fuelling Gender-Based Violence
What happens when the very technologies built to connect and empower us become weapons of surveillance, control, and gendered harm? Over the last decade, digital tools and online spaces have transformed how people organise, mobilise, and advocate for gender equality and social justice. Movements like #MeToo, #BringBackOurGirls, the Gen Z anti-Finance Bill protests, monitoring of the extreme sexual violence in South Sudan, as well as the recent wave of South African online platforms turning purple to raise awareness of gender-based violence and femicide, all grew through the reach of online networks. Yet the same tools are reported to drive a surge in sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), both online and offline, threatening to undermine the long-standing fight for gender equality. This year's 16 Days of Activism to End Gender-based Violence draws global attention to technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV), under the theme: "UNiTE to End Digital Violence against All Women and Girls". Often referred to as technology-facilitated violence against women and girls (TF-VAWG), these harms increasingly affect women, girls, and gender diverse people. TFGBV encompasses acts of violence that are committed, assisted, or amplified through digital tools and platforms, targeting individuals based on gender. These abuses take many rapidly evolving forms, such as deepfake image-based sexual abuse, non-consensual sharing of intimate images, online harassment, doxing, impersonation, and cyberstalking, among others.
While social media and digital platforms have opened unprecedented opportunities for connection and advocacy, they have also intensified risk, particularly for women, girls and LGBTQ+ people. According to a 2020 Economist Intelligence Unit study, 85% of women globally reported experiencing or witnessing online violence, with higher prevalence in countries marked by entrenched gender inequality. Deepfake technologies reveal an even starker gender disparity; an estimated 96% of deepfakes are non-consensual, and 99% of sexual deepfakes involve women.
Digital violence has profound consequences. It compromises the safety, security, and well-being of women and gender-diverse individuals, and undermines the hard-won gains toward gender equality fought for offline. Recent reports document that artificial intelligence and algorithmic systems, from social media platforms, including X, Instagram, Facebook to search engines, are biased, often reproducing existing racialised and gendered discrimination found offline. In many cases, automated machine systems reproduce and often amplify social differences and inequalities. Online abuse, therefore, produces real-world harms.
Victims of TFGBV often experience emotional and psychological distress, including anxiety, depression, indignity, social isolation, and embarrassment. Abusers also use technology to monitor and track victims, creating serious threats to physical safety. Online abuse can damage reputations, limit employment opportunities, and in the worst cases, contribute to suicide or escalate into criminal acts such as extortion and brutal violence.
This raises a critical question: What does protection and justice look like in a world where violence transcends borders and evolves faster than the laws meant to contain it?
In recent years, international, regional, and national bodies have begun developing normative instruments to directly address TF-VAWG. The African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights Resolution on the Protection of Women Against Digital Violence in Africa ACHPR/Res.522 (LXXII) 2022 calls on all States to expand definitions of gender-based violence to include cyber-harassment, cyberstalking, sexist hate speech, and other forms of violations targeting individuals based on gender, particularly women. The 2024 African Union Convention on Ending Violence Against Women and Girls (AU CEVAWG) urges Member States to establish legally binding obligations to address violence against women and girls on online platforms and in digital spaces. In South Africa, the Cybercrimes Act (2020) criminalises online harassment, the Protection from Harassment Act (2011) enables victims to seek protection orders, and the Film and Publications Act (1996) regulates harmful online content, amongst others. The Domestic Violence Amendment Act (2021) also recognises harassment via electronic communication. Despite these commitments, there are limitations in the language used to describe these crimes and in how the law comprehends and addresses these violations.
Confronting TFGBV, therefore, requires a holistic, survivor-centred approach to justice. TF-VAWG cases often involve cross-border creation and circulation of content, making it difficult to prosecute perpetrators or identify those responsible. The ever-changing environment of artificial intelligence, social media, and other digital tools also means new harms that laws often have to play catch-up. This means recognising justice as more than a legal remedy, but also ensuring safety, dignity, respect, and access to systems that do not re-traumatise survivors.
States must criminalise emerging forms of digital abuse, strengthen cross-border cooperation, develop transparent and rapid content-removal mechanisms, properly resource enforcement and support services, and integrate digital safety into education systems. Equally crucial is ensuring that women participate meaningfully in the design, development, monitoring, and evaluation of digital platforms and technologies.
Without strong accountability and coherent legislative and policy frameworks, the "justice gap" will only widen, leaving survivors unprotected and unheard in the very spaces meant to elevate their voices.
