Technology Facilitated Gender Based Violence in Context
Technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) is not an entirely new phenomenon in the Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region – rather, it is the digital extension of long-standing systems of gendered control. As such, its growing scale and impact on women, girls, gender non-conforming individuals, and marginalized people can no longer be ignored, as it is increasingly used to silence, shame, and intimidate.
(“Women” and “girls” are used herein as umbrella terms for the diverse and intersecting identities across the region, including ethnicity, race, religion, language, gender identity and expression, age, class, citizenship, and displacement status, all of which are shaped differently by local contexts, conflicts, and social inequalities).
Addressing TFGBV therefore requires strategies grounded in the extensive experience of women and girls, who have been responding to these forms of violence long before they received mainstream policy attention.
Indeed, technology has expanded the reach and intensity of gender-based violence, amplifying pre-existing vulnerability, while increasing perpetrators’ sense of impunity and reducing their fear of consequences. Like other forms of gender-based violence, TFGBV remains significantly under-reported and available data is mainly based on surveys and case documentation by civil society and INGOs. A few recent reports from the UN provide figures on prevalence and types of TFGBV in the SWANA region: approximately 60% of women using the internet in the region have been exposed to some form of online violence, nearly half disclosed experiencing direct harassment, and 1 in 3 women reported this violence also occurred offline after starting online.
Many women in SWANA are not unprepared for this, they have long navigated social environments in which visibility can be dangerous.
What is often framed as conservative caution toward the digital world can also be understood as a survival strategy shaped by lived experiences: firsthand knowledge passed down from generation to generation and influenced by everyday practice and collective memory. It is with this that sharing images has rarely been neutral, but instead a calculated negotiation of risk. Even before smartphones, stories circulated of photos used for blackmail, images shared without consent after broken engagements or marriage breakdowns, or used for surveillance by families and authorities. Within these contexts, reporting abuse could itself expose women to public shaming, retaliation, or legal consequences. These experiences, reinforced through oral warnings and shared social memory, continue to inform contemporary security and digital habits.
These observations reflect recurring narratives, oral histories, and shared social practices surrounding gendered harm across online and offline spaces in SWANA contexts.
Forms and Dynamics
TFGBV can be perpetrated by intimate partners and strangers, often anonymously or under false identities, and can occur anywhere and at any time. It unfolds along a continuum between online and offline spaces and can take different forms, including targeted intimidation (such as harassment and stalking), privacy and identity violations (such as doxing, defamation, and identity impersonation), and sexualized and coercive behaviours (such as sextortion or non-consensual image sharing). These forms of violence can easily escalate into offline harm, leading to stigma and honor-based violence, while exposing women to shame, punishment, and other types of social control that frame women’s everyday life.
TFGBV is rooted in gender norms that reinforce surveillance and control over women’s lives.
Women and girls’ access to digital public spaces can be restricted and monitored by male guardians, and their mere online presence can become a source of punishment if seen as a breach of imposed social norms. While women have long limited image sharing to avoid harm, the potential for harm has multiplied: even those who do not share anything can be targeted through fabricated images, identity theft, or surveillance. These conditions are reinforced by the “permanence and virality” of digital content. Information can spread globally within minutes (virality) and remain indexed, archived, and reachable indefinitely (permanence), leading to continued revictimization.
From this perspective, TFGBV can be understood not only as a form of online violence, but also as a practice that can reinforce women’s isolation by discouraging participation in digital and public spaces and, in some situations, enforcing pressures to return within more easily controlled private environments.
This interpretation suggests that the combined effects of restrictions and violence can significantly suppress opportunities for women’s social, economic, and political participation, both online and offline.
These trends are visible in the most commonly reported types of TFGBV across the region. In several contexts, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, and Morocco, the predominant forms include online harassment and abuse, GPS tracking, cyberbullying and hate speech. Non-consensual image sharing and sextortion have been widely documented in Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon, while doxxing and non-consensual sharing of personal data have also been reported in Lebanon. Cyberstalking and persistent harassment have been documented in Egypt.
More recently, AI-generated and deepfake image abuse have emerged as a growing concern, although country-specific data is poor. These forms, most commonly lived through online platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, and X, increase their reach and persistence across digital spaces and can easily spread offline .
In the SWANA context, these developments suggest a growing challenge that requires women to reinterpret and adapt their intergenerational knowledge. This involves not only confronting oppression, discrimination, and unequal power relations, but also questioning institutional responses, reaching those most affected by exclusion, and placing women’s own histories, lived experiences, and ways of understanding at the center.
Unequal impact
While all women and girls using digital platforms may be affected by TFGBV, its impacts are not distributed equally.
Women in public roles – journalists, human rights defenders, politicians, and activists – are particularly targeted through coordinated online campaigns of harassment and abuse.
These methods are often reinforced by offline harassment and intimidation and can represent extensive forms of digital violence against women aimed at obscuring their presence in public spaces. In these cases, online violence also functions as part of larger efforts to silence dissent and criticism across both digital and physical spaces, as illustrated by the case of Ghada Oueiss.
In conflict-affect settings such as North West Syria and Yemen, multiple factors intersect, increasing unsafety, particularly for people disproportionally affected by discrimination and exclusion. In these situations, online abuse can be understood as part of underlying conditions of gendered insecurity, and political and military violence that can quickly escalate into real-world harm, including trafficking, sexual exploitation, and stalking.
Displaced women, young women, and female heads of households appear especially targeted in these contexts, particularly given the extremely limited paths to safety and justice.
Intersecting forms of discrimination based on race, ethnicity, religion, and disability further increases exposure to TFGBV. As documented by Amnesty International, racialized and minoritized women face more intense, repeated, and punitive forms of online abuse, reflecting the combined effects of misogyny and ethnoreligious prejudice. Young women and adolescent girls appear to face greater threats because they are more active online, while LGBTIQ+ people are often targeted in ways that reinforce marginalization and social isolation, making them particularly vulnerable both online and offline, as reported in Lebanon, Egypt, and the Gulf.
Risks are further amplified for women living in poverty, with disabilities, or in rural and remote areas, as documented by UNDP and Amnesty International reporting in diverse contexts across the region, including Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon, Jordan, Yemen, Syria. In these circumstances, low digital literacy and unequal availability of support services often leave survivors with few avenues for reporting abuse and seeking support (UNDP, 2023; Amnesty International, 2018).
The combined effects of gender role stereotypes, multiple inequalities, and restrictions on freedom makes women more likely to be targeted by TFGBV. In response to these hazards, many women withdraw from digital spaces as a way to stay safe. While this coping strategy can reduce immediate harm, it can also deepen silence, isolation, and exclusion, reinforcing existing inequalities and limiting ability to benefit from opportunities, resources, and public life.
At the same time, many women continue to negotiate and reshape their digital presence by balancing safety and participation: keeping personal information limited, being cautious about what is posted and where, and turning off geolocation. This suggests that, even if structural inequalities increase the likelihood to TFGBV, women are not passive with how they engage with digital spaces,
Civil society responses
Despite the scale of the problem, legal and policy responses remain inadequate, leaving many women without formal protection and reinforcing cycles of silence, underreporting, and exclusion.
Overall, TFGBV is exacerbated because of unresolved systemic issues, including lack of specific legal rules, and shortage of training and resources for law enforcement which prevent them from prioritizing and investigating online abuse.
With the exception of Tunisia most countries in the region do not have distinct laws explicitly addressing digital violence against women. This suggests that justice systems remain shaped by social norms based on tangible, physical evidence, which is not fully adequate to address technology-enabled violence. Moreover, high legal costs, stigma, and victim-blaming can further discourage reporting and accountability.
As a result, data collection remains fragmented and insufficient, limiting the development of effective policies and responses. These trends also show how knowledge and solutions are often defined outside the region, overlooking locally grounded expertise. Feminist and digital rights organizations, including APC, have thus emphasized the need for regional and disaggregated data collection that includes clear protection for survivors and relies on their lived experiences to support more effective and locally grounded responses.
Addressing TFGBV in the SWANA region therefore requires more than isolated digital safety measures. It demands a survivor-centered approach that recognizes the link between online and offline harm and is rooted in the cultural and legal context. As well as an effective coordination between governments, civil society groups, digital platforms, and survivor support services. This includes stronger legal measures, safe and confidential reporting channels, digital literacy and safety initiatives, and greater accountability from the online platforms. At the same time, it also requires challenging the gender norms sustaining violence and social control in both digital and physical spaces, and recognizing women’s full participation in social, economic, and political life, including leadership roles, while rebuilding trust in public spaces.
Regional advocacy initiatives have also stressed the need for digital platforms to establish strong Arabic-language moderation systems, improve transparency, and provide accessible reporting and content removal methods. Organizations such as APC, Social Media Exchange (SMEX) and Arab Alliance for Digital Rights (AADR), have repeatedly highlighted the limitations of current moderation systems in Arabic-speaking contexts and the need for policies that better reflect regional realities. This also requires integrating local perspectives of TFGBV into comprehensive gender-based violence prevention and response systems, particularly in conflict-affected and humanitarian settings where digital and physical harms tend to overlap, making purely technical responses insufficient.
In the absence of effective institutional responses, civil society organizations have emerged as key actors in addressing TFGBV across the region. Relying on women’s lived experiences, they document abuse, and develop survivor-centered advocacy tools and strategies. Through everyday efforts to stay safe, collective storytelling, and grassroots organizing, they build strategies that respond to gaps left by institutions or anticipate future needs. This challenges top-down approaches to digital safety and recognizes women not only as rights-holders, but also as key actors shaping digital safety knowledge and responses.
At the national level, organizations such as SMEX in Lebanon and HarassMap in Egypt reflect this trend. SMEX’s Digital Safety Helpdesk provides assistance with removal requests and legal advice in Arabic, while also collecting case-based data, publishing reports, and sharing recommendations with policymakers. HarassMap, relying on women’s self-reported episodes of street harassment, collects reports of both online and offline harassment, transforming individual testimonies into collective evidence that supports awareness-raising, reporting tools, and prevention initiatives. Both organizations demonstrate how women’s lived experiences can be translated into context-specific digital safety habits, grounded in real cases rather than externally imposed models. This highlights the importance of sustained funding for Arabic-language, survivor-centered digital safety services, including legal support, psychosocial assistance, and technical training rooted in local realities.
Beyond direct survivor support, feminist campaigns and organizations across the region have also played a central role in raising awareness, challenging harmful norms, and making online violence more visible. SMEX formulate Arabic-language resources on digital and social media safety, while Mawjoudin combines digital safety support with psychological and counselling services, and advocacy for women and LGBTIQ+ survivors of online violence. Campaigns such as #AnaKaman, active in Lebanon and Egypt between 2017 and 2021, while not strictly related to TFGBV, represent a genuine and spontaneous initiative, led by women who shared personal testimonies and denounced sexual harassment and assault. In doing so, these critical and interconnected campaigns transformed personal testimonies into collective evidence that challenged dominant narratives around gender-based violence and made digital harms more visible and publicly recognized.
At the regional level, initiatives such as the Arab Alliance for Digital Rights (AADR) combine peer support, helplines, and awareness-raising on online freedom of expression, privacy, and safety with advocacy campaigns that pressure social media platforms to remove content, particularly that targeting marginalized groups. The Feminist Principles of the Internet, developed through a global feminist collaboration facilitated by APC, further demonstrate how women and disadvantaged people can shape approaches to digital rights rooted in lived experience, rather than relying solely on state-led models.
One example illustrates both the potential and limits of these efforts. In the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, institutional mechanisms such as the Directorate for Combating Violence against Women have begun addressing online abuse within established GBV responses. Women’s rights organizations, including WADI and OWFI, have played key roles in legal advocacy and in expanding recognition of digital harm. However, holistic responses to TFGBV remain limited, unevenly applied, and often framed through existing cybercrime or morality-based approaches.
Feminist and civil society organizations, including SMEX, APC, Masaar, ARTICLE 19 MENA, have warned that cybercrime laws frequently fail to account for gendered harm and may reinforce violence against women and LGBTIA+ people online. They have therefore called for reforms to cybercrime and morality-based laws that criminalize survivors, restrict freedom of expression, and are used to silence feminist human rights defenders and activists online. Although these actors play a central role in documenting abuse, producing knowledge, developing survivor-centered advocacy strategies, and actively contributing to policy debates, their influence on formal law-making remains largely indirect.
Across the SWANA region, civil society groups have developed strong grassroots responses to TFGBV, influencing public conversation, and supporting survivors, especially where state systems are weak or absent. However, these efforts rarely lead to more impactful institutional change. Civil society actors remain largely excluded from formal decision-making and operate in restrictive political environments that constrain their influence on laws and policies. This shows a persistent disconnection between where change emerges – within civil society – and where decision-making power is concentrated; in state institutions, slowing the development of responses that reflect local realities. At the same time, the growing force of bottom-up initiatives led by women, whose role goes beyond service provision to include expertise and leadership in shaping regional responses to TFGBV, is central. To acknowledge this transformative voice of feminist and human rights organizations, it is necessary to support those who give it visibility, such as female journalists, activists, and human rights defenders, who face coordinated campaigns of abuse and intimidation.
Pathway forward
For many women in the SWANA region, the burden has shifted from risk management to damage control, with restricted access to tools, remedies, and justice, as has often been the case. Yet, as the feminist struggles across the SWANA region have long shown, women have always built on their collective knowledge to address new challenges and continue their path toward equality.
To respond to the digital and amplified form of an old story – gender-based violence – solutions must stem from the women’s lived experience and knowledge, not from imported external models that often fail to reflect local realities. These strategies, warnings, forms of solidarity, and collective practices of care have long sustained resilience and now form the basis for feminist responses to the insecurity posed by digital spaces.
Across the region, human rights actors are building locally grounded responses, including Arabic-language digital safety and literacy resources, survivor support systems that address the intersection of online abuse and social pressure, and advocacy for legal reforms that recognize the gendered harms enabled by technology.
Ultimately, addressing TFGBV requires situating it within existing inequality, shrinking civic space, and social control that restrict women’s inclusion and participation in public life. This is not an isolated phenomenon, but part of systems of power that reinforce exclusion, silence, and violence. Grassroots feminist initiatives have long worked to challenge these dynamics, often anticipating institutional responses.
Addressing TFGBV therefore means not only improving the digital protections of women, girls, and gender non-conforming people, but also confronting the gender norms that perpetuate violence and isolation, enabling their full and equal participation in public, political, and digital life.
References
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