The digital world promised connection and empowerment – but for millions of women, it has become a hunting ground.
Schoolgirls are grappling with fake nude images of themselves circulating on social media. Female business leaders are increasingly targeted with deepfakes and coordinated harassment campaigns. And women in the public eye face torrents of abuse: one in four women journalists and one in three women parliamentarians worldwide report online threats of physical violence, including death threats.
Different lives, different contexts, same pattern. This is digital abuse – one of the fastest-growing forms of gender-based violence, and it is spreading across borders and platforms, threatening women and girls everywhere – online and offline.
Experts say the problem is vast, with anywhere between 16 and 58 per cent of women worldwide reporting online violence or harassment, and now new technologies like artificial intelligence are making things worse. Image-based abuse is exploding, with an estimated 90 to 95 per cent of online deepfakes depicting women in sexualised ways.
The abuse doesn’t just stay online. Online abuse can shatter mental health, wreck relationships, and derail careers in seconds. It can also spill into real life, escalating into stalking or physical violence, even death. Digital violence silences women and girls who should be free to speak.
UN Women warns that this new front line of violence against women is intensifying and spreading fast. Recognising it and stopping it is urgent. While perpetrators of abuse and tech platforms that allow, advertise, and profit from digital abuse must be held accountable, women and girls also need information and tools to spot the early signs of abuse, take action, and reclaim their digital space.
What is digital abuse?
Digital abuse (also called technology-facilitated violence against women and girls) covers a wide spectrum of violent behaviours. It can look like:
- Online harassment and cyberstalking: repeated, unwanted messages, cyber-flashing, creepshots, surveillance such as tracking your location, or monitoring your activity.
- Image-based and deepfake abuse: sharing private images without consent, or creating AI-generated sexual content through morphing, splicing, or superimposing photographs and videos to create deepfakes. These are sometimes called revenge porn.
- Violent pornography: images of sexual aggression and gendered violence in pornography widely available on the internet which is normalizing and perpetuating violence against women and girls.
- Trolling, threats, and blackmail: abusive comments designed to silence or intimidate, gender-based hate speech, threatening to share personal information, photos or videos of someone.
- Digital dating abuse: using apps or social media to control, pressure, or isolate a partner.
- Online grooming: using digital platforms to build trust or a relationship with someone – often a minor – with the intention of sexual exploitation and trafficking.
- Doxxing: publishing personal information online to endanger or intimidate.
- Identity theft: impersonation and the creation of fake profiles.
- Control of access: restricting or monitoring a woman’s access to shared devices, internet, or power sources.
What are the consequences of digital abuse and online violence?
From Manila to Mexico City, from Nairobi to New York City, women are on the front lines of digital violence. It can happen in rural or urban settings, and across income brackets. From anonymous threats to abuse and control by intimate partners, it can take many shapes and forms.
For example, women living low income or rural households often share devices or depend on others for access to phones, computers, or the Internet. In these settings, perpetrators restrict or monitor access to devices or power sources, and exploit limited digital literacy to commit both economic and digital violence.
The targets are familiar: young women, politicians, journalists, women human rights defenders, and activists often singled out with sexist, racist, or homophobic slurs. For migrant and racialized women, those with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ people the abuse can be even more extreme, combining misogyny with other forms of hate and exclusion.
And it is getting worse. UN Women research shows that aided by AI-powered technology, these abuses are fast growing in scale and sophistication. The consequences are grave and reach far beyond the screen:
- In the Philippines, an analysis revealed that 83 per cent of survivors experienced emotional harm, 63 per cent sexual assault, and 45 per cent physical harm linked directly to online abuse.
- In Pakistan, online harassment has been tied to femicide, suicide, physical violence, job loss, and the silencing of women and girls in online spaces.
- In the Arab states, 60 per cent of women internet users reported exposure to online violence.
- In Africa, 46 per cent of women parliamentarians said they had received online attacks.
- In Latin America and the Caribbean, 80 per cent of women in public life reported restricting their online activities out of fear of abuse.
The pattern is clear: digital abuse has real-world consequences. It is increasingly linked to violent extremism, silences women’s voices in politics and media, and can even lead to femicides when technology becomes a weapon for stalking or coercion….
