This explainer by the Institute for Sustainable Empowerment and Justice (ISEJ) provides a comprehensive overview of technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV), highlighting its global and regional prevalence, the real-world harm it causes, and the necessary systemic shifts to combat it.
Key Takeaways:
- Defining TFGBV: Encompasses digital acts of violence, harassment, or abuse—such as image-based sexual abuse, sextortion, online stalking, doxing, and digital surveillance. It is not separate from “real life” but exists on a continuum with offline violence, frequently escalating into physical harm.
- The Scale of the Impact:
- Globally, 58% of girls and young women have experienced online harassment, often beginning between ages 14 and 16
- In sub-Saharan Africa, 28% of surveyed women experienced online GBV, and 44% reported that online violence crossed over into the physical world.
- It heavily targets public figures: 73% of women journalists and 46% of African women parliamentarians have faced targeted online attacks.
- Public & Political Harm: Beyond psychological impact, TFGBV functions as a tool to silence women in public, political, and democratic spaces—forcing women journalists, activists, and politicians offline and widening the digital gender divide.
- What Must Change:
- Legal Reform: Modernizing legislation to explicitly cover digital abuse like sextortion, surveillance, and image-based abuse.
- Survivor-Centered Systems: Training law enforcement and courts to handle digital evidence and take online harm seriously.
- Platform Accountability: Mandating safety-by-design standards and transparent moderation from tech platforms.
- Narrative & Research: Generating African-context research and shifting public perceptions so digital abuse is recognized as violence rather than “the price of being a woman online”.
About the Publisher:
The Institute for Sustainable Empowerment and Justice (ISEJ) is a Zimbabwean non-profit working at the intersection of law, gender equality, public health, climate justice, and narrative change to ensure complex legal and policy frameworks are accessible and actionable at the community level.