Technology Facilitated Gender Based Violence Violence is often imagined in physical terms, as a blow, a bruise, a locked door, a threat that occupies visible space. Yet in the digital age, harm has learned to travel differently. Technology facilitated gender based violence describes abuse carried out, intensified, or prolonged through phones, platforms, and other digital tools against someone because of gender. According to UNFPA, it includes online harassment, cyberstalking, image based abuse, impersonation, and the sharing of private information. What makes it especially insidious is not only its range, but its ability to enter ordinary life unnoticed. A device meant to connect can become a leash. A public platform can turn into a theatre of humiliation in which the audience is limitless and the exit difficult to find. To treat such abuse as unreal because it occurs through a screen is to misunderstand both violence and fear. [I] The message may be digital, but the consequences are not. A threat sent at midnight can follow a woman into the next morning. [II] A manipulated image can stain her reputation in classrooms, workplaces, and homes she once moved through without calculation. Technology does not create misogyny from nothing, but it gives old contempt a faster vehicle, a wider stage, and a convenient disguise. [III] They withdraw, go silent, or reduce their visibility, not because they have nothing to say, but because speaking begins to feel like exposure. [IV] That is why this issue exceeds private suffering. When women and girls are pushed out of digital spaces, public life itself is diminished. Debate grows narrower. Opportunity becomes conditional. Freedom begins to carry a surcharge. A society cannot praise participation while allowing intimidation to set its terms. Nor is this merely a question of unkind behaviour online. Repeated often enough, such abuse redraws the boundaries of who feels entitled to appear, to speak, and to remain visible without fear. The answer, then, is not to ask women and girls to disappear more carefully. It is to make disappearance unnecessary. UNFPA argues for stronger laws, greater accountability, and technology designed with safety and privacy at its core. That response matters because progress is hollow when it expands access while leaving power untouched. A connected world should enlarge freedom, not place it under glass. [Adapted from https://www.unfpa.org/TFGBV] |
