LocationsThe Urgent Need for Innovative Solutions
Technology-Facilitated Violence Against Women and Girls
December 14, 2025
By: Sundus Abbas
Women Empowerment Specialist
For decades, the global community has underscored the importance of combating violence against women and girls, developing protection mechanisms and prevention frameworks informed by hundreds, if not thousands, of studies, research papers, and reports examining its various forms and root causes. These efforts have been accompanied by extensive national and international initiatives aimed at shaping strategies and advancing policy responses.
Yet, despite this accumulated knowledge and sustained commitment, violence against women and girls continues to persist, growing increasingly brutal and complex. Its tools now intersect across both private and public spheres, targeting women from all walks of life, including girls, women with disabilities, and elderly women. Alarmingly, this violence has expanded beyond physical spaces to permeate the digital realm, with technology increasingly weaponized to facilitate violence against women and girls at deeply troubling levels, at times amounting to forms of concealed or indirect killing.
This reality raises a critical question. Is technology increasingly operating against women by enabling new and intensified forms of violence, thereby confronting societies with unprecedented and ambiguous dimensions of this phenomenon? These developments compel urgent and deeper analysis, particularly to assess whether the negative impacts of technology are beginning to outweigh its undeniable benefits. This is no longer the same violence, in form, scope, or nature, as that addressed by international instruments of the last century.
For several years, UNDP has pursued sustained and focused efforts to examine frameworks and operational approaches aimed at reducing violence and addressing its root causes across all its programmes and projects. The organization has consistently emphasized the importance of avoiding imported, one size fits all models or preconceived judgments that overlook local contexts. Instead, UNDP prioritizes multidimensional analysis and the development of realistic, evidence based and locally grounded approaches.
In December 2025, UNDP Iraq convened a dialogue in Baghdad with seventeen Iraqi women activists who have worked for many years, on a daily basis, with women and girls, providing practical support and alternative solutions to enhance protection in both urban centers and rural communities. During the dialogue, Dr. Amira Al-Baldawi presented an analysis of the economic costs of violence against women in Iraq, including technology facilitated violence. Lawyer Iman Abdulrahman shared her experience integrating protection perspectives into economic empowerment programmes for women returning from displacement camps. Ms. Alia Al-Ansari highlighted the importance of complementing formal and informal protection mechanisms for women and girl survivors of violence, while Dr. Buthaina Al-Mahdawi underscored the necessity of monitoring and documenting cases of violence.
Across all interventions and discussions, a common thread clearly emerged: technology facilitated violence against women and girls, defined as acts of violence committed, enabled, or incited through information and communication technologies such as smartphones, the internet, social media platforms, and email. This form of violence has become one of the most widespread violations affecting women today, extending beyond digital abuse to generate profound social and psychological consequences.
Global evidence points to a rapidly escalating trend in digital violence. Worldwide, thirty eight percent of women have experienced technology facilitated violence against women and girls, and eighty five percent have witnessed it. A 2021 report by the Economist Intelligence Unit found that between 2019 and 2020, eighty five percent of women globally had witnessed or experienced online violence, with thirty eight percent personally affected. Women across all regions were impacted, with the Middle East at ninety eight percent, Latin America and the Caribbean at ninety one percent, and Africa at ninety percent reporting the highest exposure, while Asia Pacific, North America, and Europe recorded comparatively lower but still alarming rates. Girls face compounded risks, as they are often exposed to digital violence at an early age and frequently hesitate to report it due to fear of blame or punishment. These risks are heightened in contexts marked by limited digital literacy and weak awareness of existing institutional or community based protection mechanisms, where such mechanisms exist at all.
Technology facilitated violence manifests in multiple forms that extend far beyond mockery, insults, or the spread of defamatory rumors. It includes blackmail, stalking, identity theft, the misuse and exploitation of victims’ images for fraud or reputational harm on social media platforms, and often escalates into digital sexual harassment.
Against a backdrop of rising unemployment, increasing barriers to labour market access, growing poverty, ongoing conflicts and wars, the spread of extremism, the escalating impacts of climate change, and widening inequalities, most countries continue to lack clear and explicit legal provisions addressing technology facilitated violence. This legislative gap leaves the issue insufficiently regulated, undermines public confidence in the ability of legal systems to respond effectively, and creates wider space for perpetrators to act with impunity.
Nevertheless, some progress has been made in several Latin American countries, where technology facilitated violence has been formally recognized as a distinct form of violence. This has occurred either through direct criminalization or by amending existing legislation to explicitly include digital violence among punishable offences.
In the absence of comprehensive legislative frameworks, the need for innovative solutions becomes increasingly evident. These include establishing capable and well-resourced institutional mechanisms able to deliver rapid and context sensitive responses to nationally relevant digital content, as well as developing specialized platforms to receive and respond to reports of digital extortion, such as the Ameen platform in Iraq. At the same time, integrating digital violence within domestic violence protection laws remains a critical alternative worthy of serious consideration and advocacy, particularly given that national efforts have yet to succeed in enacting a comprehensive law on protection from domestic violence.
With the commencement of the newly elected Council of Representatives following the 11 November 2025 elections, renewed momentum may emerge to advance this agenda. However, meaningful progress will depend on pairing legal reform with sustained awareness raising initiatives that promote social and behavioral change as a fundamental prerequisite for the effectiveness of any legal framework.
In parallel, regional and international frameworks provide valuable entry points to strengthen responses to violence against women in the region. These include the Arab Convention on Combating Information Technology Crimes, the Arab Declaration on Combating All Forms of Violence against Women and Girls, and the Regional Executive Plan for the Protection of Arab Women in the Areas of Peace and Security 2015 to 2030, alongside other relevant instruments that can be leveraged to develop more comprehensive, responsive, and future oriented approaches to the growing challenges posed by the digital environment.
