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Online law

Online and technology facilitated gender-based violence against women

Online and technology facilitated gender-based violence against women is recognized increasingly by international and regional human rights experts and feminist civil society as a major problem: not least because these prominent women and girls are very frequently targeted by this kind of violence because of their work to eradicate gender-based violence and discrimination.

Various aspects of online gender-based violence include:

  1. Violence facilitated by technology, for example, domestic violence perpetrated through the use of spy-ware, death threats sent using social media.
  2. Violence which takes place and is amplified by technology, for example, non-consensual sharing of intimate photographs or “revenge porn;”
  3. Technology which generates gender-based violence, for example, the creation of “deepfake” pornographic images which purport to be real intimate images of real women and girls.
  4. Violence, which is enabled to take place through social media, for example, online sexual exploitation of girls.

Technology-facilitated violence takes place on a continuum with aspects of off-line violence, and its impacts are experienced physically and psychologically by the women and girls affected.

Multiple actors have responsibility under international human rights law for eradicating these forms of violence. Some forms of violence are such that the criminal law is the most appropriate response to the individuals responsible. However, there are also legal responsibilities for the private companies and transnational companies who manufacture and maintain the technology – they bear responsibility for ensuring their products are safe for all to use. States have obligations to regulate companies and to sanction individuals who use technology to facilitate violence.

There are many interesting and important civil society organization initiatives, which have highlighted especially how intersecting aspects of identity make it more likely that women and girls will be subjected to harm: girls and women of colour, lesbian, bisexual and transgender women, and women and girls who are speaking out publicly because of their profession as journalists and parliamentarians, or civil society leaders and activists. Amnesty International’s research into the experience of Diane Abbott, a Black woman parliamentarian in the UK, illustrated the extent of the technology-facilitated abuse inflicted on a woman of colour in public life.

Civil society organizations are leading the way in researching and presenting the experiences of women and girls in the various technological spaces.

Alongside the civil society and academic research, the network of global and regional human rights experts on gender-based violence against women and girls, the EDVAW Platform, has issued a discussion paper on the human rights law and principles involved in technology facilitated gender-based violence, which gives a clear outline of the various aspects of this fast-moving and fast-developing place where women and girls should be able to organize and express themselves freely.

The basic legal principle is to eradicate discrimination and gender-based violence, with a particular focus on Article 5 of the CEDAW Convention:

“States Parties shall take all appropriate measures: (a) To modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women, with a view to achieving the elimination of prejudices and customary and all other practices which are based on the idea of the inferiority or the superiority of either of the sexes or on stereotyped roles for men and women[.]”

However, the possibilities for positive communication, study, learning, creativity and working for women, and the possibilities for technology to make everyone’s lives better, mean that a strong set of principles about the role of technology is necessary to make all these possibilities safe and empowering.

The EDVAW Platform noted several gaps in current knowledge about online gender-based violence:

  • Lack of commonly understood terminology
  • Scarcity of data, especially data which reflects the experiences of women and girls with intersecting aspects of their identity
  • Laws relate to specific campaigns or tragedies, rather than a comprehensive legal approach across all forms of online gender-based violence, which is comprehensive and holistic
  • Some criminal laws require a specific kind of intent which may be hard to prove, for example, some acts of “revenge porn” might not be done with a particular aim of blackmailing the woman concerned to do something, it might just be done for gratuitous harm
  • For women who face multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination, there should be appropriate services and specialist support.
  • Appropriate and effective support should be available for women and girls who are speaking out in the public sphere, whether as activists, politicians, or journalists.

In establishing regulations and laws relating to online violence, the EDVAW Platform noted that debates are often simplified as “freedom of speech” versus “regulation of speech.” The EDVAW Platform has noted that it is more accurate to address anti-women rhetoric and threats, as “gendered hate speech” and “disinformation.”

In the European Court of Human Rights, the case of Volodina v Russia (2) (2021) on technology related violence was heard after Ms Volodina’s original case, which reviewed the long-term situation of violence and harassment by a previous partner. (Volodina v Russia (2019) (see: the Tackling Violence against Women website legal updater for 2019)

“Ms Volodina was subjected to violence over three years by her former partner, referred to in the case as S. He assaulted, kidnapped, stalked, threatened, stole from, and intimidated her. When she was pregnant, he assaulted her so severely that the pregnancy was compromised and on medical advice, she had an abortion. Her complaints to the police were treated in a desultory manner – for example, S’s tampering with her car brakes was treated as a minor criminal damage matter, rather than an attempt to cause serious injury or death. S was not convicted of any of the crimes she reported, and no protective measures were used. Eventually Ms Volodina legally changed her identity in order to stop S from finding her.”

In this second case against Russia, Ms Volondina raised the online violence with the court, specifically the non-consensual sharing of intimate images. The perpetrator sent these images to many other people, including to her son’s teacher and other children in her son’s class. The perpetrator used a tracking device that he hid in her handbag and sent her death threats via social media.

In its review of the relevant legal framework to address Ms Volodina’s case, the ECHR referred to the report of the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women,

“Technology has transformed many forms of gender-based violence into something that can be perpetrated across distance, without physical contact and beyond borders. All forms of online gender-based violence are used to control and attack women and to maintain and reinforce patriarchal norms, roles and structures and an unequal power relationship.” (paragraph 23)

Regarding Ms Volodina’s experiences, the ECHR said:

“The Court considers that the acts of cyberviolence in the instant case were sufficiently serious to require a criminal-law response on the part of the domestic authorities. The publication of the applicant’s intimate photographs, calculated to attract the attention of her son, his classmates and their teacher sought to humiliate and degrade her. As noted above, the tracking of her movements by means of a GPS device and the sending of death threats on social media caused her to feel anxiety, distress and insecurity. The Court also reiterates that both the public interest and the interests of the protection of vulnerable victims from offences infringing on their physical or psychological integrity require the availability of a remedy enabling the perpetrator to be identified and brought to justice. Civil proceedings which might have been an appropriate remedy in situations of lesser gravity would not have been able to achieve these objectives in the present case.”(paragraph 57)

The ECHR found that Russia did not have adequate civil remedies for victims of gender-based violence, as well as a complete failure of its criminal justice approach.

Relevance of this case

Eventually in Volodina (2) the European Court of Human Rights found that the online violence had been a breach of her right to privacy, rather than a breach of her right not to be subject to torture and ill-treatment. This was partly because the domestic remedies that Ms Volodina had to exhaust to cover the non-consensual sharing of intimate images all related to privacy laws. However, some of the forms of online violence were extremely humiliating (sharing intimate pictures non-consensually) and were overtly forms of gender-based violence against women (i.e. death threats via social media). This indicates that more work needs to be done in understanding online violence as cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or torture, or other forms of gender-based violence against women.