By Carson Jones, Together Women Rise Communications Intern

With the recent erosion of women’s rights, increasing political polarization, and isolationism, the safety of women and girls is at greater risk than ever before. They face gender-based issues that emerge from spaces that are supposed to be safe and empowering. With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and widespread Internet access, women’s security is pulled from the physical realm into the digital one.

While men and boys in the Global South are still far more likely to have online access, women and girls have gained digital access at a substantial rate over the last decade. According to the GSMA Mobile Gender Gap Report 2026, 84% of women in low and middle-income countries now own a mobile phone of some type, 64% own a smartphone, and 65% use mobile Internet. The women who are online often face exploitation, extortion, and harassment.

Gender-Specific Digital Violence

According to UN Women, digital abuse against women and girls — also called technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) — is one of the fastest-growing forms of gender-based violence. Many of these types of abuse already exist and are only made worse via technology, while some, like deepfake imagery (images created or heavily altered by AI) and pornography, are usually digitally exclusive.

• Blackmail and Exploitation: involves threats to share personal information, photos, or other content unless some sort of request is granted. For women, these threats are often intertwined with sexual exploitation.
• Doxxing: The release of sensitive personal information like addresses, social security numbers, or phone numbers. It is often used to undermine someone’s credibility or hurt their reputation. Doxxing can happen to both genders, but women (especially minority and queer women) are disproportionately targeted, and face a lack of legal protections. International human rights laws do not contain the word or its definition, and on a more local scale, it is a case-by-case basis determined by country or state governments.
• Harassment: Online threats aimed at intimidating and silencing women. Online harassment also frequently contains gender-based hate speech that degrades and discriminates against women.
• Stalking: Using sensitive information about a person to observe and monitor them, presenting real-world threats to the victim and people around them. Cyberstalking can also involve persistent monitoring and interaction, such as nonconsensual tracking of someone’s location, sending messages or images even after being told to stop, or using information found online to piece together personal details about a woman’s life.

What Are the Consequences?

Fewer than 40% of countries globally have specific laws protecting women and girls from cybersecurity threats. Most importantly, since women and girls in the Global South are more likely to rely on shared devices, the lack of personal and secure technology makes them far more vulnerable to threats.

Even if these issues take place in the digital space, the consequences can be physical and tangible— women can be physically intimidated, stalked, isolated from friends and family, or lose their jobs. For outspoken women and political activists, the stakes are even higher– online attacks that spill over into the real world can lead to job loss or community ostracization. An anonymous online news editor from India reported: “Sex is used to intimidate us. Rape is used to frighten, intimidate, and stop us… from doing our work, but at a deeper level it is actually about stopping us from having opinions, showing any semblance of independence.”

The increasingly common use of generative AI also heightens digital risks, since girls and women can be edited into explicit content, edited to say certain things or act in certain ways, or even have their voices or image used to exploit friends and family members. Up to 95% of online deepfakes are nonconsensual pornographic images, and 99% of those targeted are women.

What’s Being Done?

Together Women Rise is a charitable giving community dedicated to achieving global gender equality. It funds projects and organizations that work to eliminate all forms of gender-based violence and ensure women’s safety and security, both online and offline. It recognizes the importance of preserving the digital space as a place for women to learn, thrive, and connect.

Since 2023, Together Women Rise has partnered with Equality Now, which has 30 years of experience working to end violence and discrimination against women and girls everywhere, using the power of the law to bring about systemic change. Equality Now works both at the regional and global levels to urge lawmakers to create progressive and evidence-based cyber-safety frameworks. In 2023, Equality Now co-founded the Alliance for Universal Digital Rights (AUDRi), which targets equal protection from online threats, equal access to digital opportunities, and equal respect for privacy and identity.

“In the virtual world where the future of human interaction is being reimagined, it’s imperative that we prioritize the safety and dignity of all users. The responsibility of protecting women in the metaverse demands a collaborative effort, bridging states, international law, and technology companies to foster an environment where human rights are non-negotiable,” stated Emma Gibson, an advisor at AUDRi, in an Equality Now press release.

Protecting women’s online safety begins with the women themselves and their stories, which Together Women Rise helps to amplify. Grants and partnerships from Together Women Rise support women’s safety at multiple levels— funding is given to grassroots women’s advocacy groups to spark regional change, and alongside organizations like Equality Now, change is taken to the international level.

Learn more about Together Women Rise at https://togetherwomenrise.org.