Digital Violence

While many responses to digital violence involve reporting crimes to authorities, the question of how (and how much) to involve law enforcement is a key area of friction.Some have developed policing guidelines on how best to investigate and serve survivors, especially in the absence of clear legal frameworks and lack of cooperation by digital platforms^[2]. A core concern, is that police often contribute to re-traumatising survivors through their handling of cases, particularly when it comes to image-based abuse.^[7] Often, there can also be violations of consent and privacy for people reporting crimes.^[4]

It is well known that “criminal justice systems” reproduce injustices, prejudices and stereotypes^[3] in everything from how laws are created to how they are enforced. These structural inequities directly impact digital violence survivors. For instance, structural discrimination and bias between citizens and police can result in help only being available to certain people in practice, while those punished are often mainly from marginalized communities^[5] .Government responses to digital violence often involve increasing surveillance, but reducing privacy exposes people to even more risk of abuse. For instance, it could be a person planning to leave their abusive partner in secrecy; a teenager who wants to read about queer relationships privately; or a woman researching abortion in a country where abortion is illegal.

Critics of ‘carceral logic’ argue that criminalisation does not keep us safe because it puts punishment ahead of prevention ^[5]. In other words, imprisoning people will never be a sufficient response to digital violence because it overlooks the actual factors that drive abuse^[6]. Many feminist defenders of sexual and reproductive rights (in general) agree.^[8]
 

Involving police is often a go-to action in societies where surveillance and punishment are the norm, and many survivors do want to see attackers face consequences, often with the goal of making sure they don’t harm anyone else again. But recidivism rates can be high for people who were put in prison.

There are alternative approaches of seeking accountability, though: a restorative justice approach focuses on repairing harm, rather than on punishment. For instance, justice might include reparations—which could involve financial compensation—but can also be about restitution, rehabilitation, and guarantees that harms won’t be repeated, including through the change of systems that marginalise people.^[10]

In around 80% of cases, survivors know who bullied or stalked them online. For others, justice might mean uncovering the anonymous person or group targeting them. Many want to understand why or how they were targeted, or wish to directly confront their attackers face to face, according to the European Forum for Restorative Justice.^[11]

Responses to digital violence should involve the views of survivors from different backgrounds. There are also examples of involving former perpetrators in developing approaches of how best to deter others from committing the same harms. 

Getting formal recognition by authorities can be important empowerment tools. At the same time, others argue that creating new laws is a distraction.“There are key structural issues that need to be addressed around digital violence rather than focusing on drafting new crimes and raising the number of years someone has to be in prison,” writes Oriana López Uribe for the feminist alliance RESURJ.^[14] 

New technologies lead to new types of digital violence. If a policy response is needed every time a new type of digital violence comes into play, we’re arguably forced into an endless cat-and-mouse game. Policies to address digital violence can also restrict free speech through overreach–for example, if a law calls for punishing anyone who digitally alters and disseminates an image, journalists, satirists and meme creators could also be targeted.^[15]

Some tech companies who respond to digital violence report very high incident numbers, but not everyone agrees on what to count—and there is often no independent verification. For instance, internet service providers (ISPs) in the US are required to detect and report suspected child sexual abuse material (CSAM) to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). When ISPs report many millions of images it gives the impression they take fighting CSAM seriously. But because of how CSAM is defined,^[16] sometimes family album photos and consensual teenage nudes also get counted.  The NCMEC said they received 36.2 million image reports in 2023. Such numbers raise awareness of the problem, but also cause anxiety about online dangers. In reality—and this is not to minimise the real harms that exist—children are most likely to be abused by people invited into their family home, and the photos that end up online in paedophile forums were often first published by unsuspecting parents on social media.^[17] If we take that context into account, the approaches to dealing with harms are very different to the immediate solutions that might come to mind when just looking at that high number.

In 2023, Center for International Governance Innovation conducted one of the first large-scale international surveys of people’s experiences with tech-faciliated gender-based violence and violence against LGBTQ+ communities. They interviewed more than 18,000 people of all genders, predominantly in the Global South.^[18] Almost 40% of those who experienced a serious incident of online harm said they did not reach out to anyone for help.^[19] 

What would it look like to create systems where people—particularly marginalised communities and people living under repression—felt incentivised and safe to report harm? And trusted that the response after reporting wouldn’t re-victimise them, but would actually help in the long run?

Groups like Saheli, who provide emergency refuge and specialist counseling for women of colour fleeing violence, see this all the time. ‘Generalised’ services for women just don’t meet the needs of women from all communities or cultures, because of different understandings and contexts for what is socially acceptable, and what is not.

This can make ‘shared solutions’ trickier. Often gender-based digital violence aligns with cultural and societal stigmas about what women ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ do or wear. For example, for a woman who chooses to wear a hijab, a non-consensual intimate image might be a photo showing her hair—which for another woman would not be a stigmatising image. Harassers often purposely seek to cause shame ^[22]. Responses to digital violence, need to take into account how differently cultural contexts affect the experience of victims. While there are often policy differences between countries —for example, different image take-down rules for Muslim-majority countries than for western European countries—there is rarely that nuance within countries themselves, even in countries with diverse populations.

For individuals, there are social, psychological, cultural, and economic factors that impact a person’s likelihood to engage in digital violence, ranging from mental health to personal trauma, cultural values and beliefs^[26]. None can be addressed by tech.

At the same time, there are technical protections that could have an impact in the long run if they are combined with societal and structural interventions.^[24] Learning from the past is key. One common misunderstanding is that anonymity is the opposite of safety, even though research has often shown that online anonymity helps protect targets of violence. Earlier, women were told by advocates, “don’t send nudes’, while feminist responses—based on women’s actual needs— included advice like, “Safer Nudes, a Sexy Guide to Digital Security”^[20], created by Coding Rights in Brazil in 2016.

Technology does not cause digital violence. Patriarchy, misogyny, racism, etc, are facilitated by technical tools. This means two things: one, that digital violence will never be entirely stopped solely through tech; and two, that there are still things we can do to make it harder for digital violence to spread with technology.