Digital Violence - Reflections from Practice

This year's 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence theme is “UNiTE to End Digital Violence against All Women and Girls”. Our Young Women's Practitioner reflects on the campaign's theme and why it is important to the work that Abianda does:

This campaign validates what young women and girls go through and helps them see they're not the only ones dealing with this. The campaign reinforces that digital violence counts as actual violence, so we can recognise the real psychological damage it causes, understand it can escalate to physical harm, and see that online monitoring and tracking are often used as tactics of control.

The themes I've noticed in practice:

• "School bait out" pages are very damaging. These platforms publicly target, shame, and humiliate young women by sharing their images, personal information, or spreading rumours. They create an environment where young women live in fear of becoming the next target.

• Group chats and forums have become spaces for bullying where young women are discussed and mocked.  Young women often only discover they've been discussed after screenshots circulate more widely.

• Privacy breaches through unauthorised sharing of images, conversations, and posts are also common. Young women share content in spaces they believe are trusted or private, in direct messages, close friends' stories, private accounts, only to have it screenshot and distributed without their knowledge.