Can Tech Prevent and Combat Cyber Violence Against Girls?

By Mallory Knodel

Our collective imagination likes to manifest tech solutions for tech harms. In the case of cyberviolence against girls, in what ways is it possible that tech can be used against itself, to both prevent and combat gender based harms online?

This month the Working Group on discrimination against women and girls presented its report on women's and girls' rights and artificial intelligence and related digital technologies (A/HRC/62/48) to the Human Rights Council, warning that AI deployed without gender-responsive governance risks deepening existing inequalities, and naming technology-facilitated gender-based violence as one of the "redlines" demanding urgent intervention. 

Several months earlier, at the 70th Commission on the Status of Women, held at the UN Headquarters in New York, a panel of experts was invited to weigh in on strategies needed to intervene in online social interactions, where digital forms of abuse have been identified as particularly pervasive and harmful to girls. Hosted by the EU and Cyprus, as the current Presidency of the Council of the European Union, invited Mr. Gary Barker CEO and President of Equimundo, Ms. Olimpia Melo an Activist, Mr. Viraj Doshi from Snap, and myself for the Social Web Foundation.

The session recording can be found online at UN Web TV. I’ve written the essence of my remarks below, which focus on the architecture of the internet and emerging tech and how these quietly shape what content and behavior is possible, amplified, or deterred online.

My Remarks

Regulatory commitments from states to address gender-based violence online abound: The EU Directive 2024/1385 was written for combating violence against women and domestic violence, and the 2025 EU Roadmap for Women's Rights prioritizes freedom from gender-based violence as its first principle. The EU Digital Services Act (DSA) plays an important role in strengthening the protection of women's and girls' rights online. And all UN Member States have committed to combatting sexual and gender-based violence online in the Global Digital Compact (GDC), adopted in the World Summit on the Information Society WSIS+20 resolution (A/Res/80/173).

However, efficient tech and regulatory solutions must be complementary. There are three ways that regulation can force emerging technologies to consider cyberviolence against girls as a first principle:

Safety by design, not after harm.

Platform infrastructure choices like default privacy settings, introducing friction when girls share intimate content, making legible manipulated media, improving attribution and accountability for abuse all influence whether harms can achieve scale. Because technical design is policy, technical standards bodies are crucial for developing norms and mitigating harms. However this then requires human rights experts to be present in those bodies to help balance equities. One solid example of this is age gating, which disenfranchises youth from human rights like expression and privacy, as well as economic, social and cultural rights. In a technical standards body, engineers will be putting their heads together about how to make age gating work technically, often without the social context to understand how it can undermine rights like expression, privacy, and access to information.

Accountability must be embedded in infrastructure. 

Regulation like the DSA is powerful because it goes beyond content takedown and toward systemic risk obligations. We need technical systems that can support auditability, researcher access, and meaningful transparency, not just terms of service and privacy policies. Moreover, the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) indicates interoperability as a core tenet for breaking up consolidated digital ecosystem but we also need this for accountability structures, too. This leads to the third recommendation.

Interoperable safety. 

Girls don’t live their digital lives on just one platform. Abuse crosses services, borders, and legal regimes. Large tech companies work together to identify nonconsensual intimate images that need to be taken down all over the internet. If they can work together on that, we can ask them to work together in more ways that benefit people, namely through interoperation. Interoperability meets the need for shared technical standards for reporting, evidence preservation, and identity protection so survivors aren’t forced to relive harm platform by platform. Platforms need to be more open and interoperable by design to give everyone more agency and to ensure platforms are more accountable.

Often solutions work best when technical architecture is open, and kept open through regulatory incentives, standards are interoperable and human rights are considered. Solutions are inadequate when safety is addressed in product deployment, treated as an optional feature or bans are used to wall off populations and communities from one another. 

Importantly, survivors and activists must inform these solutions. Keen power analysis and global movement organizing means feminists are the world’s watchdogs. Civil society organizations are activists and survivors who are already experts in system failure. The gap we see globally is that girls’ lived realities rarely shape platform governance or technical standards. That has to change.

Beyond spaces like the Commission on the Status of Women, UN Women, and the Working Group on discrimination against women and girls, we need feminists in technical spaces to build credible participation where rules are actually made. It is crucial to bring experts with lived experience to technical spaces. Many of the most consequential decisions about digital systems happen in technical standards bodies and procurement processes long before laws are enforced. Women’s rights groups and youth advocates need funded pathways into those rooms.

When we treat girls and survivors not just as beneficiaries but as co-designers of digital infrastructure, solutions become more effective, more legitimate, and more just. The Office for the High Commissioner on Human Rights has recently published some ideas about how to bring more human rights considerations into technical standards bodies. The GDC language can also ensure that this work is more coordinated in human rights spaces, rather than in engineering and technical ones.

The design, development and deployment of technology is a site of power. Feminist analysis must shape tech from the start.

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