International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women – 25 November 2025-Digital Violence is Real Violence: Protecting Women and Girls in Our Online Spaces
The West Africa ICT Action Network (WAICTANet) joins the global community in marking the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women by sounding a clear alarm: online gender-based violence (OGBV) has become one of the fastest-growing threats to women’s safety, dignity, and participation in public life – including here in the Mano River Union (MRU) region and across West Africa.
Today Day 1 -, violence against women extends far beyond the street or home — it happens on smartphones, social media, messaging platforms, video-sharing sites and AI-driven spaces, where women and girls are stalked, humiliated, blackmailed and silenced in digital spaces meant to empower them. Globally, 38% of women online have faced digital violence, and 85% have witnessed it, from threats and harassment to non-consensual image sharing. UN Women reports that 90–95% of deepfake content targets women and girls, making AI a new weapon of abuse. Studies show 16–58% of girls and women worldwide have experienced technology-facilitated harm. Those in public roles suffer most: 73% of women journalists have endured online attacks — including doxxing, sexualized threats and smear campaigns — forcing many out of public debate due to the toll on their safety, dignity and mental health.
On this International Day, Peterking Quaye, Regional Executive Director of WAICTANet and digital rights advocate for the MRU region, states, “We cannot ask women and girls in Africa to ‘embrace the digital future’ while leaving them unprotected in the very spaces we are pushing them into. When we know that roughly four in ten women with internet access have already faced online violence, and that most deepfake content targets women’s bodies, we are no longer dealing with isolated incidents – we are facing a systemic digital harm that must be treated with the same urgency as any other form of gender-based violence.” He further adds, In the Mano River Union region, we talk about digital transformation, AI innovation, smart cities and e-governance. None of this will be legitimate if women and girls must pay for ‘innovation’ with their safety. Ending online gender-based violence is not a side-issue – it is a pre-condition for genuine digital progress in West Africa.”
Across Africa, the alarm is clear: the online environment is increasingly being weaponized against women and girls, demanding urgent protections, stronger accountability, and platforms that take African users and languages seriously. While the AU has begun responding—through the 2025 negotiation of the AU Convention on Ending Violence Against Women and Girls (AUCEVAWG) and the 2024 continental study on digital violence by the African Commission—national laws in West Africa still lag far behind women’s lived realities online. Few countries explicitly address technology-facilitated violence; data-protection systems remain weak; law-enforcement and judicial actors lack training to investigate or prosecute digital abuse; and platforms often fail to provide accessible, survivor-centred reporting and redress. In the MRU region—Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire—where connectivity is rapidly expanding, inaction now risks embedding digital inequality and digital violence into the foundation of the next generation.
On this day, WAICTANet affirms a simple principle: if a space is not safe for women and girls, it is not fit to be called “digital development.” As a regional civil society network working at the intersection of ICT policy, digital rights, AI governance and youth empowerment, WAICTANet views online gender-based violence as a multidimensional threat: a human rights violation that infringes on privacy, dignity, freedom of expression, access to information and participation in public affairs; a public health and psychosocial crisis with documented impacts on mental health, self-harm and wider social exclusion; a democracy and governance issue, given that silencing women journalists, human rights defenders and young activists weakens society’s ability to hold power to account; and a development and digital-economy risk, as women entrepreneurs and professionals face heightened exposure to scams, extortion and reputational attacks that undermine trust in e-commerce, digital payments and online work.
