By Femme Wire 
The digital future promised a boundless horizon of connection and empowerment. Yet, for millions of women and girls, the internet has become a toxic frontier. In a terrifying current event convergence, the rapid rise of sophisticated Generative AI has not only encoded our historical biases but has actively armed and amplified a global wave of digital violence, threatening to erase women from public life, silence activists, and inflict real-world harm.
This is the most critical social justice crisis of our moment. While we celebrate technological marvels, we must confront the fact that AI is not just creating deepfake pornography; it is fueling a pervasive “digital dark age” that systematically undermines women’s safety, dignity, and democratic participation. As UN Women calls for urgent action, we must recognize that this abuse is not a fringe issue; it is a systemic violation of human rights occurring everywhere, demanding a feminist intervention now.
The sheer scale and cruelty of technology-facilitated violence are exploding, thanks in large part to the accessibility of generative AI tools. While online harassment and cyberstalking are long-standing issues, AI has turbocharged the capacity for abuse, making it easier than ever for perpetrators to act with impunity.
A comprehensive analysis by UN Women emphasizes the severity of the crisis, noting that up to 58 per cent of women and 20 per cent of girls face some form of digital violence Call to action: UNiTE to end digital violence. The core weapon in this arsenal is the deepfake. The statistics are horrifying and unequivocally gendered: 90 to 95 per cent of all deepfakes online are sexualized images of women (UN Women). These are not isolated incidents but a systemic attack on female identity and privacy.
The trauma inflicted by non-consensual sharing and AI-generated abuse spills over into tangible, real-world consequences. It causes devastating and lasting psychological, social, and economic harm, often leading to withdrawal from online spaces and activism. The experience in Mexico provides a stark recent example, where digital abuse is rising from online harassment to political attacks, including a case where hundreds of students at Zacatecas Technical High School reported that their images had been manipulated into pornographic content using AI (as reported by Mexico Business News). When an entire generation of young women is being targeted with such sophisticated, malicious tools, the ability for them to safely learn, connect, and lead is fundamentally compromised.
As UN Women Executive Director Sima Bahous stated, “What begins online doesn’t stay online.” Digital abuse spreads fear, silences voices, and, in the worst cases, has escalated to physical violence and femicide (UN Women Press Release). This is not a technical problem; it is a threat to the foundation of gender equality.
The technology may be new, but the tolerance for gendered harm is a deeply rooted corporate problem. While the perpetrators of deepfakes are individuals, the infrastructure and platforms that monetize and distribute this abuse are managed by some of the most profitable companies in the world.
A recent report by the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre and the World Benchmarking Alliance paints a damning picture, linking more than 200 allegations of gender-based harm between 2014 and 2024 to 11 leading technology companies, including Meta, Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, and Apple (Business & Human Rights Resource Centre). These accusations range from fueling gendered hate speech and algorithmic biases to discriminatory hiring and censorship that specifically silences women activists.
The report concluded that these systemic harms are not an accident but a predictable problem resulting from a “gap in will.” Despite years of making public commitments to gender equality, most of these giants fail to screen their entire value chain—from factory floors to AI design teams—for gender-related issues.
The issue of inherent bias, a precursor to outright violence, is amplified by the sheer volume of biased data these platforms use. Research published by UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business highlights that algorithms actively amplify the age-gender bias already present in online content, systematically portraying women as younger than men across images and videos Women portrayed as younger than men online, and AI amplifies the bias. This bias, whether sexualizing, silencing, or devaluing, demonstrates a foundational flaw in systems trained on historical inequity. As UN Women explained, AI systems learn from data that is “filled with stereotypes,” reinforcing them in decisions related to hiring, loan approvals, and legal judgments, making it imperative that we address the root of the bias How AI reinforces gender bias.
The result is a corporate infrastructure that often tolerates, and in some cases benefits from, the gendered disinformation and surveillance that targets women and LGBTQI+ individuals.
The fight against digital violence is critically hampered by a global legislative lag. While the technology accelerates, the laws designed to protect citizens are stuck in the analog age.
The alarming reality is that fewer than 40 per cent of countries globally have laws protecting women from cyber harassment or cyber stalking (UN Women Press Release). This weakness in legal protection leaves millions of women and girls vulnerable, creating a climate where perpetrators of deepfakes and other forms of digital abuse can act with virtual impunity across borders. The rise of AI-generated abuse only deepens this impunity, as traditional legal definitions of defamation, harassment, and image-based sexual abuse struggle to account for generative tools and borderless platforms.
The challenge is complex, particularly concerning intersectional groups. The UN Development Programme (UNDP) has detailed how AI-based systems and algorithmic governance, particularly in areas like facial recognition, impose disproportionate risks on women, especially women of color, leading to misidentification and amplifying real-world inequalities in law enforcement (UNDP Blog on AI and Real Biases). This legal and technological gap is compounded by the severe underrepresentation of women in the tech policy and AI governance sectors, meaning the people designing the systems and the people writing the rules rarely reflect the demographics of those most at risk.
This current crisis demands a legislative evolution that is fast, coordinated, and feminist. We need rights-based legislation that aligns with digital governance frameworks like the Global Digital Compact, coupled with strengthened cross-sector and cross-border cooperation to enforce these laws effectively.
To break free from this digital dark age, we must launch a coordinated, global effort to reclaim technology as a tool for equality, not harm. This is a current event mandate for collective action.
We must fundamentally change how technology is built. UN Women and other organizations are advocating for the implementation of safety, privacy, and security-by-design principles at all stages of technology development. This means embedding human rights due diligence from the moment a product is conceptualized, rather than trying to patch biases and address violence after the product has done damage (UNESCO: Calling for Ethical AI). Companies must be forced to take proactive measures, not just reactive ones, against content that targets women and LGBTQI+ persons.
Tech platforms must be held accountable for the distribution and amplification of harmful content. Legislation must close the legal loopholes that allow platforms to operate as passive conduits for abuse. This includes global cooperation to ensure digital platforms and AI tools meet safety and ethics standards, and that there are effective mechanisms for holding perpetrators accountable. As the data shows, the vast majority of harm occurs at the downstream impact on end-users; the companies that control those impacts must be held liable (Business & Human Rights Resource Centre).
The solution is not just restrictive; it must be empowering. We need sustained, flexible, and core funding for women’s and children’s rights organizations and feminist tech activists to build digital literacy, resilience, and advocacy efforts. Digital literacy must become a fundamental skill taught to women and girls to navigate online risks, and critically, to challenge misogynistic narratives that seep into mainstream discourse. We must empower women to lead in the technology sector, ensuring they inform the design and use of safe digital tools and spaces free of violence, as emphasized by the Women4Ethical AI platform by UNESCO.
The urgency of this crisis cannot be overstated. The digital realm is not separate from reality; it is where our democracy, our discourse, and our dignity are increasingly shaped. We must reject the notion that digital violence is inevitable or a cost of participation. We must reclaim our digital spaces and demand that the AI revolution be one of equity and safety, not erasure and abuse.
Sara Jasmine