Online gender-based violence: A submission to the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women

This submission was presented by APC in 2017 to render visible the impact of online gender-based violence (GBV) on women’s rights for more than a decade. APC worked with women's organisations and advocates to identify, monitor, analyse and combat uses of the internet and digital technologies that are harmful to women and marginalised communities, and with individual internet users to assist them in using technology to document and combat online GBV and challenge harmful sexist online practices. We also advocated internet policy and regulation that enable the expression, protection and promotion of human rights, women's rights, and the rights of people of diverse sexualities to both states and private sector actors.
This submission draws on the above experience as well as that of working with partners in the global South to understand, respond to and prevent online GBV. It takes the perspective that online GBV is part of the continuum of violence against women and as such occurs in all countries, contexts and settings, is one of the most pervasive violations of human rights, and is a “manifestation of the historically unequal power relations between men and women and systemic gender-based discrimination.”