The Epidemic Of Digital Violence Against Syrian Women And Girls

The photo seemed harmless enough: it showed a female doctor in Northwest Syria. But what was especially significant for some viewers was what the photo didn’t include: a hijab covering the woman’s head. The photo was posted online by a user operating a fake account. The following day, in a so-called “honor killing,” the doctor’s brother murdered her in public.

This woman was a victim of technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV). This unwieldy term may not be used widely. But most women have experienced it, even if they haven’t framed it to themselves as violence. Most have also not reported it. It’s so pervasive and dismissed, and typically less dramatic than the Syrian doctor’s case, that it can feel futile to bother mentioning it.

A recent report by three organizations—humanitarian research organization ACAPS, the UN sexual and reproductive health agency UNFPA, and the Global Protection Cluster network of humanitarian organizations—shows how frequent and damaging this digital violence is in Northwest Syria. It’s mainly motivated by “financial and sexual exploitation, revenge, coercion, defamation or reputational harm, or simply to threaten, cause harm to, or harass the targeted individual,” according to the report. “This shows that TFGBV is almost always intended to cause severe real-life consequences and should not be underestimated as a purely online phenomenon.”

Though this latest report focuses on Northwest Syria, the problem is not limited to one region, or even to one country, says Diana Garde, who led the Arab States Regional Office Hub for the UNFPA Syria response before moving to focus on Sudan. TFGBV likely exists anywhere in the world, particularly where vulnerability is intensified by hunger, conflict, or poverty, combined with manmade limits to women’s agency.

Indeed, intimate image abuse and sextortion are all too common. For instance, men threaten to expose private photos if women don’t pay them off with money, more photos, or sex. But there are factors intensifying the consequences in some parts of Syria, where the threshold for a reputation-damaging photo may be very low. Even an image of a woman sitting without a head covering at home could, without context, be used to manipulate and harass her online.

In one case, a man in Northwest Syria blackmailed a girl over private photos she had sent them during their relationship. Unable to gather enough money, she started trafficking drugs, which led to her imprisonment.

This can be an opportunistic violation. Phones might get hacked or scooped up following a crisis, such as the 2023 earthquake that devastated parts of Syria and Turkey, taking over 50,000 lives. Displacement has also created technological vulnerability, Garde explains. With people forced to leave their homes amid years of violence, education has been interrupted, including technological literacy. And women living in isolated refugee camps with limited money might have older versions of phones that frequently need repairs, exposing them to repair technicians who sometimes hack into customers’ phones.

The perpetrators can be just about anyone: phone repairers, friends, family members, other women, members of politically motivated networks, and humanitarian and medical staff. Organizations have processes to try to stamp out sexual exploitation and abuse by the people who are supposed to be helping. Still, “it’s hugely underreported, but we always assume it’s happening,” Garde acknowledges. “It does affect the credibility of humanitarian agencies and workers.”

There are also targeted attacks on female journalists, activists, and humanitarian workers, as well as women who are generally outspoken about politics online. Hiba Ezzideen, an activist from Idlib in Northwest Syria, has herself been inundated with insults and threats online. The harassers include other women—which Ezzideen understands. Without external protection, women may turn to “negative self-protection mechanisms” like calling out other women in the hope that they won’t be attacked themselves. Yet all this harassment limits women’s opportunities as a whole. For instance, because of being targeted in this way, many women aren’t entering politics, Ezzideen says.

Ezzideen leads a Syrian women’s rights organization, Equity and Empowerment, that treats TFGBV as a significant issue affecting women and girls. She and colleagues found that most domestic violence they were aware of had started online. For instance, an online post about a married woman might be followed by her husband beating her. Equity and Empowerment has trained case managers, working for national or international protection organizations, to better understand the links between online and offline violence.

It may seem that Syria is a surprising place to work on technology-facilitated gender-based violence, given the other issues the country has been grappling with. “It’s one crisis after another after another after another; they don’t catch a break,” Garde reflects. Crises this year have extended from wildfires to sectarian violence and Israeli drone strokes. “And so when you when you’re just hopping from one emergency to the next,” including a new government in a country undergoing transition, digital violence against women “typically comes, unfortunately, last in the areas of priority.”

But UNFPA kept hearing from Syrian women’s organizations like Equity and Empowerment that TFGBV deeply concerned them and was linked to violence in person. This insistence prompted UNFPA to research the problem. Many people, even those involved in human rights and humanitarian work, were not drawing a connection between physical violence and online harassment. “This topic is not discussed enough,” Garde comments.

One finding of the research was that the digital violence in Northwest Syria mainly occurs on Meta’s platforms, chiefly Facebook. Many women and girls also rely on WhatsApp Gold, an unauthorized and less secure version of WhatsApp that has been used for fraud. Ezzideen explains that one advantage is that WhatsApp Gold allows people to use multiple phone numbers. And sometimes perpetrators groom targets into using these less secure apps. People using cheap or secondhand phones, with less awareness of the security risks, are especially exposed.

However, Meta has also been more responsive to the problem than some other tech companies, according to Ezzideen. She is part of Meta’s Trusted Partner program, which pays special attention to the flags raised by researchers, NGO workers, and activists. Most of the content reported under this volunteer program originates in the Asia region, which includes the Middle East.

Ezzideen says she spends two or three hours a day checking social media for posts that could be linked to gender-based violence. She’s not paid for this challenging work. Three years ago, she started to see a psychiatrist, feeling that she was absorbing too much of the hate speech and incitements to violence she was seeing online. While she’s glad that the Trusted Partner program exists, she argues that Meta needs to take down dangerous posts sooner. “Time is really important because a lady may lose her life if the post is too much communicated and shared,” Ezzideen warns.

Meta has said that cases are being resolved faster, even as the number of reports grows massively. In the second quarter of 2024, 81% of cases were resolved within five days of escalation. (Meta did not respond to a request for comment.)

AI has been a double-edged sword. Ezzideen uses AI frequently in her work, for instance to analyze photos. Photos can easily be doctored, including through the use of AI, to blackmail and exploit girls and women. But “AI cannot address all the daily dynamics” of online interaction or the distinct nuances that exist in different parts of Syria, Ezzideen stresses.

UNFPA organizes safe spaces where women and girls, including those who have experienced violence fuelled by social media, can receive support without being identified or stigmatized. This can include case management, psychosocial care, and sometimes cash and vouchers for people who urgently need to find housing.

However, the agency has had to close down some of these spaces, reduce the number of information sessions, and scale back its work with local organizations because of dramatic cuts to international development and humanitarian funding since the Trump administration came back into power. This U.S. support can’t be fully replaced by any other funders. It’s agonizing having to decide which services to keep. “It’s like choosing your favorite child,” Garde says. Ezzideen reports that there was already less funding for Syrian women’s organizations since the fall of Assad’s government in December 2024.

The governmental fragility in Syria extends to “very little access to legal outlets. And the judicial system is being revamped,” Garde says. Even in the rare cases where a woman will report a violation to a lawyer or a police officer, typically nothing happens or they themselves get blamed or revictimized. “There are a lot of barriers for women and girls to seek any kind of justice.”

They may have to go to extreme lengths to stop the violence. In Northwest Syria, one woman’s phone was hacked while playing an online shooter game. The hacker threatened to post her private photos unless she sent him more. Her family had to fake her death, through a death announcement and a staged funeral, to end the blackmail.

Some organizations assisting women are going to less extreme lengths. In 2020, Equity and Empowerment started training women in Idlib to repair their devices themselves. This filled a gap, because vocational training was generally for men and boys, and schools lacked technology-related education. For instance, Ezzideen says, women would send their personal information to IT businesses to create social media accounts for them, making them vulnerable to violations of privacy.

The women’s training program attracted a huge backlash in the community, Ezzideen remembers. A common criticism was that her organization was teaching women to be men. Equity and Empowerment took a pragmatic response to the controversy. They provided grants to women to open shops inside their houses, serving only female customers, which would be less threatening to men in the community. “Then the backlash was less,” Ezzideen reports.

This work snowballed. They trained trainers, who spread the information to others. Women started to see the benefits of this way to earn an income. The trainings helped to change the stereotypes around acceptable careers for women, according to Ezzideen. Now there are many such businesses.

While the gains in women’s entrepreneurship and digital literacy have been inspiring, much more needs to be done to curb the rampant violence against women online. “This is a structural issue,” Ezzideen emphasizes.