Technology-facilitated gender violence (TGBV) is a broad spectrum of online behaviours perpetrated by one or more people where digital tools and technology is used to harass, intimidate, surveil, and inflict violence upon victims. Such behaviours can have both online and offline consequences for victims. They can be carried out by one person but sometimes also in a systematic coordinated fashion in an ongoing targeted campaign.
TGBV can include forms of abuse such as image-based sexual abuse, doxxing, deepfakes, cyberstalking, online harassment, cyber-flashing, sexual exploitation, and many more, designed to humiliate, embarass, control, and discredit. This form of online violence is disproportionately directed towards those with less power, often women and girls, but also others who are marginalised due to their gender and/or sexual identities.
Both existing and new digital spaces and technologies are rarely designed to prevent such gendered harms from occurring, and fail to provide adequate protection or redress to victims.