Written evidence submitted by Centre for Protecting Women Online (TVF0045)

Summary

This submission of evidence highlights the importance of allocating sufficient funding to address online violence against women (OVAWG) specifically within the Government VAWG Strategy. It explains the impact and current challenges in effectively tackling OVAWG. This submission also makes recommendations in relation to where the governmental funding needs to be allocated and how it can be used to address the current gaps in law and policy, policing, development of responsible AI and software technologies. It also recommends providing sufficient fundings to NGOS and other organisations to improve victim support services and capacity building in relation to addressing OVAWG.

About the Centre for Protecting Women Online

The Centre for Protecting Women Online[1] is a vehicle for understanding and addressing challenges posed to women’s online safety through a novel, interdisciplinary and ambitious research agenda. It develops cross-sectoral, collaborative outputs and interventions which inform law, policy, technology development and practice to reduce online harms suffered by women and girls; minimise anti-social behaviours online whilst promoting pro-social behaviours and help build tech/software that helps ensure accountability, credibility and helps facilitate justice.

The Centre is comprised of five interwoven work streams:

• Law & Policy,
• Human Behaviour,
• The Future of Responsible Tech,
• Ethical and Responsible Tech/AI and
• Policing.

Additionally, the Centre has partnered with numerous organisations to help achieve its core objectives.[2]

We are pleased to have the opportunity to respond to the Home Affairs Committee inquiry in relation to the governmental funding required to address violence against women and girls (VAWG). Please note that we are responding to the Committee’s consultation in relation to online violence against women and girls (OVAWG) as this is an area of expertise for the Centre.   Should you require further information we would be happy to assist you by providing oral evidence and engaging in further policy development.

Key Recommendations:

• The government needs to allocate more funding for large-scale research which is required in relation to OVAWG before effective policy measures and prevention mechanisms are devised.
• We encourage the government to allocate funding to develop guidance that creates coherent terminology in relation to OVAWG, capturing the full extent of harms and providing stronger protections and avenues for redress to victims. We would be happy to support development of such guidance.
• To ensure that policing can effectively respond to OVAWG, funding must be allocated to ensure that a structured, intelligence-led, and capability-focused national policing framework is adopted—one that is rooted in the lived experiences of victims and survivors. The absence of this has led to inconsistent responses across forces, disparities in training, and limited strategic prioritisation.[3]
• Second, investment in digital investigation capabilities is critical. Many survivors report that officers lack the knowledge and resources to investigate online abuse, leaving them without protection or legal recourse.[4]
• Appropriate and effective trauma informed training must be funded and made mandatory across police and numerous governmental departments tackling OVAWG, including Department of Justice, Department for Education and the Home Office. Further, such training may also be desirable for capacity building for support organisations and NGOs. This will ensure that those dealing with victims of OVAWG can effectively identify, document, and investigate OVAWG cases.
• Reporting mechanisms and intelligence-sharing between police, online platforms, and support services must be strengthened through governmental funding. A formal process for reporting tech-facilitated abuse incidents from online platforms to law enforcement should be established.[5]
• Survivors consistently call for better frontline support, which requires more financial investment, clearer reporting pathways, and greater awareness of tech-enabled abuse within the wider community.[6]
• Governmental funding should prioritise strengthening independent audits and building secure data-sharing infrastructure. It should allow researchers, law enforcement and support organisations to access anonymised platform data or the platforms tools to tackle OVAWG.
• Civil society organisations (CSOs) fighting OVAWG need further funding to provide their ongoing support services such as helplines, toolkits, platforms and apps that enable them to provide their services.
• Further, CSOs need continued and adequate level of funding to ensure they can provide support and advice to victims and survivors, assist with removal of illegal content from online platforms, conduct effective research, run campaigns, co-design policies and grow capacity for specialist response to OVAWG.
• It is necessary to provide funding for intersectional, survivor-informed safety by design. Government funding should facilitate initiatives where diverse groups of women, particularly survivors from marginalised groups, actively shape AI systems through their insights.
• It is also necessary to invest in governmental funding of programmes which co-design policy solutions from cross-sectoral and cross-disciplinary perspective. The CPWO would be happy to participate in further discussions regarding this and to contribute expertise to any future policy development.

Importance of providing funding to tackle online violence against women (OVAWG)

A Parliamentary inquiry on violence against women and girls (VAWG) must pay particular attention to online harms experienced by women and girls. In order to meet the Government’s policy objective of halving VAWG in a decade, funding must be allocated to tackle online violence against women (OVAWG).

Many forms of violence are facilitated through online platforms.[7] The online environment makes it easier for perpetrators of OVAWG to harass, stalk and abuse victims, as it allows for a global reach, online anonymity, and provides an outlet of misogynistic views.[8] Technology is often utilised to negate typical physical boundaries of offline violence and a single act of OVAWG can spread across large geographic areas whilst impacting more than one victim at a time.

The Four Nation Study, conducted by Olga Jurasz, examined the scale, impact and societal attitudes towards online violence against women and girls (OVAWG) across the UK.[9] It found that 1 in 4 women in England experience OVAWG and 1 in 3 LGB+ women experience online violence.  Similarly, in Scotland 1 in 3 young women (aged under 34) experienced OVAWG. Whilst 1 in 2 LGB+ identifying women in Scotland had experienced OVAWG. Most of the incidents surveyed were of text-based abuse and sexually explicit.  In Wales, 1 in 3 young women experienced online violence. 1 in 3 LGB+ identifying women had experienced online violence. Young women also more commonly experience sexually explicit online violence. In Northern Ireland only 12% of women experienced online violence, however, young women and LGB+ were more likely to be affected by it. This study found that in the United Kingdom, across the four nations, one in 10 women (15%) have experienced online violence, while 3 in 10 women (30%) have witnessed online violence. The study also found that most incidents of online violence that women experienced in the 12 months preceding the survey were text-based (82%) while approximately a third were image-based (33%). About half of all incidents in that period were not sexually explicit (45%) and they were committed by someone the woman did not know (81%). Women are most likely to experience online violence on Facebook (40%), Instagram (28%) and X/Twitter (33%).[10]

Challenges in addressing OVAWG in law & policy

Despite the prevalence of online harms in recent years and steady increase in law and policy responses to this phenomenon (e.g. Online Safety Act 2023; EU AI Act 2024; EU Digital Services Act 2022), there is still a limited understanding of their full spectrum and impact.[11] A lack of knowledge on different harms and how to report them will contribute to this. The Four Nation Study, found that women who experienced online violence reported it to platform providers but not to the police.[12] However, platforms are known for their failures to tackle these issues.[13]

This negatively affects prevention of, and effective response to, online harms and hinders access to justice for its victims.  This is particularly the case with online harms experienced by women which are often narrowly understood to include sexual harms and largely exclude other types of harms – e.g. text-based abuse, online harassment and cyberstalking. Such approach is not only misguided and not reflective of lived experiences of women online[14] but results in fragmented, incoherent responses which do little to i) change the behaviours which lead to online harms; ii) change the design of tech / software which enables online harms and iii) provide effective law & policy responses which help the victims.

Research addressing OVAWG

Despite some developments in law and policy on OVAWG in the UK, we are only scraping the surface of understanding and addressing this phenomenon which has real, global and local impact, including the impact on mental health; the silencing effects; the decreased ability to participate in public and political life; and, in case of many women journalists and human rights defenders, hate, threats of extreme physical violence and death, defamation, disinformation (to name but a few). Most importantly, inadequate, fragmented and partial responses to OVAWG not only exacerbate its impacts and delay access to justice and redress for women and girls who suffered online violence – they also enable normalisation of these forms of violence against women in everyday life.[15]

Further, deepfake scoping review carried out by the Centre for Protecting Women Online identified a need for gender and intersectionally informed analyses of online behaviour.[16] Existing studies neglect to examine the intersection of gender with other identities such as race, class, or sexuality.[17] This limits knowledge relating to women’s and girl’s experiences in terms of similar and differing socio-psychological and traumatic impacts of deepfake gender-based abuse compared to other forms of OVAWG. The tendency to treat deepfakes, for instance, as a neutral technology without recognising the gendered power dynamics involved can obscure how these technologies perpetuate broader patterns of gender inequality.[18] This is reflective of deeper societal patterns that devalue women’s autonomy and perpetuate harmful practices around sexuality and consent.[19]

There is a lack of systematically collated data specifically on OVAWG, especially large-scale studies. Jurasz’s Four Nation Study is one of the few exceptions to this.[20] Whilst there have been several empirical studies, these tend to focus on selected types of online violence (e.g. image-based sexual abuse), particular context (e.g. violence against women in politics) or location (e.g. only England rather than all four nations in the UK), allowing a valuable but only partial insight into the problem. These data gaps stand in the way of fully understanding the phenomenon of OVAWG and bringing forward a meaningful, coherent, evidence-based, and cross-sectoral set of responses to the multi-layered challenges posed by it.[21] This is especially acute when considered through an intersectional lens, where factors such as race, sexual orientation and disability intersect with gender to create distinctive vulnerabilities. This makes it more difficult to develop effective legislative measures, policy, preventions and strategies but also further marginalises more vulnerable women and girls.

How should Government prioritise funding addressing OVAWG?

In order to effectively tackle OVAWG it is necessary to invest in governmental funding of programmes which co-design policy solutions from cross-sectoral and cross-disciplinary perspective. The Centre for Protecting Women Online would be happy to participate in further discussions regarding this and to contribute expertise to any future policy development. The funding also needs to be allocated in the following areas:

1. Law & Policy

The government needs to allocate more funding for large-scale research

which is required in relation to OVAWG before effective policy measures and prevention mechanisms are devised. The importance of collection of large-scale data in relation to OVAWG needs to be emphasised in future governmental strategies. Otherwise, any response developed by the government will not be reflective of lived experiences of women online.

We also encourage the government to allocate funding to develop guidance that creates coherent terminology in relation to OVAWG, capturing the full extent of harms and providing stronger protections and avenues for redress to victims. This coherent terminology needs to be developed together with the academics, NGOs and victims of OVAWG to ensure that it reflects the realities of victims’ lives and promotes coherent approach in addressing OVAWG. This terminology could then be used by academics, NGOs, police and numerous governmental departments including the Ministry of Justice, Department for Education, the Home Office and the police, leading to a coherent terminology in responses to OVAWG. This terminology would also be useful for the Crown Prosecution Bodies and the regulatory bodies such as the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and OFCOM.  We would be happy to support development of such guidance.

The challenges of tackling OVAWG are currently exacerbated by the linguistic fragmentation in the field of OVAWG whereby “discourses and approaches to abusive behaviour online and harms perpetrated via technology are marked by terms that are used interchangeably or inaccurately, creating a fragmentation that is reinforced by the diversity of aims and perspectives of the different stakeholders that are currently shaping the narrative”.[22] This, in turn, leads to a failure to capture the full extent of harms arising from specific and distinct acts of online violence which, by extension, has impact on women and, in the legal context, the available avenues of redress.[23]

2. Policing

Policing in England and Wales faces significant structural, operational, and capability challenges in responding effectively to (OVAWG).[24] There is currently no structured, intelligence-led national policing framework for OVAWG, and funding needs to be allocated to develop this. A national operating model should be funded and developed to ensure that all forces follow clear investigative protocols, intelligence-sharing mechanisms, and victim-centred safeguarding approaches. The VAWG Strategic Threat and Risk Assessment highlights the lack of an existing coordinated approach.[25] This leads to inconsistent investigative responses across forces, disparities in training, and a lack of strategic prioritisation.[26]

Another key challenge in policing OVAWG is the lack of specialist digital investigation skills and forensic capacity. Many survivors report that officers lack the knowledge and resources to investigate online abuse, leaving them without protection or legal recourse.[27] Investment in digital investigation capabilities is critical. The HMICFRS/IOPC 2024 report on stalking found that police responses frequently fail to consider digital evidence, leading to missed opportunities to identify high-risk offenders and safeguard victims.[28] Appropriate and effective trauma informed training must be funded and made mandatory across all forces, ensuring that all frontline officers can effectively identify, document, and investigate OVAWG cases.

Another core challenge is the lack of intelligence-sharing between police, technology companies, and specialist support services. The CPWO Landscape Review states that there is no formal mechanism for systematic reporting and data exchange between online platforms and law enforcement, making it difficult for police to build an accurate threat picture of OVAWG.[29] The VKPP 2024 report similarly highlights gaps in data collection and intelligence-sharing across agencies, which limit policing’s ability to track emerging threats and offender behaviours.[30] Reporting mechanisms and intelligence-sharing between police, online platforms, and support services must be strengthened through governmental funding. This will provide a clearer picture of offender behaviour and emerging threats.

3. Funding for NGOs providing support to survivors of OVAWG

The ROSA report states that less than 2% of UK funding goes to women and girls organisations, and over half were for £10k or less.[31] Civil society organisations (CSOs) fighting OVAWG need further funding to provide their ongoing support services such as helplines, toolkits, platforms and apps that enable them to provide their services. Further they need continued funding to ensure they can provide advice to victims and survivors, assist with removal of illegal content from online platforms, conduct effective research, run campaigns and co-design policies.[32] Additionally, CSOs need funding to continue building their capacity and deliver tailored support as there are only a few organisations specialising in supporting victims of OVAWG specifically.

Survivors consistently call for better frontline support, which requires more financial investment, clearer reporting pathways, and greater awareness of tech-enabled abuse within the wider community.[33]

4. Funding for development of responsible AI and software solutions

Platforms are well-known for inadequate responses to OVAWG. whilst their algorithms can amplify harmful content, particularly through recommendation systems.[34] Platforms and social media companies must take a more active role in directing victims to appropriate law enforcement channels and specialist support services. Platforms should also be required to implement clear and accessible reporting mechanisms that allow users to flag incidents of OVAWG and receive guidance on next steps, including how to make a formal police report.

Governmental funding should prioritise strengthening independent audits and building secure data-sharing infrastructure. It should allow researchers, law enforcement and support organisations to access anonymised platform data or the platforms tools to tackle OVAWG. This approach would significantly improve platforms accountability and help measure the effectiveness of interventions against OVAWG, revealing areas where current approaches fall short.

It is also necessary to provide funding for intersectional, survivor-informed safety by design. This would include providing funding for academic researchers and NGOs to develop responsible software solutions. Government funding should facilitate initiatives where diverse groups of women, particularly survivors from marginalised groups, actively shape AI systems through their insights. For example, recent research highlights that BAME women are more effective at detecting and annotating misogynoir (anti-Black racist misogyny) compared to other groups (e.g., white males) due to their lived experiences[35]