How Online Violence Against Women Goes Unpunished

The harmful effects of online violence against women and girls, thus, exceed the issue of safety. Ultimately, this violence prevents women and girls from fully enjoying their human rights and hinders the achievement of gender equality.

Online violence against women takes many different forms: from harassment and intimidation to stalking, rape and death threats. New forms constantly emerge in the digital dimension. And while “doxing”, “trolling”, “sextortion” and “revenge porn” may be terms most of us have heard of, but aren’t sure how to define, studies have shown that over half the women and girls using the Internet have experienced these or other forms of online violence. Women and girls in the Balkans are just as exposed to digital forms of gender–based violence, but there remains a lacuna of research and statistics for the region.

Noting the significance of regional and context specific data – and the lack of it – as part of our efforts to detect digital rights violations in the Southeastern and Central Europe, we have analyzed over 35 instances of online gender-based violence against women and girls that took place from January 2021 to March 2022 in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia, which we collected as part of our Digital Rights Monitoring Database.

The selected cases demonstrate prevailing trends and contemporary forms of online violence against women and girls, which are worsening discrimination against women and hindering full enjoyment of their rights in the Balkans. They do not in any way represent the overall scale of violence committed against women in in the region. This is just a small piece of the puzzle that helps us to better understand trends and responses.

BIRN monitoring reveals six prevailing trends in which digital violence occurs:

• Online attacks with clear manifestation of hate speech
• Online attacks that follow domestic violence
• Online attacks that lead to physical violence
• Online attacks that include or lead to privacy breaches
• Online attacks on publicly exposed women groups, in particular journalists and politicians
• Online attacks on already vulnerable groups, in particular minorities, migrants and members of the LGBTQ community

Right to hold and express opinions v. Right to live free from violence

International Woman’s day March in Skopje in 2021. Photo: EPA-EFE/GEORGI LICOVSKI

More than half of the documented cases demonstrate a recurring theme of verbal harassment of women intertwined with sexist, misogynistic, degrading and disparaging comments, insults and threats, including threats of physical and sexual violence, rape, death and encouragement of others to inflict harm.

Triggers vary in nature. In some cases they are nonexistent, as some social media users deem it their personal right to share sexist, misogynist and hateful content and comments about women, regardless of whether the targeted woman is a public figure or not, and invite others to participate in their smear campaigns.

For example, in North Macedonia, a woman was subjected to a surge of hateful, sexist and misogynistic comments on social media after a news portal published an article about the amount of books she reads each year. According to the website, the woman read more than 438 books a year, which led to a number of hateful comments and mockery of her, personally, her family, her ability to be a mother, her professional record, etc. Most of the comments were posted on Facebook in the comments section on the pages where the article was shared and posted. The comments remained available despite their clear violation of Facebook’s community standards on hate speech.

Very often, discrimination and gender-based violence against women is incited and perpetuated by online portals that publish misogynistic, sexist and degrading articles about women. From tabloid to mainstream media, click-bait culture and lack of ethical standards, as well as poor (self) regulation, women and girls, through images and words, are subjected to violence and discrimination.

For instance, in two documented cases, internet portals in Bosnia and Herzegovina published articles depicting women’s physical appearance in a sexist manner with clear elements of “age shaming”. The articles resulted in further verbal harassment, ridicule, mockery, stigmatization and discrimination of the women by social media users in the comments section. In both cases, neither the media outlet nor the social media platforms removed the content despite their violation of journalistic ethical standards and community guidelines.

These two cases are not unique to the media landscape in Bosnia and Herzegovina; cases of misogynistic and sexist content published by media then going viral on social media with the surge of hateful comments are common in other countries in the region, too – with a similar lack of response from media or big tech companies.

Online violence against women as extension of domestic violence

A Bosnian woman looks at artist’s paintings in Sarajevo. Photo: EPA/Fehim Demir

In many cases, violence in the digital world is an extension of domestic violence committed by an intimate partner. Very often, domestic violence serves as a trigger for online attacks and gender-based violence. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, for instance, both news about a femicide and news about a victim reporting rape attracted misogynistic and offensive comments, with particularly concerning “victim blaming” and “victim shaming” comments from users who claimed that the victim “got what she deserved”.

Such comments reflect a prevailing attitude towards victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse in the region. This often pushes victims into self-censorship and silence, as they refrain from speaking out about the violence they suffered due to the concerns about prejudice and damage to their own reputation.

In many cases, online violence on social media is triggered by media reporting on domestic violence against women and girls. A BIRN investigation showed that media in North Macedonia still tend to sensationalise coverage of gender-based violence and point the finger of blame at the victim. According to research  done by the group Female Journalists against Violence, 27 per cent of articles in Serbia focused on domestic violence use sensationalistic or stereotypical terminology when describing a victim. The same report also showed that, in at least 40 per cent of the articles, the identity of the victim was revealed in the media. It often happens that, following this revelation, the victims are targeted on social media. In some countries, however, like Albania, Kosovo and Montenegro, domestic and a follow-up online violence has triggered protests in support of victims, as well as calls for stronger legislation to protect those exposed to violence.

When online violence moves offline

Kosovans take part in a march to mark International Women’s Day in Pristina, Kosovo, 08 March 2019. Photo by EPA-EFE/VALDRIN XHEMAJ

While the right to hold and express opinions applies to offensive and unfavourable ideas, this right is not unlimited. Incitement to violence, hostility or discrimination is not protected speech and cannot be justified under this right. Words and other forms of expression can and do lead to physical assault of those against whom the speech is directed. And while alarms would go off if this happened in the “real” world, when it comes to violence in the digital environment, many – in some cases including law enforcement authorities – regard virtual things as “not real”, as something that cannot inflict “real” harm. This seems to be the prevailing attitude even when threats of physical violence and assault are made online. However, online violence is not confined by the screen. The fact that in many cases online violence finds its way into the “real” world was demonstrated by a case in Serbia where, before physically assaulting a female gym employee, a man made online threats to her and even announced his plans to assault her on social media.

Furthermore, a case in which an unlawful action taking place offline was transferred and disseminated online, to subject the victim to further harm and suffering, demonstrates how online and offline violence are often intertwined and even dependent on each other to achieve full effect.

In another case in Serbia, a man was reported to the police for covertly taking intimate photos of a woman through the window of her home while she was undressing, and posting them online, violating not only her privacy rights and subjecting her to gender-based violence in the offline world but furthering violations in the digital environment as well.

Research also showed a correlation between online violence and human-trafficking, leading to increased cyber-trafficking of women, in particular during the global COVID pandemic. More than 40 per cent of female victims of human trafficking have also been subjected to some form of online abuse, according to a report by a Serbian NGO, Atina, looking at the correlation between the two. In interviews with 178 women and girls who received support from Atina over the past five years, 42 per cent reported being the target of online abuse, ranging from cyber-bullying, cyber-stalking, hacking, catfishing, revenge porn and “doxing” to online publication of private information intended to publicly expose and shame the victims. For 31 per cent of the interviewees, online abuse was directly linked to the process of human trafficking.

Explicit content sharing and privacy violations

A woman takes a picture of a contemporary art installation by Turkish artist Vahit Tuna that aims to raise awareness on women killed by domestic violence, in Istanbul. Photo: EPA – EFE

Online gender-based violence against women is often perpetrated through non-consensual accessing, manipulation and sharing of private information and content, including explicit content and photoshopped photos and videos that are sexualized or created with the intent to humiliate and stigmatize women.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, a photomontage of a woman artist’s naked body was shared online and accompanied by sexist and misogynistic insults and mockery, done not only directly by the perpetrator but by his numerous followers as well.

“Sextortion” is a similar form of online gender-based violence. This refers to the use of digital means to blackmail a victim, usually involving the perpetrator threatening to release intimate pictures of the victim, or other content, in order to obtain more explicit content, sexual acts or sexual contact with the victim. Such forms of online violence against women have been documented in the Balkans as well. For instance, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a man was reported to the police for “sexual blackmail” after he had been harassing a woman online for a long time, by sending her offensive messages and threatening to publish explicit images of her, if she did not agree to have a relationship with him.

A particularly worrying trend noted in the monitored countries is the sharing of explicit photos and videos of women, as well as their personal information, including their names and addresses, via social media, messaging apps and secret groups.

For example, a notorious Telegram group where users post and share explicit sexualized content about women and girls has been reactivated in North Macedonia. Alongside the photos, users share the addresses and telephone numbers of the victims, many of whom are underage. In a similar case in Serbia, chat groups containing explicit photos and videos of women and seeking sexual services were detected. Some of these chat groups were named after cities in Serbia, further identifying the location of the victims. Such cases do not only violate the privacy rights of the women and girls whose images and personal information have been shared; they pose a direct threat to their safety.

Female politicians are frequent targets

A Romanian masked woman plays in a street theatre act, meant to show women’s condition in Romanian society. Photo: EPA-EFE/Robert Ghement 

Certain groups of women are more often at the receiving end of online violence due to the role they play in society, or their public positions. Politicians, journalists, human rights defenders and activists are increasingly targeted, threatened and harassed, our monitoring shows.

Previous BIRN research showed that women journalists in the Balkans face online abuse on a daily basis. Most see little point in complaining to employers or the police, given the systematic failures to punish the perpetrators, according to the findings of a BIRN analysis. For the purpose of this research, we explored violence against a group that is prominent in terms of the number of online threats it receives – female politicians. In a large number of cases, female politicians are targeted by online threats that are generally misogynistic, sexualized and specifically gendered. This further institutionalizes patriarchal norms whereby most politicians in the region in leadership positions are male.

For instance, in Montenegro, three female members of the Democratic Party of Socialists, DPS, Drita Llolla, Amina Brahic and Nina Perunovic, were insulted and targeted with sexual harassment by a Twitter user. Similarly, a Montenegrin opposition MP, Draginja Vuksanovic Stankovic, was targeted with threats of physical violence and incitement to violence by a Facebook user. In both cases, although these threats violated the community standards of Facebook and Twitter, the networks failed to sanction hate speech in both cases.

In many cases where female politicians suffer online violence, their male counterparts are perpetrating the violence, further confirming power dynamics in Balkan politics whereby men take most senior and decision making posts and are the majority in the political and governance circles. For instance, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Social Democratic politician Vojin Mijatovic insulted Sabina Cudic, a representative of the party Nasa Stranka, on the basis of her gender and repeated his insults on his Facebook profile. In a similar case, the Mayor of Zenica, Fuad Kasumovic, commenting on a presentation by a city councilor, Emina Tufekcic, said that she “deserved a slap for every word”. After other councilors condemned him for misogyny, Kasumovic insisted that he had not referred to Tufekcic herself but her party, the Party of Democratic Action, SDA. Tufekcic was not sanctioned for his attack, and his speech went viral, attracting further sexist and misogynistic comments and threats.

Cases of online gender-based violence targeting female politicians are particularly alarming as they threaten to undermine women’s political engagement, silence their voices and hinder their democratic participation. This correlates with studies conducted in Albania by the Ombudsman and Commissioner for Protection from Discrimination. These showed that women in Albanian politics still face routine discrimination, abuse and offensive language. Data analyzed by BIRN on online media coverage shows that sexist and derogative language was still being used against women in the last Albanian elections. Media coverage of women candidates in the election was also lower, compared to coverage of their male colleagues. A sample of some 6,900 articles analyzed by BIRN shows that 30 per cent of online media monitored had a clear gender bias. Data drawn from the monitoring showed that only 15.3 per cent of the political statements published by the media in their online sites came from women candidates as opposed to 84.7 per cent from their male colleagues.

Intersecting forms of discrimination

A Romanian young woman (L) takes care of her partner’s hair during the Gay Pride 2019 parade, in downtown Bucharest. Photo: EPA-EFE/ROBERT GHEMENT 

Women and girls who are subjected to intersecting forms of discrimination on other grounds, apart from gender, are particularly vulnerable to online violence. Women of colour and women who belong to religious or ethnic minorities are often targeted. For these women, gender-based violence in the digital world is intertwined with xenophobic, racist, misogynistic, sexist comments and hate speech.

The toll is particularly high for groups that already experience discrimination in society and are pressured on almost every societal level, – in particular Roma, refugees and migrants and LBGTQ persons. In a case in North Macedonia, explicit photos and videos of Roma women and girls were shared on Facebook, followed by insults, xenophobic and racist comments. In Bosnia, Antimigrant.ba, an anti-migrant internet portal, shared a testimony of an Afghan woman who was sexually harassed by a Croatian border police officer. The testimony was originally published by the UK Guardian, but the Bosnian internet portal misused the article and shared its own review of the story, filled with sexist, misogynistic, xenophobic and racist comments. The administrator and the editor of Antimigrant.ba portal, Fatmir Alispahic, was charged with inciting and spreading hatred through textual, photo and video content on several occasions in 2019 and 2020. However, in 2021, the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina acquitted him. In Albania, the prominent LBGTQ activist Xheni Karaj and members of her association, Aleanca, have been exposed to threats and insults on social media and have also experienced  derogatory treatment from other media outlets.

Reasons for failing to protect

A woman holds a poster reading ‘Men Should Not Be Making Laws About My Body’ as pro-abortion protesters demonstrate at the West Hollywood City Hall in Hollywood, California, USA, 21 May 2019. Nationwide protests have activists calling for reproductive freedom and a halt to new laws limiting and criminalizing abortion services. EPA-EFE/ETIENNE LAURENT

As outlined, violence against women, including online gender-based violence, is a form of discrimination against women and a human rights violation that prevents women from fully enjoying their human rights, from actively participating in society and, ultimately, from achieving gender equality.

Our monitoring shows that online gender-based violence is growing in the Balkan region for four main reasons: inadequate legislation and an already poor institutional response to discrimination and hate speech; lack of response from big tech companies in implementing their own community policies related to digital violence; media enforcing gender stereotypes and failing to publish violations of professional ethical guidelines; and deep-rooted patriarchal norms on societal level that legitimize and normalize  violence and discrimination against women.

According to relevant regional and international human rights instruments, by which Balkan states are bound, states have an obligation to combat all forms of discrimination against women, including online violence, and to protect their human rights, including every woman’s right to live free from violence. Furthermore, states have an obligation to prevent, investigate and punish acts of violence against women and girls.

Despite their legal obligations, however, many Balkan countries, including those monitored for this study, have poor legal frameworks that do not adequately treat and sanction online violence and its perpetrators. Namely, domestic laws do not explicitly regulate online gender-based violence. Considering the scale of this problem and its detrimental effects on human rights, equality and participation of women, it is essential for countries to adopt specific laws or adapt existing laws to combat and prevent gender-based online violence and its contemporary forms, bearing in mind its continuing evolvement. Here, particularly relevant are violence against women and gender equality domestic legal frameworks, including family laws and laws on domestic violence, and applicable criminal codes.

Even when handling offline gender violence, institutions have a poor record. Criminalization of online violence against women and girls is essential to ensure a deterrent effect. States should criminalize all elements and forms of online violence, including subsequent re-sharing of harmful content. Members of legal and regulatory mechanisms, including law enforcement and prosecutors’ offices, need to be properly trained and equipped with knowledge, human and technical resources, including special divisions for digital crimes, to adequately and effectively implement the law, minimize harmful effects, sanction perpetrators and ensure prevention.

Just as the legal framework fails to regulate online gender-based violence, the laws of monitored countries do not contain provisions specifically regulating online hate speech either. The absence of words “online” or “internet-facilitated” does not and should not, however, prevent relevant authorities from combating online hate speech through the use of existing legal provisions, particularly criminal law provisions. Overall, while existing legal and institutional frameworks for combating hate speech in the Balkan countries seem robust in theory, their practical application is lacking. The rate of sanctioned incidents of reported hate speech is worryingly low, even when it comes to the instances documented in the “offline environment”. For instance, despite data indicating that hate speech in Bosnia and Herzegovina is on the rise, only 13 convictions for hate speech were issued by courts between 2015 and 2020, according to research conducted by Youth Initiative for Human Rights in Bosnia and Global Analytics as part of the project “Suppressing Hate Speech Through Empowerment of Youth”.

An additional issue is that laws regulating hate speech recognize only several protected grounds, and gender is not one of them. However, as BIRN monitoring shows, it is women and girls that are increasingly being targeted with hate speech and subjected to hatred, hostility and discrimination based on gender. Considering that authorities are obliged to uphold women’s rights and combat discrimination, they should interpret and apply laws in the light of contemporary trends and the issues that women and girls in the Balkans are facing, including, but not limited to, gender-based violence and hate speech.

The issue is not only limited to the lack of adequate legal frameworks or poor implementation.

One major obstacle to combating online violence against women is a general perception that online violence is not a serious crime and cannot cause serious harm. Such attitudes reinforce a culture of impunity and come with dire consequences. They send the message that perpetrators of online violence won’t suffer legal consequences, thereby encouraging further violence. Out of fear, loss of trust in the authorities and a sense of hopelessness, victims silence themselves, retreat from the internet and the public space, fearing consequences of their own exposure, and further exacerbating gender inequality and stigmatization of women in the Balkans. This is even truer in patriarchal societies where women are traditionally segregated and excluded from public life and where men dominate the narrative. Such societies favour men, as shown in elections where the dominant candidates are male and where there is a clear gender cap. It is the same within institutions.

Media also favour male candidates. But it doesn’t end there. The media also amplify violence against women by publishing articles that promote sexists and misogynist attitudes, by revealing personal data about victims of sexual, domestic and general gender-based violence, and by targeting vulnerable groups simply because they belong to certain groups. Although bound by respective ethical codes in journalism, self-regulation has not done much to achieve accountability in terms of unprofessional reporting.

The reasons for increased digital violence are not only internal. They are also external. Social media companies have proved to be great enablers for digital violence against women. The platforms, especially Facebook and Twitter, have failed to uphold their responsibility to protect women’s rights online by failing to adequately investigate and respond to reports of violence and abuse in a transparent manner, leading many women to silence or censor themselves on the platform.

Facebook has its own well developed policy rationale when it comes to hate speech and sanctioning this type of content. In reality, its moderators are blind to the violations of their guidelines in the Balkans. This also reflects the fact that the company has limited content managers who understand the local languages, and relies on mix of algorithms and the human factor. Previously, Facebook told BIRN that it primarily relies on AI to detect violating content on Facebook and Instagram, and in some cases take action on the content automatically.

According to Facebook, they “utilize content reviewers for reviewing and labelling specific content, particularly when technology is less effective at making sense of context, intent or motivation”. BIRN’s investigation shows that the tools used by social media giants to protect their community guidelines are failing: posts and accounts that violate the rules often remain available even when breaches are acknowledged, while others that remain within the rules are suspended without clear reason. Almost half of reports in Bosnian, Serbian, Montenegrin or Macedonian made to Facebook and Twitter are about hate speech. One in two posts reported as hate speech, threatening violence or harassment in Bosnian, Serbian, Montenegrin or Macedonian language, remains online.

When it comes to reports of threats of violence, such content was removed in 60 per cent of cases, and in 50 per cent of cases of targeted harassment. Distinguishing harsh criticism from defamation, or radical political opinions from expressions of hatred and racism or incitement to violence, requires contextual and nuanced analysis. In the absence of that, clear violations of social media networks’ community standards allow offensive and violent content not only to stay but to flourish.