Supporting in the community
Community Support NGOs have in-depth, first-hand experience of safeguarding women’s online safety. They are often the first point of call when women encounter abuse or cyber attacks, and offer support for various problems women face. These “informal” community-centred support methods are more effective for women – as they offer face to face advice from a person, which, as our research suggests, works well for women who prefer word of mouth advice. We therefore need to actively support these NGOs with the tools, resources and skills to reach all women.
Making online advice more accessible
We need to re-vamp online safety advice so it makes sense to people in their day-to-day, rather than putting them off with inaccessible jargon. We need to prioritise certain crucial pieces of advice to communicate, and provide this consistently across all online sources that people use most often, such as search engines, online reviews and recommendations, technology company adverts, social media including YouTube and X, and online forums.
Tailoring advice to scenarios faced by women
Unfortunately women disproportionally face many specific threat scenarios, such as intimate image abuse, cyberflashing and coercive behaviour including intimate partner violence. Safety advice, in response to these harms, is usually provided across the websites of NGOs who support women but we need this tailored-to-abuse-type advice more broadly across the online sources mentioned above.
Developing safe online spaces
Safety advice in response to Online Violence Against Women and Girls is often embedded in the support package given to help victims recover from abuse and trauma, via NGOs. We should develop new online spaces for communities of women who’ve experienced abuse to share advice and support for digital safety. This would provide emotional support and trustworthiness in situations where complex harms have taken place, enabling women to help women in an open and accessible way.
Empowering women and girls with the right skills
We should be focusing ensuring women and girls have the right digital skills to comprehend and action online safety protocols, offering training where required. We should be designing advice and technology that anyone can use to gain optimal protection, irrespective of their skill level, and without a cost attached.
Analysing risks before releasing new technologies
We need multi-stakeholder engagement and discussion assessing the possibility of gender-based online harm from new technologies. This should take place before they are openly put into public use, rather than after they have been misused to harm specific users such as women . This should involve dialogue and collaboration between the government, Ofcom, industry, Online Platforms, NGOs, and research institutions. An obvious example is the need to consider and address the impact of AI-embedded public platforms before misuse occurs.
With online safety considered a social good and its equity advocated by international human rights organisations, we need cooperative action to bring about greater gender equity in online spaces. This requires re-envisaging the current models of providing advice online that don’t currently best serve women, so that we can make the online experience safer and fairer for everyone.