Cases of online abuse against women and girls have spiked in recent years. However, the legal and policy initiatives to address it do not seem to delve deep enough into the grave and changing dynamics of online violence in Nepal, or how this perpetuates gender-based violence in the offline world.

The development in internet and communication technologies has connected people in a way that was unimaginable a few decades ago. On one hand, this has opened endless opportunities to exchange ideas, share information and stay in touch with loved ones; on the other, it has given birth to new dangers that humans have never faced before. One such danger is the rise in online violence. As found by , women and girls are the main victims of trolling, abuse and hate speech everywhere in the world.

This scenario is not different in Nepal, where the rates of digital adoption are high. With increasing internet and social media users, we are witnessing , which can take the form of physical threats, stalking, sex trolling, sexual harassment, and Zoom bombing. In January 2022, there were around (with Facebook being the primary reported platform) and social media penetration has .

Virtual victims – the physical and emotional effects.

Between 2016 and 2020, were reported to the Cyber Bureau of Nepal. The prevalence is estimated to be much higher than reported. We spoke with around 80 adolescent girls and boys about their experience of online abuse as part of our recent research study for a gender equality project, funded by Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). We were surprised to find that quite a few adolescent girls that we spoke to either had experienced sexual harassment on different social media platforms themselves, or knew someone who had. While only few boys mentioned experiencing or knowing someone (either boy or a girl) who have experienced this.

"I have experienced online sexual abuse. At one time I was even asked to share a picture of my breasts. This incident made me feel uncomfortable," one of girls told us during a focus group discussion.

Regardless of the nature (online or offline), violence takes a toll on the physical and mental health of survivors. Violence against women and girls still remains a culturally accepted practice, deeply rooted in harmful gender stereotypes and attitudes stemming from the continued acceptance of patriarchal societal norms.

As digital technologies play an increasingly central role in our everyday lives, some research suggests that women are often blackmailed by their partners or former partners, especially when couples in relationships share their passwords.  is mostly conducted through photoshopping women’s images, where men misuse women’s pictures to create new accounts to trick other men.

Silencing girls’ voices.

In a society like ours, where women and girls are expected to act in a particular way, our research found they tried to cover up any sort of violence, as they feel they will get blamed for sharing their personal life on social media sites. They fear that sharing such incidents can have a devastating impact on their mental health, reputations, relationships, access to education and employment, or even expose them to physical violence. Most of the time, women are questioned about their online behaviours, and a huge burden is placed on them to accept that they were at fault for putting themselves in a vulnerable position.

From our conversations with adolescent girls during our research study, we found that often they did not share these incidents with anyone, not even with their friends. As a solution, they simply ignored and avoided the perpetrators by blocking or unfriending them on their social media platforms. We discovered that these girls feared the consequences of sharing with their families and friends. They did not trust their friends to keep their secrets, and they thought they would be blamed for the incident if they shared it with their family members. This is also why many cases of violence against women and girls go unreported in Nepal.

"No. There is no way we will share such things with others because people we share such things (cyberviolence incidents) will not keep it to themselves. I have experienced a similar scenario previously, where I shared something with one of my friends, and she shared it with others too. So, we cannot trust anyone to keep our secrets," says a girl from our focus group discussion.

As part of our research, we also spoke with government officials, women rights activists and representatives from non-governmental organisations working on women and girls' rights. Many of the participants raised concerns such as the increasing use of social media to connect to the potential victims of human trafficking. Previously, traffickers used to travel to villages to connect with their potential victims. But these days they can connect and befriend potential victims through a simple friend request on social media platforms, liking or commenting on a post, before they meet in person.

What have we learned?

The key takeaway from our recent study was that adolescent girls using social media platforms are more at risk of experiencing online sexual abuse than boys, and for us, this highlights that their safeguarding should be a priority. We also identified an urgent need to engage with adolescent girls, and their friends and families, to help break through the barriers and fears associated with sharing their experiences.

Similarly, it is also very important to understand that internet platforms – while insecure - are not the only cause of such violence. Low levels of digital literacy contribute to the issue, and not least, the bad behaviour of people who hide behind online profiles and misuse these platforms. At last year’s UN Generation Equality Forum in Paris, four of the world’s largest tech companies – Facebook, Google, and – made bold commitments to tackle the abuse of women on their platforms and improve women’s safety.

Our findings point to the need to inform and empower women and girls in Nepal about the safe use of internet and digital media platforms, so that they can protect themselves from potential harm online.

Moving forward with holistic action

Considering the severe impact of online violence, Nepalese laws already have some provisions aiming at control of such activities. When a complaint is registered, Nepalese police are required to immediately search for the alleged perpetrator by tracking their IP address. Then, depending on the severity of the case, they either make the two parties compromise to resolve the issue, or file a case. However, there are many loopholes in the system. We feel that both legal changes and understanding the root causes are required to address this violence.

Actions must go beyond calling for improvements to the platforms’ own Community Standards, and their reporting systems and policies on removing content that breaks the rules. We also recognise this is an uphill struggle, particularly in non-English languages where the bots are not trained to recognise local languages, slang and dialects, and often end up removing legitimate content instead.

But we know that media and communication is in a unique position to challenge social norms and help address the root causes of why these cases go undiscussed and therefore unreported. In India, Myanmar, Tanzania, Zambia – using media and communication - we’ve seen positive changes for women and girls by engaging, informing, and sparking conversations on taboo topics both online and offline.

Our innovative Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights project in Myanmar called Ma Shet Ne (Don’t be shy!) was designed to help open discussions and break down barriers. We found that sharing interviews with female celebrities who spoke openly about the issues they had faced, and equal representation in content, helped to challenge the gender divide that had previously stopped women speaking out. Audiences were significantly more confident than non-audiences to talk about relationships and sexual health offline with medical professionals, friends and partners – a key achievement.

In Nepal, we recognise that creating safer environments like this, where women and adolescent girls can confidently share their experiences with friends and families without fearing the consequences, is vital. So far, we have supported local radio stations to produce digital content on various gender-based violence issues through training, editorial guidance and support to build the capacity of our local partner stations. But much more needs to be done.

Addressing online violence requires collective efforts. Broad-based, multi-sectoral partnerships need to be established to reach out to families and communities at scale. It is also important to bring systematic changes in mentality where it requires social institutions such as education, media, religion, the judiciary and political systems to be gender sensitive. With the advancement of digitalisation, it is crucial that women and girls are well informed. Sharing positive stories of those who have used formal support mechanisms and found help - and not suffered social discrimination as a result - is necessary to enable this shift.

We believe that collective efforts including stronger cybersecurity, media to support gender equality, changing attitudes and changes to legalisation all need to happen to address this problem.

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Limits on progress

However, there are constraints on the transformative potential of women’s collectives in India:

• Geographically isolated groups have few opportunities to engage beyond their immediate circle with the wider collective;
• Women have limited channels to request and receive targeted information, resources, and services from the wider collective;
• Grassroots members have limited opportunities to make their voices heard in the wider collective;
• The lack of access to high quality, standardised, flexible learning opportunities;
• Members tend to be older and less educated, and younger women are under-represented;
• There are limited opportunities for consultative decision-making, and leadership may not be transparent.

Digital technology could be a game changer

Chat applications and social media platforms, as social networking tools, could help women’s collectives overcome many of the constraints they face – for example, by:

• Reducing geographical isolation, enabling women to interact more regularly with their wider collectives.
• Improving internal information dissemination and consultative decision making by collective leadership.
• Improving the bottom-up flow of information from grassroots members to collective leadership to transnational partners, amplifying marginalised voices.  
• Diversifying group membership by attracting younger women.
• Helping collectives trying to scale to overcome challenges of transparency and leadership ossification by offering new growth pathways to young and emergent leaders.

Collectives could also use digital technologies to accelerate the accumulation of human capital by providing flexible, personalised digital learning to members, and the accumulation of financial capital by providing greater access to government entitlements and markets for their products and services.

Low tech digital solutions have delivered results

There are already examples of low-tech digital solutions achieving some of these goals for disadvantaged women in India, including for women in collectives. For example:

• , an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) social media platform for rural communities in India, enables women in self help groups to call a number to record an audio message about their community, or to listen to messages left by others. Over 100,000 unique users have been calling Mobile Vaani every month in the states of Bihar and Jharkhand, discussing a wide range of issues and sharing information, including health information during the COVID-19 pandemic.
•  equips women in self help groups who already own smartphones with an application to support claims for government entitlements, helping 600,000 people claim entitlements in 22 Indian states.
• Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Media Action has used IVR to deliver impactful, cost-effective audio learning to rural, low-income women at scale in India for almost a decade – for example, delivering free health information to over 10 million families, and successfully training 200,000 frontline health workers in 13 Indian states in collaboration with the Indian government, .
• During the pandemic, Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Media Action began collaborating with capacity building organisations - for instance,  to provide IVR-based learning in agricultural best practices to marginalised women farmers in self help groups in the state of Bihar, and with to support digital adoption and digital literacy in self help groups in Madhya Pradesh.  

The gender digital divide

However, the transformative potential of digital to support women’s empowerment in India is constrained by the gender digital divide, including on social media. In 2018, LIRNEasia estimated that only 9% of women aged 15–65 were using social media in India, compared with 22% of men. In addition, although India is now globally the largest market for platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, these are still heavily skewed towards male users. For example, according to estimates from publicly available advertising data, only 8% of Twitter users and 24% of Facebook users in India were women, as of January 2021. Even though more women began using the mobile internet during the pandemic, with usage increasing from 21% in 2019 to 30% in 2021, social media use did not reflect this: Facebook usage among women increased by just 1% during the pandemic, and Twitter usage among women fell by 6%.

Social media users in India tend to be younger, better educated, wealthier and urban

Wealth and education are the strongest determinants of access to and use of mobile phones in India, but age and geography also matter. In 2018, a study by LIRNEasia found that only 5% of social media users in India had only a primary school education or had never been to school, and only 11% lived in rural areas. The same study found that only 10% of 36–45-year-olds had used social media in 2018. Although social media use among adolescents in India has increased since then, the gender gap is the most extreme in this age group. For example, a survey by the Population Council in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in 2018–2019 found that 33% of 15–19-year-old girls who had completed fifth grade or higher had used social media, compared with 70% of boys in the same age group.

Women and men also behave differently on social media in India. Men tend to be more active participants in digital groups than women, with the most active users being men with other forms of social privilege. Most women (92%) use social media to stay in touch with existing friends and family, rather than to make new friends (38%), which could limit their access to new ideas, opportunities and ways of doing things – the accumulation of bridging social capital. 

The role of gender norms

Gender norms - offline and online – are another constraint. Women’s use of mobile phones and the internet are often supervised and monitored by men, which limits the agency and freedom that digital technology could provide women. Technology-facilitated gender-based violence is rife in India, and nearly always against women. Research suggests that over 58% of women internet users have faced online sexual harassment of some form, most commonly on social media. While India has legislation on cyberbullying, cyber-stalking and online sexual harassment, victims of online gender-based violence do not usually seek legal recourse. Social media platforms have been grappling with the issue of online violence since their inception. However, despite best efforts, online violence and harassment remain pervasive issues.

Implications for designing social media interventions for women

The gender digital divide on social media platforms in India, and the offline and online norms that create the divide, necessitate a gender-intentional, research driven approach to designing social media interventions for women’s empowerment. 

• We need to begin with a gender analysis of who has access to digital technology and why, and who is excluded and why.
• We also need to understand women’s level of digital skill among the population we aim to serve, as well as their usage habits and the factors shaping their use, including the implications of shared and supervised mobile phone use for privacy and data protection.
• We need to design differentiated digital strategies, using appropriate digital channels and tools, to meet a diversity of needs.
• We need to use women-centred design methodologies to co-create solutions with women who represent different segments of the target population, to improve accessibility, usability and relevance.
• We must remember that face-to-face communication remains key to women in the target population who don’t own, or have meaningful access to, mobile phones – or the skills or permission to use one.
• We require processes to respond to online harassment and violence that may be triggered by your intervention.
• And we need to be patient. Test and re-test because there is the potential to do as much harm as good.

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The third paper in our learning series offers more insights: 

Learn more about our Digital Women's Economic Empowerment learning and research agenda here. The project is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and includes partners at Chaitanya WISE, PRADAN, the University of Southern California at Los Angeles, and the University of Denver, Colorado.

As a child and throughout my teenage years in northern Nigeria, I saw men in our neighbourhood shopping for the food needed by the family. To my young mind, this was fascinating, and I thought “how helpful and thoughtful of them”.

It was only later I came to understand that, for cultural reasons, women were not expected to be seen in public. But deep down, I still couldn’t understand it.

As an adult I have dealt with stereotypical expectations around women in politics. I’ve heard statements such as women are not “naturally” oriented towards governance or politics, or that “politics is a man’s thing”. Our system in Nigeria seems to give this credence by not making adequate efforts to encourage women to be active in politics.

I remember when Sarah Jibril, the first female presidential candidate, failed to make it past the party primaries in 2011 and got only one vote. I asked myself then, half seriously - is there something about the woman that makes her unsuited to such key a role in society?

Fast forward to the present: I understand that the behaviour of the men and women I saw while growing up helped to perpetuate ideas about the way men and women “should” behave. Worldwide, women are still the focus of only 10% of news stories and comprise just 20% of experts or spokespeople interviewed.

As a social researcher I have designed and implemented studies to understand what audiences in Nigeria want from shows like the drama Story Story and the radio discussion show Talk Your Own, and I evaluated their impact. We saw a pattern in our findings. Fewer women than men tended to listen to our programmes and were engaging less frequently in politics than men. To understand this better, we designed a study to speak to young girls and women across five states in five geo-political zones of Nigeria.

Involve your target audience

We used a market research technique called co-creation, whereby customers or product end-users (in our case, potential audience members) are involved actively in inventing the product.

Working in groups, we encouraged unguided discussions and used practical exercisesand  to explore issues of concern, perceptions of governance and ideas about what a governance-focused programme should include. Something I particularly enjoyed was the collaboration between the women themselves, researchers, programme producers and project managers. It resulted in valuable feedback to help us improve our programmes and give women and girls a chance to have their voices heard.

We found that women aged over 36 in particular, think that few women get involved in decision- making, and feel they do not have a voice. “They look down at us people and they don’t involve people that they think are illiterate,” said one participant.

Younger women claimed to feel disconnected from politics as they have no opportunity to meet with the leaders (traditional and elected) and felt decision makers did not seek their opinions. Across the board, women lacked faith in the political system – citing poor leadership and a failure to fulfil promises made by politicians during election campaigns. They saw evidence of poor governance all around them – including a lack of basic amenities in their communities. A few participants mentioned that state-owned media tended to portray even an ill-functioning government in a positive light.

The co-creation research was part of a conscious effort to attract more female audience members, which included revising the content of our programmes to appeal to women and younger people. , for example, launched a new youth segment – My Life, My Story – featuring teenage girls sharing their life experiences. At the end of the project,  showed that the programmes steadily attracted a higher proportion of female and rural listeners: by 2016 women accounted for 43% of the audience compared with 35% in 2013.

I want my daughter(s) and girls all over to have a voice – and not just a voice, but a voice that counts in the governance and decision-making processes that affect their lives. Therefore, understanding and helping women (in any small way) to find a voice is not just another deliverable in my line of work, it is something that matters a lot more to me!

In Bangladesh and Ethiopia, mothers-to-be and their families don’t follow a number of other medical recommendations either. For example, ‘preparing for childbirth’ in Ethiopia generally doesn’t involve deciding on where to give birth, how to travel there and getting that all-important hospital ‘grab bag’ ready. Instead, the primary focus is on organising a big social event for family and friends to give thanks for the new life. Not doing so is frowned upon.

So… why is this?

Mother-in-law knows best?

Both Bangladeshis and Ethiopians believe that everything baby-related is the responsibility of women, with mothers-in-law – particularly in Bangladesh – serving as the ultimate arbiters of pregnancy.

Mothers-in-law are in turn likely to give their daughters-in-law advice based on their own experiences and what has always been done in their communities: give birth at home.

Expectant mothers are unlikely to defy both society and their mother-in-law to follow medical recommendations. This is because humans are social beings. When we choose whether or not to do something, we’re heavily influenced by social norms – what the people we love, respect and are surrounded by would normally do or strongly expect us to do.

Influencing the influencers

To encourage more women to seek medical help in pregnancy, it became clear that it was important to influence mother-in-laws.

Husbands – usually the household decision-makers – tend to not get involved in plans for childbirth. We saw this as an opportunity to engage men, who could then encourage their pregnant partners to adopt safer habits.

To reach and convince these family members to do things differently, we created and shows featuring husbands and mothers-in-law supporting the kind of practices we wanted to catch on. But modelling new behaviours isn’t enough to get them adopted. So to help audiences make informed choices, the shows also provided a space for discussion and explained why, for example, antenatal appointments were worth attending.

Inspiring change through fictional characters and real-life experiences

Of course, leveraging influencers, like or , to improve women and children’s health isn’t a new approach. What is less well-known is what works when trying to do so.

Speaking to audience members and project staff five years on, it was clear that husbands and mothers-in-law who tuned in to our shows saw themselves and their lives reflected in their fictional or ‘real life’ counterparts. This, they said, was critical.

As one husband told me, this was the first time he heard other men like him talk about accompanying their wives to the health clinic for her check-ups or saving money for a birth. While such anecdotes give us an idea of what inspired people to do things differently, they don’t give us – and the global health sector – the much-needed hard evidence of ‘what works’.

What we can say with confidence is that, after watching or listening to our programmes, husbands and mothers-in-law in both Bangladesh and Ethiopia to know the recommended guidance and to believe that it’s commonly followed in their community.

With improved knowledge and new perceptions of local social norms, influencers can offer better advice and support, helping secure a safer future for mothers and their babies. It’s just difficult to say exactly what it was about the programmes that set off this chain of events.

Future food for thought

Through influencing influencers, we’ve also begun to tackle gender stereotypes. For instance, we’ve shown that it’s OK for men and women to talk openly and freely together. In Ethiopia, our male and female radio presenters often share their own baby stories with each other in a light and friendly way.

We’ve also helped show that caring about babies is just as manly as keeping a job down and putting food on the table. Our TV drama in Bangladesh achieved this by weaving together storylines about male characters struggling with debt and ‘bad guys’, together with those about couples having a baby.

We’ve succeeded in getting men to watch and listen to our shows and get more involved in what’s considered a ‘woman’s issue'. We’ve done so without overtly challenging the status quo in which ‘men are the decision-makers.

Our next challenge is figuring out how we can help transform traditional gender roles, which could arguably have even longer-lasting impacts that also go beyond health.  

If you want to find out more about how Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Media Action used media and communication at scale to improve maternal, newborn and child health, go to our digital platform, .

is a Health Adviser with Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Media Action. She tweets as .

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