November 25 marked the start of UN Women’s annual “16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence” campaign, a global initiative aimed at raising awareness, mobilising communities, and pushing for stronger action to end all forms of violence against women and girls, including its rapidly expanding digital manifestations. While the campaign has now concluded, the issues it highlighted — particularly technology-facilitated gender-based violence — remain deeply entrenched and demand sustained attention and urgent action.
Worldwide, women are increasingly exposed to online abuse or have witnessed it firsthand. Technology-facilitated gender-based violence spans a broad spectrum: from sextortion and non-consensual image sharing to doxxing, cyberbullying, harassment, stalking, grooming, hacking, hate speech, impersonation, and the use of digital tools to monitor and target survivors.
Across the MENA region, this online violence is both pervasive and deeply damaging. Reports consistently highlight widespread blackmail, harassment, and image-based attacks that can upend women’s lives, reputations, and careers. Survivors often face profound psychological harm, social exclusion, and in extreme cases, even risk of suicide. This climate of fear silences many women, including activists and journalists, pushing them to self-censor, retreat from online platforms, or disengage from civic spaces altogether. The result is not only personal suffering but a significant erosion of women’s public voice and political agency.
In some countries, these patterns are easier to document thanks to active civil society monitoring. In others, however, the true extent of digital violence remains difficult to capture due to limited reporting mechanisms and insufficient data collection.
The Bahraini government, for instance, expressed its commitment to protecting women and girls on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, reaffirming its pledge to combat all forms of abuse, including digital violence, and to promote a safe environment where women can fully exercise their rights. Yet digital abuse remains under-reported, likely because Bahrain does not criminalise online threats and harassment. Reporting such incidents is also heavily stigmatised, with many women reluctant to come forward for fear of victim-blaming, reputational damage, or bringing shame upon their families.
A 2022 study on the cyber-victimisation of women in Bahrain found that women experience more cyber-attacks than men. Phishing accounted for the largest share of reported incidents (44%), followed by reports related to people or content (12%) and hacking cases (11%), while instances of sexual harassment, sextortion, and bullying were reported far less frequently.
A handful of Bahraini women have come forward to openly discuss, with the most prominent case being that of human rights defender Maryam Al-Khawaja. The Bahraini-Danish activist has long faced severe digital abuse linked to her human rights work. She has been targeted with coordinated online harassment, including death and rape threats, as well as impersonation campaigns created to discredit her activism. Twitter originally verified her account to curb these risks, but after the platform’s policy changes under Elon Musk, she lost that protection. This made her more vulnerable to impersonation, reduced the visibility of her posts, and weakened her ability to advocate for human rights issues in Bahrain.
Ultimately, the rise of digital gender-based violence in Bahrain and across the region underscores the urgent need for stronger legal protections, better data collection, and safer reporting pathways. Without these measures, online spaces will remain exclusionary environments that silence women and limit their participation in public life.