A young lady posted a video of her celebrating a career milestone; she expected congratulations from her professional network. Instead, the comment section was filled with sexual propositions and personal attacks questioning her competence. Within hours, someone had provided edited personal photos of her and was circulating them across social media. Her career milestone had become a battlefield for harassment that would last for weeks. All this happened because she is a woman, and society often attributes female success to male connections or sexual favours, rather than acknowledging their own hard work and merit.

With Nigeria’s increasingly connected digital landscape, women and marginalised groups often face a similar epidemic of violence that leaves wounds as real as physical harm, but often goes unrecognised and unaddressed. 

The Invisible Violence

Technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) represents a new frontier of harm that mirrors and amplifies offline inequalities. Technology-facilitated gender-based violence can be expressed in various forms of abuse from fairly known acts like cyberstalking, doxxing, cyberbullying, hate speech and impersonation, to more sinister acts like cyber flashing and AI image abuse and so on.  But this definition barely captures the lived reality of women navigating Nigeria’s digital spaces.

Picture a young journalist who receives rape threats after publishing an investigative piece. Consider the female politician whose deepfake videos circulate during campaign season. Think about the entrepreneur whose business reviews are flooded with gendered slurs after she refuses a business proposition. These incidents aren’t mere “cruise” or “banter”; they’re calculated attempts to silence, intimidate, and make women feel smaller in the digital spaces.

Victims of TFGBVsuffer severe harm, such as long-term psychological trauma, stigmatisation, depression, low self-esteem, job loss, fear and in extreme cases lead to suicide. Dismissing these experiences as just online banter minimises the effects of digital violence that translates into offline consequences.

TFGBV can be expressed as…

Image-Based Sexual Abuse: Non-consensual sharing of intimate images, often called “revenge porn,” has become disturbingly common. Perpetrators weaponise private photos to humiliate, blackmail, or control victims. The threat alone, “behave or I’ll share your photos”, can be enough to silence women’s voices. When AI is applied to this type of harm, we have situations like the one discussed in our first “Viral and Vulnerable” article

Doxxing and Privacy Violations: Personal information like home addresses, phone numbers, or workplace details is shared publicly to enable offline harassment. For women in public roles, such as activists, journalists, and politicians, this creates genuine physical safety risks that could be exacerbated by politically charged environments.

Coordinated Harassment Campaigns: These involve organised mass harassment, where groups flood victims with abusive messages across multiple platforms. The campaigns primarily target women who speak out on controversial issues or challenge traditional gender roles. Noteworthy examples in Nigeria include the counter-narrative against the Feminist Coalition’s efforts during the 2020 #EndSars protests and the harassment of political party/candidate supporters during the 2023 presidential elections. The central aim of these efforts is to derail important conversations and silence victims of various forms of oppression.

Cyberstalking: Here, bad actors exploit GPS tracking through shared apps to monitor social media activity, using technology to maintain control over former partners, business associates or even strangers. The same tools meant to keep us connected become instruments of surveillance and control in the hands of malicious elements

Professional Sabotage: Fake reviews, coordinated reporting to get accounts suspended, or harassment designed to damage the professional reputation of creators, journalists, and women in the public eye. In Nigeria’s growing digital economy, this can have serious economic consequences.

Deepfakes and Manipulated Content: The emergence of AI technology has made it easier to create convincingly fake videos or audio recordings (deepfakes). Women in public life are particularly vulnerable to having their images manipulated for non-consensual pornographic content. This technology is also used to target elected officials and political appointees with videos that portray them making false statements.

The Silence That Amplifies Harm

One of the most misleading aspects of TFGBV is how it’s often minimised or dismissed. “Just ignore them,” “turn off your phone,” or “that’s what happens when you put yourself out there” are common responses that blame victims rather than address the perpetrators of harm.

This dismissive attitude has real consequences. More and more women are limiting or leaving social media spaces as a result of online gender-based violence. When women withdraw from digital spaces to protect themselves, we lose their voices, perspectives, innovations, and contributions, creating an absence in the rapidly developing digital landscape. 

Furthermore, in the digital entrepreneurship and online business space, harassment forces women entrepreneurs offline, which in turn triggers a decline in the economic impact they could have made in Nigeria

Understanding TFGBV in Nigeria requires grappling with how traditional gender dynamics play out in digital spaces. Online harassment often reflects offline inequalities; the woman who challenges authority in a virtual meeting faces the same resistance she might encounter in a boardroom, but with additional layers of anonymity-enabled aggression.

Religious and cultural justifications are frequently weaponised to legitimise harassment. Women who speak publicly about gender issues, reproductive rights, or challenge traditional roles often face campaigns framed as defending “moral values” or “African culture.” This cultural packaging makes the violence seem legitimate to some observers, complicating efforts to address it.

The rise of influencer culture and social media entrepreneurship has also created new vulnerabilities. Young women building online businesses or personal brands face unique pressures, with appearance-based harassment, sexualization, and attempts to undermine their professional credibility becoming routine parts of their online experience. 

Legal Frameworks: Promise and Problems

Nigeria’s legal approach to digital violence reflects broader tensions between security and rights. The Cybercrime Act of 2015 criminalises various forms of online harassment, but its vague language creates problems. Terms like “grossly offensive” or “causing annoyance” are so broad that they can be weaponised against critics while failing to protect actual victims. This is evidenced in the ongoing case of Erisco Foods vs. Chioma Okoli where a viral product review led to the drawn-out legal prosecution of customers.

The Economic Community of West African States Court of Justice ruled that section 24 (1) of the Cybercrime Act was problematic, highlighting how poorly crafted laws can actually undermine rather than protect digital rights. The Nigeria Data Protection Act represents progress, establishing frameworks for handling personal data and giving citizens recourse when their information is misused. However, enforcement remains weak, and many Nigerians remain unaware of their rights under the law.

Beyond Individual Harm: Systemic Impact

TFGBV isn’t just about individual victims; it shapes who feels safe participating in digital spaces and how they participate. When young girls see successful women being torn down online, they learn to stay quiet. When female activists face coordinated harassment, others hesitate to speak up. When women entrepreneurs are driven offline, innovation suffers.

This creates a cycle where digital spaces become increasingly male-dominated and hostile to diverse perspectives. The technology sector, already struggling with gender representation, becomes even more unwelcoming. Political discourse loses women’s voices precisely when their participation is most needed.

Fighting Back: Grassroots Resistance

Despite these challenges, Nigerian women and allies are pushing back. Organisations like Stand to End Rape (STER) and TechHer provide digital safety training, support networks, and advocacy. They’re filling gaps left by inadequate policy responses and platform failures.

Online feminist spaces have emerged as both targets and sources of resistance. Women share strategies for staying safe, document harassment patterns, and create support networks that transcend geographic boundaries. These communities prove that technology can be a tool for liberation as much as oppression.

Digital security training has become a form of resistance. Learning to use encrypted messaging, secure email, privacy settings, and digital documentation tools isn’t just technical knowledge;  it’s a form of self-defence that enables continued participation in digital spaces.

Looking Forward

The path forward requires all of us, men and women, policymakers and platform designers, parents and educators, to recognise that digital violence is real violence. Until we treat TFGBV with the seriousness it deserves, Nigeria’s digital safety promise will remain unfulfilled, and too many voices will remain silenced by the unseen wounds of online abuse.

The internet emerged with a promise to democratise information and opportunity. For that promise to be fulfilled in Nigeria, we must ensure that digital spaces are safe for everyone and not just those with the power to fight back.

Sources 

• https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5315568 
• https://allafrica.com/stories/202501030402.html 
• https://www.evanigeria.org/online-gender-based-violence-promoting-digital-rights-for-women-in-nigeria/
• https://www.amnesty.org/en/what-we-do/technology/online-violence/
• https://www.unfpa.org/TFGBV 
• https://iclg.com/practice-areas/cybersecurity-laws-and-regulations/nigeria 
• https://equalitynow.org/what-we-do/end-sexual-exploitation/tech-facilitated-gender-based-violence/