Abstract
Introduction:
New technological advances, including generative artificial intelligence, have provided new methods of victimizing women and girls. The discussion on the impact of digital violence against women and girls throughout the United Nations 70th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women represented a global and unified effort to influence and shape global policy discourse for digital violence against women and girls.
Discussion:
This perspective paper examined the digital violence against women and girls in a global context and reviewed existing international and the U.S. federal legal frameworks. Critical gaps were identified, and recommendations were presented.
Recommendations:
Digital violence against women and girls is a justice and public health crisis. Concerted legal and legislative regulations at an international, national, regional, and local level are essential to protect women and girls. Nurses and health care professionals are stakeholders in the protection of women and girls from digital violence.
Keywords
Introduction
New technological advances, including generative artificial intelligence (AI), have provided new methods of victimizing women and girls. The focus of the United Nations (UN) 70th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW70) was to ensure and strengthen access to justice for all women and girls by promoting inclusive and equitable legal systems, eliminating discriminatory laws, policies, and practices, and addressing structural barriers.
The discussion on the impact of digital violence against women and girls throughout CSW70 represented a global and unified effort to influence and shape global policy discourse to protect women and girls from digital violence. This perspective paper aimed to examine the digital violence against women and girls in a global context, review existing international and the U.S. federal legal frameworks, identify critical gaps, and provide policy and practice recommendations.
Digital Violence Against Women and Girls
Digital violence against women and girls refers to any act that is committed, assisted, aggravated, or amplified through the use of digital technologies to facilitate sexual exploitation and psychological harm toward women and girls. As part of technology-facilitated violence (TFV), digital violence includes doxxing, image-based abuse, online impersonation, sextortion, cyberstalking, cyberbullying, online harassment, revenge porn, and deepfake (UN Women, 2025a). Digital violence infiltrates homes, workplaces, and schools and can escalate from digital spaces into physical violence, including femicide. The prevalence of digital violence ranges from 13% to 58% globally (Zhu et al., 2021). As of 2022, only 30% of countries had laws addressing cyber violence or digital violence (Recavarren & Elefante, 2023).
Nurses as the Stakeholders to Protect Women and Girls
Nurses are stakeholders and a driving force in ensuring health and safety of women and girls. Nurses understand local culture, national policies, and clinical practice. This positions the nursing profession and nurses to influence accountability for digital violence across communities. Nursing, particularly transcultural nursing, recognizes digital violence against women and girls as a justice and health crisis and is uniquely positioned to ensure that policy-making, nursing curricula, and community-level response reflect the clinical realities and the cultural contexts. The holistic approach of nursing contributes to the concerted global effort to raise awareness and promote equitable and responsible laws, policies, and practices to protect women and girls from digital violence.
Legal Frameworks and Protections in the United States
The United States has made incremental progress at the federal level. The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), created in 1994, and after several reauthorizations, included technological abuse as a form of domestic violence (https://www.justice.gov/ovw/violence-against-women-act).
In 2022, the reauthorization of VAWA established a federal civil right of action for victims of nonconsensual disclosure of intimate images.
The Take It Down Act (Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and Networks), established on May 19, 2025, criminalizes the publication of Non-Consensual Intimate Image Abuse (NCII), including AI-generated images; mandates that platforms remove content, including copies, within 48 hr of victim notification; and imposes harsher penalties when minors are involved (https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB11314). One issue with the law may be a violation of free speech, which could make prosecution difficult (Goodman, 2025).
The Defiance Act (Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits), reintroduced in 2025, would complement Take It Down by granting survivors a federal civil right of action for deepfake intimate imagery (https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/1837/text). The act was passed by the Senate in early 2026 and, as of this writing, is pending in the House of Representatives.
International Protections and Legal Frameworks
Several countries have enacted protective actions, offering comparative insight into global policy advocacy. In Japan and South Korea, smartphone manufacturers, responding to a surge in voyeuristic photography targeting women and girls in public spaces, placed an audible camera shutter sound that cannot be disabled (https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/llglrd/2019669583/2019669583.pdf). In July 2023, Japan further codified protections under the “Satsueizai” (photography crime) law, which criminalizes voyeuristic photography, its distribution, and storage, with financial penalties and up to 5 years in prison depending on the specific crime.
In Germany, Section 201a of the German Criminal Code prohibits the creation or transmission of intimate images without consent, with penalties of up to 2 years’ imprisonment (https://www.lewik.org/term/15704/violation-of-intimate-privacy-by-taking-photographs-section-201a-german-criminal-code/). Section 184k specifically protects against the secret production of images in embarrassing or intimate poses, regardless of location; the implementation of the EU General Data Protection Regulation further reinforces digital privacy protections for all individuals (https://polizei.nrw/en/article/upskirting-and-downblousing-are-punishable-by-law).
In Australia, the Online Safety Act of 2021, administered by the eSafety Commissioner, provides a comprehensive legal framework covering adult cyber abuse, image-based abuse, and cyberbullying of children (https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/media-technology-communications/internet/online-safety/current-legislation). The Commissioner can order the removal of digital content within 24 hours. Women and girls account for two-thirds of all image-based abuse reports filed with eSafety (Office of the eSafety Commissioner, 2017).
Current Legislative and Policy Gaps
Despite emerging legislative actions, critical gaps persist. Fewer than one-third of countries had enacted laws specifically addressing digital violence against women and girls (Recavarren & Elefante, 2023). No international law addresses technology-facilitated gender-based violence. This absence allows perpetrators to operate across jurisdictions while targeting victims globally, with no mechanism for cross-border investigation or survivor support.
The European Directive on Violence Against Women (https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/policies/justice-and-fundamental-rights/gender-equality/gender-based-violence/ending-gender-based-violence_en) and the Inter-American Belém do Pará Convention (https://www.oas.org/en/mesecvi/convention.asp) represent incremental progress, but implementation remains inconsistent, and cross-border enforcement is absent. The UN Women (2025b) identifies fragmented international enforcement as one of the most structurally unsolved problems.
AI has made it so easy to produce harmful, image-based abuse against women and girls. However, legal systems are lagging in addressing the impact of AI on digital violence against women and girls. Of 138 countries assessed in a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) study, only 24 mentioned “gender” in their national AI strategy, and 18 included gender-responsive provisions (UN Women & Everyday Sexism Project, 2025). Currently, a perpetrator can generate synthetic sexual imagery of any woman and face no consequences in most jurisdictions unless and until it is publicly distributed. It is essential for the UN to work with all nations to establish international laws specifically addressing technology-facilitated gender-based violence.
Systems and Structural Gap
For many women and girls, the tools designed to protect them are inaccessible. In low-income countries, only 21% of women are connected to the internet (UN Women, 2025a). Women who cannot independently access digital platforms are less likely to recognize technology-facilitated surveillance and are unable to access legal or support resources. In many regions, women’s access to technology is controlled by male partners or household heads who own devices and pay for connectivity. When a woman’s only pathway to help runs through a shared device monitored by a partner, digital protection remains inaccessible. Digital safety education rarely reaches the women at higher risk.
Recommendations
CSW70 advanced justice frameworks centered on accountability, prevention, and systems change, creating a strong foundation for protecting women and girls from digital violence. Within this context, preventing digital violence against women and girls is not a woman’s or girl’s private issue, but a social justice and health issue as well as a public responsibility at an individual, local, national, and international level.
Exercising Self-Protection
At the individual level, in the absence of equitable legal protection, women and girls often navigate digital violence alone. For women and girls whose device access is monitored or shared, safety planning must account for the risk that changing passwords or deleting apps may alert an abuser. Guidance should include how to use private browsing mode, how to seek help without leaving a digital trail, and how to identify whether a device has been compromised by spyware. Women and girls should limit personal information shared on social media profiles and other public-facing platforms, enable privacy settings on all digital accounts, and use multi-factor authentication.
Integrating Digital Violence in Nursing Education and Practice
Nurses are often the first point of contact for women and girls who are victims of digital violence. Trauma-informed care provides the framework for that contact, with culture-informed care embedded. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration identify Cultural, Historical, and Gender Issues as one of six foundational principles of a trauma-informed approach (https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/138924).
Local and national nursing education curricula and professional development programs should include competencies in recognizing digital violence, providing trauma-informed and culture-informed care, as well as advocating for patient support if they have been identified as a victim of digital violence. Nurses can only provide trauma-informed and culture-informed care if they are trained to recognize victims of digital abuse. Nursing credentialing bodies and regulatory organizations across countries are well positioned to establish competency standards for digital violence based on transcultural nursing and trauma-informed frameworks.
Conducting Research on Prevention and Care for Survivors
The UN Women (2025b) reported that 58% of girls have experienced online abuse. Collaboration among international organizations, including the UN, World Health Organization (WHO), and Transcultural Nursing Society, would strengthen the concerted effort to drive policy and funding priority for research on digital violence. Research should focus on effective legal and system-level strategies to prevent digital violence against women and girls. Survivor-centered research is imperative to develop targeted interventions to protect women from digital violence, as well as provide culture-informed, person-centered, and trauma-informed care for women who have encountered digital violence.
Conclusion
Digital violence against women and girls is a justice and public health crisis. Rigorous legal and legislative regulations at an international, national, regional, and local level are essential to prevent digital violence against women and girls and provide care for those who have been victimized. Nurses and health care professionals with knowledge of transcultural care are well positioned to serve as change agents. As technology advances, the role of nursing in upholding individuals’ right to enjoy the highest attainable standard of health extends beyond borders (International Council of Nurses, 2025) to protect and support women and girls worldwide.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This work is disseminated in partnership with the Transcultural Nursing Society (TCNS), a Non-Governmental Organization in Special Consultative Status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) since 2025. Part of the authors (Ivana Dehorney, Natalie A. Cyphers, Lynne Zajac, Mei R. Fu) participated as delegates from TCNS to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW70), convened March 10–21, 2026. The perspectives presented here are grounded in TCNS’s mission to advance transcultural nursing knowledge, practice, research, and global health equity.
Author Contributions
Conception and design: All authors.
Manuscript drafting, revision and editing: All authors.
Final approval of manuscript: All authors.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.