Pakistan's fight against Gender-Based Violence (GBV) is increasingly being undermined online. Women, girls, and transgender individuals, regardless of age, religion, ethnicity, and socio-economic status, continue to face physical, sexual, psychological, and digital violence. As social media platforms become spaces for harassment, blackmail, and public shaming, Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence (TFGBV) is not only creating new harms but also reinforcing the very social norms that decades of legal reform sought to dismantle.
Online Abuse Amplifies Offline Violence
Survivors of domestic violence, intimate partner violence, or sexual harassment face continued abuse via digital surveillance and online intimidation. The Digital Rights Foundation (DRF) reported more than 5,000 TFGBV-related complaints in 2026, including blackmail, sextortion, and deepfake abuse. This confirms that online harm is increasingly structured around gendered exploitation and coercion rather than isolated incidents of trolling. Sensitised mainstream media coverage has contributed to reducing stigma and encouraging reporting, but digital technologies increasingly facilitate and reinforce victim-blaming and online abuse.
The interconnected nature of offline and online violence places them on a continuum. Offline violence is increasingly extending into digital spaces as perpetrators use technology to monitor, threaten, harass, and/or intimidate victims. Online violence generates profound offline consequences such as self-censorship, emotional distress, reputational damage, and, in certain cases, risks to physical safety. The cases of Sana Yousaf, Eshaal Fatima, and Noor Muqadam exemplify this effect.
Weak Legal Frameworks Fail to Keep Pace
Pakistan has made significant legislative progress through women's protection laws and amendments to the Pakistan Penal Code, yet the rapid evolution of technology is outpacing legal response frameworks. The Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA) remains the primary legal instrument for addressing TFGBV. However, its utility is diminishing due to a lack of institutional intent, mechanisms, and practices that are synchronised with international best practices and can keep pace with the changing nature and complexity of online abuse.
Social media is fast turning into a digital judge, jury, and executioner, where circulation of a private image or conversations leads to social punishment, forced reconciliation, and/or withdrawal from public life. Nevertheless, social acceptance of harmful practices and the persistence of victim-blaming attitudes continue to undermine these gains. The justice system continues to fail women, as conviction rates in sexual violence cases are estimated at around 3% despite the establishment of specialised GBV courts.
TFGBV as a Tool to Reinforce Patriarchal Norms
TFGBV is evolving rapidly, but legislation is struggling to keep pace. The legislative and policy trajectory in Pakistan has recognised VAW, GBV, and TFGBV as a structural issue rooted in unequal gender relations, yet this has failed to be reflected in a social mindset that would condemn it unequivocally rather than seeking qualifiers under the pretext of socio-cultural and, at times, religious norms. Following the principle that justice delayed is justice denied, conviction rates in sexual violence cases remain negligible—estimated at around 3%—despite the existence of GBV courts. TFGBV remains unchecked, unmonitored, and largely undocumented, thus becoming an amplifier and enabler of offline GBV.
Digital users are negatively impacting progressive social change generated over the years by reinforcing harmful socio-cultural practices through anonymity, virality, and weak platform accountability. Doctored videos and photoshopped images are circulated without any social remorse or legal fear. A benign difference of opinion online can quickly escalate into coordinated harassment, where women are labelled “characterless” or “dishonourable.” Anonymous and/or pseudonymous accounts on social media not only lower social and legal accountability but also enable cyberstalking, coordinated harassment campaigns, defamation, and targeted moral policing of women's mobility, voice, and agency.
AI-Based Portal Launched to Counter TFGBV
This is indicative of a dangerous trend as TFGBV becomes a tool to re-legitimise coercive social norms under digital conditions. It is creating a hybrid violence ecosystem, where online and offline harms are mutually reinforcing; where the absence of effective platform accountability and enforcement systems is creating a persistent cycle of social impunity; and resulting in the structural transformation of GBV/VAW into a digitally networked system of control. Digital narratives on TFGBV not only mirror offline patriarchal norms but also often reproduce and strengthen them in digital form. It is reinforcing honour-based ideologies through viral shaming content and victim-blaming in comment cultures. Together, it is normalising community policing of women's voice and agency by effectively digitising traditional mechanisms of control.
Social media is fast turning into a digital judge, jury, and executioner, where circulation of a private image or conversations leads to social punishment, forced reconciliation, and/or withdrawal from public life. It happens at such speed that fact-checking and verification are effectively run over. Reputational damage, emotional trauma, and physical safety of the female victim are never a consideration, even though many innocent lives have been lost.
Need for Comprehensive Reform
The transition from GBV to TFGBV in Pakistan demonstrates that violence, instead of being displaced by technology, is being reconfigured. TFGBV cannot be addressed through legal or technological fixes alone. It needs to engage at the normative framework level, i.e., social acceptance and collective belief systems, because it intervenes at the level where both GBV and TFGBV are legitimised. The persistence and adaptation of violence from offline GBV into digital spaces shows that the core driver is not technology itself, but the social normative framework that makes violence socially acceptable, transferable, and repeatable across offline and online spaces.
PECA reform is urgently needed to protect digital rights in Pakistan, as a recent policy paper warns. The launch of an AI-based “Digital Defenders Pakistan” portal aims to strengthen a safe and inclusive digital civic space, but broader societal change remains essential.
