LONDON - When Priya's boyfriend posted a nude photo of her online, he told her it would give her a confidence boost by making her an object of desire for other men.
"I was constantly walking on eggshells. It may not be physical violence but it would mean either I'm slut-shamed or I worried how my behavior would trigger him which always meant trouble for me," she said.As worldwide restrictions push more people online, digital gender abuse is likely to worsen now that the internet is an absolute necessity and there is no escape from it, said Azmina Dhrodia, a senior researcher at the World Wide Web Foundation.
Dhrodia said online violence was a manifestation of existing discrimination that women face offline so it was not surprising that it has proliferated under COVID-19. "It's a sobering fact because if you think about how much work is being done in terms of digital inclusion and getting people online," said Neema Iyer, head of Uganda-based digital rights group Pollicy.
There has also been a surge in spyware, stalkerware and other online monitoring software, said New York-based lawyer Akhila Kolisetty, co-founder of End Cyber Abuse, which mostly works to tackle digital abuse in South Asia. Human rights lawyer Kolisetty said India, Canada, England, Pakistan and Germany were among a small number of countries that have outlawed image-based sexual abuse, where private pictures are shared without consent.
Pollicy's Iyer said she had spoken to women who were laughed at for reporting online abuse to the police. Even when there are laws, conservative attitudes could stop women speaking up. Zoom, which soared to 200 million daily users from 10 million in less than three months in the pandemic, had multiple reports of "zoombombing", where strangers barge into private calls having gained access to a meeting invite.
Yet nearly all respondents in the EVAW and Glitch report said their experiences of online abuse during COVID-19 were not properly addressed by the tech giants.But that is because the health crisis itself has overshadowed all aspects of life, leaving gaps in the fight against digital abuse, said Caroline Sinders, a fellow at German internet institute, the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Berlin.
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