About Gender Lens

The age of social media is bringing new challenges. While social media has created spaces for empowerment, activism, and connection, it has also exposed people to new forms of gendered abuse, harassment, and misinformation.

Both the online and offline worlds are deeply gendered. As gender-based violence persists globally, it has also spread into the digital realm – where competing gender identity narratives and gendered disinformation can undermine social cohesion and threaten to destabilise democratic societies.

Tech-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV), along with other gendered harms, silences voices, threatens safety, and restricts public participation both on and offline, disproportionately affecting women and LGBTQ+ individuals. Vital voices are being removed, or are removing themselves, from the political dialogue and civic spaces. Societies and political institutions suffer as highly qualified individuals withdraw or are driven from public life.

Men and boys are also being targeted. Concepts of masculinity are weaponised by malign actors, such as violent extremist and terrorist groups, to stoke fear, anger, and division. They are also used to degrade, discredit and ridicule men and boys who may not conform to their preferred concept of masculinity.

Open source analysis provides a unique lens for reporting on these topics. At CIR, we monitor gender-based violence and restrictions on individuals’ rights in several countries – from the Taliban’s repressive laws on women’s work and education in Afghanistan, to the torrent of gendered online abuse, threats and hate speech aimed at activists, politicians, sports persons, and journalists around the globe.

After several years of monitoring these topics across multiple countries and contexts, including Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Ethiopia, we realised this research deserves its own online space.

Our Gender Lens hub collates all of CIR’s gender work in one place, allowing you to filter it by topic and country. Our goal is for it to inform reporting and policymaking, increase awareness, and, above all, establish real-world countermeasures to protect against gendered harms and strengthen democratic resilience to gendered manipulation tactics.

Our goals

Strengthen understanding

We want to strengthen the evidence base on gender-based violence, repression, and the weaponisation of gender by malign actors – providing quality analysis and data that can be used by journalists, policymakers, and the general public.

Raise awareness and counter harms

Engagement with domestic and international media, as well as local partners, enables us to reach wide audiences with our findings. Our work enables countermeasures by survivors, civil society, social media platforms and governments. Exposing this behaviour is essential to better protecting those affected and empowering their safe and meaningful participation in all forms of public life.

Empower stakeholders

We want to empower CSOs and government institutions with practical recommendations to address gender-based violence, particularly TFGBV. Through bespoke training, we build capacities with stakeholders so they can identify and address the root causes of gender-based violence.

How we do this

At CIR, we continuously develop techniques and tools to uncover and expose TFGBV, including gendered disinformation and other gender-based harms. We analyse patterns, identify root causes, and address them in collaboration with partners on the ground.

We also work to monitor forms of offline violence, using open source investigative techniques to monitor potential human rights abuses and compile data on restrictions or policies targeting women and LGBTQ+ rights.

Our topics

Content in the Gender Lens hub is categorised to make it easier to filter by topic and country.

The terms we have used to organise content are explained in full below. In cases where we have used an expert definition, we have provided a source. Some tags have been developed by CIR to group various themes under one term.

Conflict-Related Sexual Violence	Conflict-Related Sexual Violence, or CRSV, covers all forms of sexual violence that are directly or indirectly linked to a conflict, including (but not limited to) rape, sexual slavery or forced prostitution, forced pregnancy or abortion, enforced sterilisation, or forced marriage. Source: UN
Gender-Based Violence	Gender-based violence refers to any type of harm that is perpetrated against a person or group of people because of their factual or perceived sex, gender, sexual orientation and/or gender identity. Source: Council of Europe
Gendered Disinformation	Gendered disinformation, also referred to as gender-based disinformation, focuses on the intersection between disinformation and gender. It includes false or misleading narratives used against an individual or group due to their gender. Source: EU Disinfo Lab
Policies and Restrictions	This covers our analysis and monitoring of edicts, policies and restrictions issued by governments and de facto authorities that directly impact or restrict fundamental rights to education, work, security and healthcare, along gendered lines. Our work in this area largely focuses on restrictions against women and girls in Afghanistan.
Technology-Facilitated Gender-based Violence	Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence, or TFGBV, is an act of violence perpetrated by one or more individuals that is committed, assisted, aggravated and amplified in part or fully by the use of information and communication technologies or digital media against a person based on gender. Source: UNFPA
Women in Activism, Politics, and Media	This category encompasses our research and interviews with women activists, politicians, journalists and other public figures. These conversations cover the challenges they face in their work, including but not limited to online abuse, barriers to reporting/public participation, risks to their security, and gender-based violence. While we use data to strengthen the evidence base on GBV and other issues relating to women’s rights, these voices provide vital insight into the impacts.