Gendered Disinformation Gender-Based Violence Policies and Restrictions Tech-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence
CIR launches new ‘Gender Lens’ hub to spotlight research on gender-based violence and information manipulation
3 min read
CIR
Photo by Luis Alvarez via Getty Images
The internet has created a new frontier in the fight against gender-based violence. Women and members of the LGBTQ+ community are attacked online with hate speech, threats and gendered disinformation. Men and boys are targeted with gendered narratives that spread anger, hatred and division. But we know that digital harms do not remain digital – they spill out into the real world.
CIR’s research in Ethiopia detailed how women faced offline violence as a result of online threats; some suffered assaults and arrests or even had to flee the country. In Myanmar, we found that women posting pro-democracy views online were doxxed, with thousands of posts calling on the Myanmar military to arrest the women or seize their property.
CIR has also explored how misleading and harmful theories have been used to target the LGBTQ+ community online, as well as how LGBTQ+ identities and slurs are used to “discredit” and “shame” cisgender men and women, in particular, women’s rights advocates in Ethiopia and individuals in leadership roles in multiple countries.
About one in three women around the globe have been subject to gender-based violence in their lifetime, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). In Afghanistan, reports of violence against women are widespread and are set against a backdrop of dozens of Taliban-issued restrictions against women and girls, making justice or support virtually impossible to access.
To mark International Women’s Day 2025, CIR has launched Gender Lens, a new online hub focused on exposing and countering gender-based online and offline harms. It collates CIR’s open source investigations and analysis on gender-based violence, gendered disinformation, and restrictions on women’s rights, spanning several years of research and covering a range of countries and contexts.
“By uniting our work on identity-based disinformation, potential rights violations, and online harms in our new Gender Lens hub, we hope to provide a valuable resource to amplify awareness on a range of underreported topics and contexts,” says Rachel Winny, CIR’s Technical Director.
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“Gendered violence and information manipulation is not just a critical issue for the human rights community. It represents a threat to our national security and democratic institutions. Our goal is to provide robust evidence and practical action which can drive meaningful change.”
The hub’s research will also look at how competing narratives about gender identities and roles are weaponised in the information environment. It will analyse how gendered disinformation is used by malign actors to deepen division, undermine democratic institutions and destabilise societies.
The goal of Gender Lens is to strengthen the evidence base of gender-based violence and disinformation, expose online and offline harms, and empower civil society and policymakers with practical recommendations to address the root causes. Open source research is central to the work featured in the hub and is used to compile and analyse trends and investigate and verify potential human rights abuses.
To support journalists and researchers seeking reliable insights into gender-based issues, particularly in conflict zones where these challenges are often most severe, the Gender Lens hub allows users to filter CIR’s gender-related content by topic and country, or to browse reports via the interactive map feature.
While the hub highlights work from a range of countries, the similarities across different contexts are in some cases stark – particularly when it comes to the narratives used to target women online.
“Technology has given gender-based violence unprecedented reach. Too often, online harms are dismissed as inconsequential, yet our research shows that tech-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) has real and lasting impacts on people’s lives,” says Felicity Mulford, who leads CIR’s research on TFGBV in Ethiopia and the US.
“Digital abuse does not stay online – it spills into the real world, shaping narratives, silencing voices, and endangering safety. By using open source research methods, we can expose these harms, track their amplification, and drive meaningful action to combat them.”
Content presented in the Gender Lens hub covers six categories: Gender-Based Violence, Tech-facilitated Gender-Based Violence, Conflict-Related Sexual Violence, Policies and Restrictions, Gendered Disinformation, and Women in Activism, Media, and Politics. You can read more about these categories here.
CIR’s gender-focused work includes extensive coverage of the Taliban’s repressive laws against women and girls in Afghanistan, as well as reports on gender-based violence and femicide. Its research into TFGBV includes in-depth studies conducted in several countries, including Afghanistan, Ethiopia and Myanmar. CIR has also researched identity-based disinformation targeting women and LGBTQ+ individuals online and last year launched a playbook to address gendered disinformation during political elections.
CIR’s new Gender Lens hub will be regularly updated with new reports and articles, with the goal of increasing access to gender-focused, open source research covering a range of topics and contexts.