Photos by Diego Cuevas
Authored by: Diana J. Arango, Alicia Hammond, Kay Atanda, Taitu Heron, Erika Marisol Troncoso Saavedra, Florencia Savoca Truzzo
María is 18 years old.
She is about to begin university and has just started a part-time job. But her ex-boyfriend controls her through her phone and social media. He monitors her, shares intimate images without her consent, and threatens to send them to her mother and employer unless she stays with him. She has already reported the messages to social media platforms, but nothing happens.
During a recent World Bank-supported regional workshop in Bogotá, participants stepped into María's shoes. Using a ball of yarn, they recreated her search for help as a survivor of technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV). One thread led to her mother. Another to a community leader. Then to a women's center, legal aid, a psychologist, the police, an online chatbot, and finally a friend. At every step, María had to explain her story again, receiving little guidance on what to do next. The web became increasingly tangled.
María may be fictional. Her experience is not.
As digital technologies expand, so do new ways to control, threaten, and harm women. Between 2019 and 2020, 38% of women reported experiencing some form of online violence, and 85% said they had witnessed it happening to others.
In Latin America, 9 in 10 women report having witnessed or experienced online violence. Across the region, harassment, non-consensual sharing of intimate images, and digital surveillance disproportionately affect women, youth and LGBTQ+ persons. Findings from a World Bank survey in the Caribbean also point to tangible economic consequences: three-quarters of surveyed survivors reported that online violence negatively affected their job performance.
At the workshop in Bogotá, representatives from across the public and private sectors came together to discuss the urgent question: How can countries move from laws and policies to practical, survivor-centered prevention and response to TFGBV?
In opening remarks, María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés, Ecuador's former Minister of Foreign Affairs and former President of the UN General Assembly, highlighted technology-facilitated gender-based violence as one of the most urgent challenges of the digital age.
Five key insights emerged:
- Fragmented systems are failing survivors
Police, cybercrime units, duty bearing ministries, social services, legal aid providers, and digital platforms often operate in silos. Combined with limited awareness of TFGBV, weak institutional protocols, and inadequate legal tools, this leaves survivors navigating delayed and fragmented responses with little clarity about where to turn and what the benefits for seeking help are.
The burden falls most heavily on women, young people, and LGBTQ+ persons, who are often forced to relive traumatic experiences as they move between disconnected institutions.
- Laws matter – but implementation matters even more
The MESECVI Inter-American Model Law on Digital Violence Against Women, alongside reforms across the region, reflects growing recognition that gender-based violence has evolved in the digital age. During the workshop, representatives from MESECVI, UN Women, and UNFPA discussed both the progress made and the challenges of translating legal reforms into meaningful protection.
But legislation alone cannot guarantee safety.
Implementation requires sustained investment in institutions and people. Police, judges, mental health professionals, and service providers need trauma-informed training, clear protocols, and consistent standards for handling digital evidence. Governments also need technical and financial support to strengthen prevention, while survivors need accessible reporting pathways and communities need greater awareness of this emerging form of violence so they can seek help and challenge its use.
- Better data is crucial
Reliable evidence is fundamental to understanding the scale of TFGBV, targeting resources, designing prevention strategies, and measuring progress.
That requires both reliable administrative data and high-quality prevalence data. Useful administrative data should be cemented in interoperable data systems across police, justice, health services, and digital platforms. Prevalence data should follow international standard data collection practices and be compiled at least every five years as part of appropriate household surveys.
- Governments cannot tackle this challenge alone
Effective action requires governments, technology companies, and civil society to work together.
Mexico's recent collaboration with Google, Meta, and TikTok, to strengthen reporting, content takedowns, and survivor support illustrates what this can look like in practice.
Participants also highlighted fintech platforms, which can be exploited as channels for harassment - for example, through abusive payment messages after perpetrators have been blocked elsewhere. As more women earn, transact, and build businesses online, digital safety becomes inseparable from economic participation.
- Digital safety is a jobs issue
Online abuse pushes women out of digital spaces, workplaces, and economic opportunities. In Latin America and the Caribbean, women's labor force participation remains well below men's, while digital access continues to expand.
Unsafe online environments reduce productivity, increase absenteeism, discourage entrepreneurship, and undermine trust in digital services.
Addressing TFGBV is therefore not only a protection challenge but an investment in the digital economy. Countries will need cyber investigators, digital forensic specialists, trained counselors, prosecutors, and professionals able to work with technology companies to build survivor-centered systems.
Looking Ahead
Participants identified priorities: strengthening data systems, improving survivor reporting pathways, and deepening collaboration with digital platforms and other private-sector actors.
The message from Bogotá was clear: TFGBV is a development challenge that will shape whether digital transformation expands opportunities for women or eventually exposes them to more harm. Closing the digital divide requires more than connectivity. Without safety, privacy, and protection from abuse, women will remain excluded from the full benefits of the digital economy.
The Bank Group is well positioned to help countries move from legal frameworks to functioning systems by integrating TFGBV prevention and response into digital policies, strengthening referral pathways and data systems, and supporting partnerships across governments, technology companies, and civil society.
The conversation does not end here. Through the Gates Foundation-supported Digital Futures Partnership, the World Bank's Digital Empowerment and Equity Program is working with country clients and operational teams across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to identify and scale solutions that make online spaces safer, more inclusive and empowering for women and girls.
María's story may have been fictional. But the barriers she encountered were not.
The challenge is not making survivors more resilient to broken systems but building systems resilient enough to prevent abuse and support survivors. Because if digital spaces are not safe, they cannot be inclusive.
