The mobile phone has opened up new opportunities for women and girls in Southern Africa, but it has also become a way for them to be hurt and harassed. Women across the region have reported experiencing intimate images shared without their consent, blackmail from people they have never met, and harassment that follows them from one platform to the next. This kind of abuse is often sexual in tone and aimed at damaging their reputations.
A policy brief by the SADC Parliamentary Forum and Equality Now found that across the 16 SADC member states, technology-facilitated gender-based violence remains largely unrecognized by the law. Only five countries have laws that clearly treat this kind of violence as an offence. Many countries still have no specific prohibition on sharing intimate images without consent, on sexual extortion, or on online coercion.
Even where laws exist, their wording can work against survivors. In Malawi, the cyber law requires proof that the offender intended to cause “reasonable fear for safety”, a test that overlooks the humiliation at the heart of most image-based abuse. Women who report abuse often meet police officers untrained in handling digital evidence, courts with no standard forms for urgent preservation orders, and platforms under no legal obligation to help them.
Some countries in the region have made progress in addressing technology-facilitated gender-based violence. South Africa’s Cybercrimes Act makes it a crime to share intimate images without consent and has produced convictions. Zimbabwe has a similar prohibition, while Eswatini has procedures for preserving electronic evidence, and Botswana has a data protection regulator that handles privacy complaints.
Lesotho has a particular reason to care about this issue, having hosted the SADC Parliamentary Forum’s 50th Plenary Assembly in December 2021, where the SADC Model Law on Gender-Based Violence was adopted. The model law counts online gender-based cybercrimes and bullying among the forms of GBV, but nearly five years later, none of the 16 member states has fully domesticated it.
The brief asks parliamentarians to act on five fronts to address technology-facilitated gender-based violence. These include defining offences clearly in law, speeding up remedies, holding platforms accountable, funding prevention and enforcement, and preparing for new harms that existing laws may not reach. The SADC Parliamentary Forum could lead by establishing a TFGBV observatory to track progress and drafting templates for cross-border cooperation.
The harm caused by technology-facilitated gender-based violence reaches well beyond the individual, affecting public debate and the region’s efforts to bring more women into parliaments and newsrooms. The digital divide deepens the problem, with women in low- and middle-income countries 15 percent less likely than men to use mobile internet.
Key points
- The SADC region needs a region-wide effort to address technology-facilitated gender-based violence.
- Existing laws in the region often fail to recognize or adequately address technology-facilitated gender-based violence.
- The SADC Model Law on Gender-Based Violence provides a framework for addressing this issue, but its implementation is still lacking.
