Women around the world continue to be under-represented in politics due to structural and systemic barriers. Today, growing gendered political violence facilitated by technology – both online and offline – is a major obstacle impeding women and gender diverse people from exercising their full democratic rights.
With the prevalence of social media, artificial intelligence and other digital technologies in politics, technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) has intensified the speed and reach of existing forms of violence that weaponise patriarchal gender norms to harm women’s political prospects. As a result of TFGBV, women often feel compelled to leave politics, are silenced online, or simply refuse to stand altogether. Those who stay pay a high price due to the negative mental and physical health consequences, as well as impacts on their families and social networks.
The rapid proliferation of unregulated digital technologies threatens democratic principles, especially equal representation. Therefore, TFGBV should be a key concern for political parties – as key democratic actors. Similarly, despite the essential role political parties play in supporting women candidates to stand and stay in politics, as sites of intervention for preventing and responding to TFGBV their potential has been underexplored.
This ALIGN toolkit offers gender professionals and others working on democratic strengthening a set of guiding questions and reflection prompts to identify which responses could be most effective and suitable in different contexts. These actions can complement other solutions to TFGBV, such as regulations promoting safety by design. The assessment spans a broad range of factors including: (1) different manifestations of gender norms, (2) the socio-political environment and (3) internal party structures.
Key messages
- Political parties are duty-bound to take action internally to respond to the significant threats posed to women members and candidates, including from their own party colleagues, affiliates and political peers.
- Existing party approaches to TFGBV can be assessed along a spectrum which ranges from active discouragement and passive acceptance to minimal response and transformative change.
- To generate effective and context-appropriate solutions to TFGBV, it is important to consider how gender norms shape leadership expectations and internal party practices, while also analysing the impact of the socio-political environment.
- While actions to support women to stay safe online are very common, codes of conduct and measures to strengthen women’s voice and power in the parties are proposed as most transformative solutions.
