Digital violence against women and children is structurally enabled, major literature review finds

A sweeping synthesis of scholarship on digital violence against women and children has concluded that these harms are not isolated incidents caused by individual bad actors, but are systematically enabled by the architectures, business models and governance failures of contemporary digital platforms. The review, published in Frontiers in Sociology by Thendo Phophi Mbambala and Mampilo Phahlane of the University of South Africa, consolidates 58 sources into an integrated analytical framework spanning domain, structural, epistemological and socio-political dimensions, and finds that fragmented definitions, fragile evidence practices and uneven governance capacity interact to sustain persistent justice gaps.

The study is explicitly a state-of-the-literature review rather than a protocol-driven systematic review or meta-analysis. The authors searched Scopus, Web of Science Core Collection, EBSCOHost, ProQuest, Google Scholar and selected policy sources from the United Nations, the World Health Organization and UN Women, covering publications from January 2000 to March 2026. The screening process, documented using the PRISMA 2020 reporting structure, identified 512 records, reduced to 428 after deduplication. Of these, 293 were excluded at title-and-abstract stage, 135 full texts were assessed, 77 were excluded at full-text stage, and 58 sources formed the final corpus. The most common full-text exclusion reasons were insufficient focus on women and children, primarily technical focus without social or policy analysis, and duplicate publication of the same data.

The analysis employed reflexive thematic synthesis, involving line-by-line coding of source material, organization of codes into descriptive themes, and development of analytical themes aligned with four research questions. Two authors independently coded a subset of sources, with disagreements resolved through discussion, although formal inter-coder agreement statistics were not calculated because the analysis was interpretive and iterative. The coding process produced 1,247 initial codes, which were consolidated into 247 codes or categories, then refined into 27 descriptive themes and four analytical themes. The authors emphasize that thematic synthesis is interpretive and that other researchers might organize the same literature differently.

Across the corpus, digital violence is conceptualized as a continuum of harms encompassing harassment, intimidation, image-based abuse, surveillance and reputational damage. The review identifies a recurring concept of boundary erosion, whereby harms are not confined to a single platform or moment but persist, migrate and intensify across temporal and spatial contexts. This erosion manifests in three ways: spatially, as harms cross from online to offline and enter victims’ homes and workplaces; temporally, as abusive content persists indefinitely and creates ongoing vulnerability; and jurisdictionally, as harms cross national boundaries and complicate legal response. The literature also reveals an unresolved debate about whether digital violence requires special criminalization through new offenses specifically addressing online harms, or adaptation of existing legal frameworks to digital contexts.

On the structural dimension, the review finds that the literature consistently demonstrates that digital violence is structurally enabled by platform architectures and political-economic incentives. Platform affordances such as anonymity, scalability and virality facilitate both the reach and persistence of abusive content, while algorithmic amplification and engagement-driven business models prioritize visibility and interaction, often at the expense of user safety. The synthesis describes surveillance capitalism, in which the data-extractive economy provides materials such as location data and personal information that can be weaponized for stalking and harassment. It also highlights generational dynamics, noting that children’s vulnerability is compounded by adultist assumptions that minimize their experiences, and that platforms designed for adult users often fail to provide adequate protections for younger users.

The epistemological analysis identifies significant constraints on the evidence base itself. Inconsistent definitions and indicators limit comparability between studies and hinder cumulative knowledge. Under-reporting emerges as a consistent finding, frequently interpreted as a rational response to low trust in institutional and platform-based reporting mechanisms, meaning official statistics often underestimate the scale and severity of digital violence. The literature also documents forms of epistemic injustice, whereby survivor knowledge is marginalized or devalued within formal systems of evidence production, with experiential accounts sometimes dismissed as subjective or insufficiently verifiable. The review notes that non-consensual image sharing is often legally interpreted as a privacy violation rather than a form of sexual violence, which the cited scholarship argues diminishes the nature of that violence and makes prosecution difficult.

Geographic imbalance is a central finding of the corpus analysis. Of the 58 included sources, 22, or 37.9 percent, focused primarily on Global North contexts, while only four, or 6.9 percent, focused principally on Global South contexts. The remaining 32 sources, or 55.2 percent, were classified as cross-national, global, conceptual, theoretical, review or policy-oriented works without a single identifiable empirical setting. Among sources with a clearly identifiable regional focus, Global North contexts were substantially more represented than Global South contexts. The authors warn that this imbalance creates interventions that may not be meaningful to regional contexts, given different legal systems, resource limitations and cultural conditions, and that policy frameworks are often developed without sufficient consideration of context-specific constraints in underrepresented regions.

On governance, the review finds that responses remain fragmented across legal systems, platform regulation and policy frameworks, with implementation inconsistent and often reactive. Legal frameworks frequently struggle to keep pace with technological change, resulting in gaps in protection, enforcement and redress. The identified justice gaps, defined as the disconnect between harm experienced and remedy available, are shaped by jurisdictional complexity, limits of platform self-regulation, evidentiary challenges, institutional cultures that may reinforce victim-blaming, and gendered assumptions embedded in legal frameworks. Platform governance mechanisms such as reporting systems and content moderation have expanded but are often criticized for lack of transparency, inconsistent enforcement and limited responsiveness to user needs, with survivor experiences suggesting that existing mechanisms frequently shift the burden of safety onto individuals rather than addressing structural drivers of harm.

The review also documents emerging alternative approaches, including survivor-led advocacy and hashtag activism that have shifted public perception and built solidarity, community-based interventions creating alternative support networks and digital self-defense resources, policy innovation including national and international efforts toward legislative reform such as the EU Digital Services Act, and technological resistance through the development of secure communication apps and alternative platforms. However, the authors note that these initiatives often operate without sufficient institutional support or scalability, limiting their broader impact. The urgency of the synthesis is underscored, the authors write, by recent global surveys indicating that 73 percent of women have experienced some form of online violence, a figure the review attributes to UN Women’s 2025 report.

The authors acknowledge several limitations that affect the generalizability of their findings. The review includes only English-language publications, introducing linguistic bias and potentially excluding important contributions from non-English speaking contexts. The search strategy and database coverage favor Global North publications, and the emphasis on peer-reviewed sources may exclude important grey literature, practitioner reports and community-generated knowledge. The 2000 to March 2026 timeframe may exclude foundational works and may not capture the most recent developments in a rapidly evolving field. Because the corpus included heterogeneous empirical, conceptual, review and policy sources, a single formal risk-of-bias instrument was not applied across all source types. The review was not registered as a systematic-review protocol. Despite these constraints, the authors argue that the synthesis demonstrates the need for coordinated interventions spanning legal reform, platform accountability, prevention and survivor-centered support, and that without greater alignment between research, policy and practice, interventions risk reproducing the very inequalities they seek to address.

Subject of Research: A literature review of digital violence affecting women and children, covering harm typologies, socio-technical drivers, evidence practices and governance responses

Article Title: Digital violence against women and children: the state of the literature

Article References: Mbambala, T. P., & Phahlane, M. (2026). Digital violence against women and children: the state of the literature. Frontiers in Sociology, 11, Article 1977287. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2026.1977287

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fsoc.2026.1977287

Keywords: digital violence, technology-facilitated violence, women, children, platform governance, justice gap, online abuse, thematic synthesis, evidence gaps, Global South, image-based abuse, state-of-the-literature review