Post #31 - "No Safe Space": The Growing Threat Women Face Online
- GINA
- Aug 4
- 6 min read
Content note: this article discusses sexual violence, drug-facilitated rape, online abuse, mental health, and suicide.
If you have spent any time online as a woman, you will likely already know what the statistics confirm: the internet is, sadly, not always a safe space.
Women are 27 times more likely than men to be harassed online. One in five women have experienced online harassment or abuse at some point in their life.
Last month, the scale of that reality has continued to increase with disturbing discoveries — as the National Crime Agency revealed the existence of organised online networks of men who drug their partners in order to sexually assault, film, and share footage of those assaults with other men across the world. It is as horrifying as it sounds. And it is taking a toll — not just physically, but mentally, and in some cases fatally.
What the NCA Found
On 2nd July 2026, NCA announced that at least eight people had been arrested in the UK following investigations into online forums that actively encourage men to drug and commit sexual violence towards women. Since October 2025, the agency has identified 270 individuals linked to one particular forum and its associated sites — with members found across dozens of countries in every continent.
The investigation began after journalists alerted the NCA to an online platform being used to organise drug-facilitated sexual assaults. What they uncovered was not a handful of isolated offenders — it was a community. Men networking openly, often connecting first on mainstream platforms like Telegram before moving to dedicated underground forums where these crimes are not just committed but celebrated, shared, and encouraged.
NCA Deputy Director Nigel Leary warned that drug-facilitated sexual assault "is no longer isolated behaviour" and is "increasingly organised." The abuse is most commonly perpetrated by a long-term partner, with offending often taking place over decades.
Europol also identified 156 victims across international investigations into similar networks, and four new online communities promoting these offences were uncovered during the same period. This followed earlier reporting from CNN in April 2026 about an online "rape academy" — a space hosting videos of men from around the world who had drugged their partners, filmed the assaults, and shared them as if they were entertainment.
Responding to the National Crime Agency’s reports of drug-facilitated rape networks, Ellie Butt, Head of Policy and Public Affairs at Refuge, said:
“Today’s devastating reports of drug-facilitated rape operating via an international organised network from the National Crime Agency (NCA) affirms what we sadly know to be true at Refuge – violence against women and girls (VAWG) is at epidemic levels, perpetrated in every corner of the world and often facilitated by unregulated online platforms which allow abusers to not only commit horrific acts, but recruit others and circulate them to a mass audience”. “Women and girls deserve meaningful protection from all forms of domestic abuse, including online abuse, not a fragmented response that allows perpetrators to act with impunity. Refuge is calling on tech companies to take proactive action to detect and prevent this abuse, while UK
regulators – including Ofcom – must adopt a coordinated approach to tackling online VAWG. Only a cohesive and comprehensive response can match the scale of this abuse and provide women and girls with the protections they deserve.”
The Everyday Reality
What the NCA uncovered is an extreme end of a much wider spectrum of online harm that women experience daily. Online abuse includes cyberstalking, sexual harassment, grooming for exploitation or abuse, image-based sexual abuse, rape threats, doxxing of women's personal information, technology abuse in intimate partnerships, and much more.
Research by Refuge found that one in three women in the UK have experienced online abuse at some point in their lives, and research by the Victims' Commissioner found that 40% of victims of cyberstalking experienced it for more than two years.
During the pandemic, Women's Aid found that over half of respondents experienced online abuse — and over a quarter said their experiences started or escalated from March 2020 onwards.
Online abuse can have a long-lasting, devastating impact. Women and girls' rights and freedoms are being restricted online, as many self-censor, avoid certain platforms, or come offline altogether to avoid harm. These are not rare experiences. They are part of the daily reality of being a woman online.
Stylish? Or Stalking…
Technology is not just creating a space for online abuse — it is creating new forms of it that the law is struggling to keep up with, such as the controversy currently surrounding Meta's smart glasses.
Reports have emerged of women being filmed without their knowledge or consent by men wearing Meta's AI glasses in public spaces — with footage later posted online, attracting millions of views, despite explicit objections from the women involved. Some victims have reportedly faced extortion threats tied to non-consensual recordings.
Creators have turned the glasses into content machines — approaching women, filming without consent, and posting footage purely for engagement.
The glasses are designed with a small white recording light intended to alert bystanders. But video tutorials showing how to disable the light are easy to find online, and patches are sold that fool the glasses into recording while keeping the indicator dark. Meta's response has been to point to its terms of service, which state that users must comply with local laws and use the glasses "in a safe, respectful manner." For many women who have found footage of themselves posted online without their agreement, that response has felt deeply inadequate.
More alarmingly, Meta has been reported to be developing a "Name Tag" facial recognition feature that would allow wearers to identify strangers in real time by matching their faces against Meta's vast databases. Over 70 civil liberties, domestic violence, and LGBTQ+ organisations have warned this poses a "grave risk to privacy, safety, and civil liberties." Emma Pickering of Refuge said giving wearers identity access without consent "threatens the safety of all women and girls in public" — a warning that takes on particular weight given what we already know about how abusers use technology to track, control, and harm women.
The question for Meta is, what is more important? Women’s safety? Or making money?
The Mental Health Cost Nobody Talks About Enough
The impact that the never-ending forms on online abuse that women experience clearly has a devastating toll on women’s mental health. Research by Amnesty International found that of the 20% of women who had experienced abuse or harassment through social media, 55% suffered stress, anxiety or panic attacks, and 61% had trouble sleeping. A systematic review found that victims of cyberstalking and harassment commonly reported experiencing depression, fear, anger, suicidal ideation, shame, paranoia and isolation. Only 3% of women who had experienced online abuse said they were untroubled by it, compared to 17% of men — and 49% of women said their experiences made them feel ashamed.
The link between online abuse and suicide is well established. A national study published in The Lancet Regional Health found that 26% of women who died by suicide within 12 months of contact with UK mental health services between 2015 and 2021 had a history of domestic abuse. The Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey found that 50% of people who self-harmed with suicidal intentions had experienced intimate partner violence.
What Is Changing — and What Still Needs To
Thankfully, there has been some progress. In February 2026, following campaigning by the End Violence Against Women coalition and others, the government announced that tech platforms must now remove intimate images shared without consent within 48 hours. This was a hard-won and meaningful step.
Ofcom, published new guidance in November 2025 specifically focused on improving the safety of women and girls online. The Online Safety Act 2023 makes tech platforms legally responsible for protecting people from illegal content and content that disproportionately harms women and girls. The guidance sets out nine areas for tech firms to improve, with a focus on safety by design — including conducting risk assessments specifically focused on harms to women and girls, and being transparent about women and girls' online safety.
But as the NCA's investigation and the Meta glasses controversy make clear, organised abusers and exploitative technology are adapting faster than regulation can follow. End Violence Against Women continues to call for stronger criminal laws, ways for those subjected to abuse to use civil law to get images taken down, robust regulation of tech companies, proper funding for specialist support services, and quality relationships and sex education for young people.
Refuge has been equally clear: only a cohesive and comprehensive response can match the scale of this abuse and provide women and girls with the protections they deserve.
The response must be equally coordinated, equally serious, and equally urgent. Because for the women living with the consequences of online abuse — the sleepless nights, the anxiety, the shame, the fear, and in the worst cases, the loss of any sense that life is safe — this is not a policy debate. It is their daily reality.
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