temic patterns: the weaponization of personal data, the exploitation of legal loopholes that
deny women justice, the social pressure that transforms shame into policy, and always the
continual attempts to silence. They highlight how outdated laws, biased algorithms, and
unregulated technology platforms reproduce on ground inequalities and realities in digital
form. They also show how the tools that promised liberation a decade ago are becoming
instruments of coercion and harm.
At the same time what resonazes most through these accounts is profound agency. These
journalists are not writing from positions of safe observation as indifferent chroniclers, nor
even as empathetic narrators, but from within the storm as participants in the struggle they
document. They are both witnessers and resisters. As women navigating hostile digital landscapes, their storytelling is an act of reclamation: asserting presence, naming violence, and
reimagining justice. In fact, research shows that countries with historically rooted women’s
movements can make tangible legal progress – demonstrating the critical role of sustained
civic engagement and advocacy to drive state accountability.
This booklet is one of these attempts for collective engagement and advocacy. It is an archive of lived experience and endurance. It shows us how women in the region confront and
contest digital violence and transform personal peril into public truth. These stories compel
us to be more than passive readers. They demand us to be witnesses to the courage of women who continue to speak, write, and exist loudly in spaces designed to silence them.
This publication is the product of a partnership between the Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), the SecDev Foundation and Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC).
ARIJ brings these realities to light through the voices of female journalists who document,
investigate, and humanize the digital harms faced by women and girls in their societies. Their
reporting transforms data and policy into lived experience—stories that resonate far beyond
the screens on which they unfold. It demonstrates ARIJ’ mission of leveraging high-quality,
fact-based journalism to empower Arab journalists to become society's watchdogs.
The SecDev Foundation acts as a catalyst for change and a leader in regional efforts to address TFVAW as a matter of public health, human security, and social justice. For more than
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