Online violence against women has been on the rise. For women environmental  human rights defenders, it is becoming a constant, and deadly, threat.

The death threats came per Whatsapp, Facebook, and the local radio channel – the main mode of communication for the residents of Tapajós, in the Brazilian state of Amazonia. Alessandra Munduruku, one of the leaders of the Munduruku women’s association who has been actively protesting illegal gold mining in her territory, was one of the main targets. The message was clear: The gold miners’ patience was up. They would kill anybody who stood in their way and first on their list was Alessandra. Usually, the death threats stop there, but then, two weeks after she got the threats, the gold miners burned down the Munduruku women’s association’s office in Jacareacanga. For Alessandra, that was the final straw. During the 2019 climate march in Berlin, Alessandra had spoken to thousands of students in front of the Brandenburger Tor about the fires raging across the Amazon, and about the influx of illegal gold miners who turn huge chunks of the forests into pits of dark red earth, and the rivers of her homeland into toxic yellow streams. Now, a year later, Allessandra  was sitting in an unknown safe house, anxiously watching the messages pile up on her phone.

Gender-based violence is not just physical violence; online attacks against women have been escalating at a staggering rate, and those online attacks can often precede and manifest in physical attacks. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights recently drew attention to the increasing threat of gender-based online violence against human rights defenders, saying these “new forms of harassment, intimidation, and defamation are shockingly frequent, frequently terrifying, and often spill over into the real world.” 

In 2017, environmental defender and citizen journalist Le My Hanh, who has shed light on the central coast residents seeking compensation for the environmental consequences of a toxic waste spill by the Taiwanese Formosa steel plant, was physically beaten in the streets of Vietnam after receiving escalating threats via social media. In March 2020 to Chilean activist Camila Bustamante Álvarez, who was targeted with a series of online threats that resulted in real-life attacks against her in reprisal for her advocacy for the right to water. 

Women environmental human rights defenders – those who work to protect natural resources from exploitation, pollution, and degradation and who fight often for their territorial rights  – are at the confluence of several dangerous trends.

On the one hand is the increase in online violence against women and women human rights defenders in general, something that has only increased since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even though women are 20%  less likely than men to use the internet they are 27 times more likely to face online harassment or hate speech when they do.  A 2020 global survey showed that a spike in online abuse is driving women and girls to quit their use of social media platforms.  Even the inventor of the world wide web has called for more protections for online harassment against women and girls.

There is also the targeting of environmental defenders and lack of justice for crimes against them. Environmental defenders now make up over 60% of all deaths of human rights defenders and  according to Global Witness, an organization that compiles a list of environmental and land defenders killed each year, one land and environmental defender was killed every two days over the last decade. 

Justice for physical violence against environmental defenders is difficult to come by, especially considering that environmental defenders are often Indigenous, Black, or rural or otherwise marginalized communities. But even fewer laws and policies exist around digital violence and specifically digital gender-based violence, something experts say is an important first step to stopping violence against women at its root.

Karina Pultz, Senior Human Rights Advisor for DanchurchAid, recently interviewed 12 women and LGBTQIA+ human rights defenders capturing  their experiences with online violence.

“Many of the people we interviewed had accepted these attacks as part of the job. And that is wrong, violence should never be part of the job of a politician and human rights defender,” but even the victims may not report online harassment or see it as a form of violence, she said. Some are making progress is this field, she noted, including one Libyan organization trying to get online violence seen as torture, but for the most part, “often people under attack of online harassment are not aware that this is violence.”

Finding solutions to this is an urgent but difficult task. Content moderation – blocking certain words – is important but attackers can resort to using different words and a lot of violence is context specific. It requires content moderators who understand the local cultures – difficult when content moderation itself is often deprioritized and outsourced to other exploited workers.

Even when people go to the police with complaints, officers are often not trained in how to handle these cases or persecute them. The challenges exist on many levels. And with the growth in AI-based apps and initiatives, most of which do not center gender-specific harm reduction and are developed by an industry that has been widely criticized for its sexist and racist biases, the call to develop solutions to this issue grows by the day.

 “It’s a structural problem that calls for a structural solution,” said Pultz. “An individual person trying to protect themselves won’t work – it’s platforms that need to create a safe space.”