September 7, 2025
The report looks into a number of platforms - in Egypt and various Arab countries - that specialize in helping women push back against online violence.
For many years, 24 year old Nour suffered from low self-esteem due to her upbringing. But social media awareness and support campaigns helped her develop her personality and enabled her to confront violence and to support others.
Nour was negatively impacted by the domestic violence she suffered as a child. “When I was young, I was badly beaten over and over again. I tried not to do anything at all, I was so scared my father would beat me,” she recalls.
The digital awareness campaigns that Nour followed worked well. The effects they had were obvious especially during a difficult situation her sister faced at university. "There was a WhatsApp group with all my sister’s college friends,” Nour explains. “One guy messaged each girl individually, threatening to expose them by sending images to their parents.”
This person caused family problems for all the women in the group, until it came to Nour’s sister’s turn. When the blackmailer called, Nour took the phone from her sister and said firmly: “If you call again, I’ll come after you and report you… I won’t let you get away with it.” Nour couldn't believe how she was able to stand up to the blackmailer and not give in to his threats.
Women and girls frequently face this type of online threat. In a study by UN Women in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, entitled “Violence against women in the digital space”, nearly half of women using the internet (49 percent) across eight Arab countries said online harassment made them feel unsafe. And 22 percent of women who had experienced violence online had suffered “direct sexual blackmail.”
The study points out that some Arab countries had responded to the problem of online violence against women by setting up online portals, forms or email addresses to report incidents. Despite this, reporting of online violence was at low.
As awareness grew of the increase in online blackmail of girls in Egypt f, Qawem foundation came about. This organization works to raise awareness of online violence among victims of both sexes and to support and encourage girls especially to report it through their social media accounts.
Qawem’s founder Mohamed Elyamani says, “It was during the pandemic that we started a group to combat violence, especially blackmail and cybercrime, when it became clear how much violent crime there was and the many suicides the blackmail was causing.”
Elyamani faced ridicule when he started this initiative on his own, but today he has hundreds of volunteers working with him, and he says they have now helped more than 4,000 people.
Qawem – via its social media pages, which have over 1.2 million followers on Facebook alone – runs awareness campaigns and takes in requests for help. It has 24-hour confidential reporting service, and survivors and their families can access help via text message and access psychological and legal support.
Elyamani explains that they verify the authenticity of reports and complaints in several ways, including obtaining a photocopy, or actual text, of conversations with the blackmailer, with any image blurred.
According to the 2020 UN Women study, women believe that the best way to combat online violence is for the police to do what is necessary to punish the perpetrator.
Elyamani believes that his real success lies in encouraging girls who are threatened or face blackmail to document the crime and make a formal complaint.
He says that, once the report is filed, it is possible to come to an amicable solution with the perpetrator. "For that, we need to do several things… delete any content relating to the girl, and get the perpetrator to sign a statement acknowledging that he is responsible for any future content that does not harm the girl, and make sure he won’t commit any cyber blackmail again. We also follow up with him from time to time, because what we’re aiming to do improve the behaviour of both parties, integrate them back into society, and ensure they are in a good psychological state and can return to a safe and normal life."
Aya Mounir, founder of the Egyptian women’s support initiative Superwomen, believes that technology, and social media in particular, have helped women discuss and advocate issues relevant to them more freely and given them digital and in-person support.
“Without social media, no one would know that we offer support,” says Aya, adding that her organization has run various online campaigns on domestic and digital violence since 2016.
She says that the coronavirus lockdown helped improve the exposure of Superwomen, through increased social media activity.The program attracts the public by using social media tools like memes, comedy, chat groups, and closed groups.
Jordan has seen the emergence of an open-source tool called Nuha, supported by artificial intelligence (AI), which helps researchers detect gender-based hate speech in Arabic on the internet, especially on social media.
The Jordanian Open Source Association (JOSA) developed this tool to pick up on hate speech in Jordanian dialect. This ranges from offensive language to threats of violence or murder, whether in comments or posts on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter), according to Yara Alrafie, a researcher at JOSA.
“We started off by feeding tens of thousands of sentences and phrases, rather than individual words, into the tool so it could grasp the full context.” Yara adds that the association is looking to expand the tool by adding in Egyptian, Iraqi and other Arabic dialects.
The tool was fed with a dataset obtained by monitoring 20 popular hashtags linked to women and the feminist movement, as well as female activists and influencers in Jordan.
In Palestine, technology has a special role in supporting women. The Israeli occupation makes it difficult to move between cities and hinders access to many of the support services for combating violence against women, says Ahmed Qadi, from the 7amleh organization in Palestine. “Because of occupation and geographical fragmentation, we have taken it upon ourselves to protect women as much as possible from gender-based violence... so we launched the 7or (The Palestinian Observatory of Digital Rights Violations) platform, which we can use to document different forms of violence on social media, especially gender-based violence.”
Qadi says the most common forms of online violence the center has detected are hacking of accounts, blackmail, publishing of personal photos, and violent language targeting women specifically.
He recalls one instance when they came to the support of women who had taken part in a demonstration: “There were some cases of phones being stolen and personal photos posted online to intimidate these women, which was very hurtful.. we worked around the clock and managed to delete these images before they could spread widely.”
In Iraq, the digital rights organization INSM has an online platform which supports male and female victims of violence. Using various electronic tools it deals with cases rapidly and securely via email, WhatsApp or Signal, according to Asia Abdulkareem, a researcher and project coordinator at INSM.
She thinks that the most significant challenges for women are online blackmail and hate speech.
These and other such platforms in Arab countries are seeking to change the reality of women's lives, where blame usually falls on the victims of blackmail and online violence, while the perpetrators escape punishment and accountability.
This report was published in Arabic by: Mada News | Nisaa FM | Daraj | Alyaoum 24 | Shorouk | Al-aalem Al-jadeed | 7amleh
