Guest Written by Cornell Student, Paris Wu
Note: This blog is part of our Guest Blog Series, where we invite community members who are passionate about our topics to contribute written works relating to our issue areas. These pieces are not written by our staff, and encourage people across Tompkins County to bring awareness to specific topics they are interested in various creative formats.
On November 25, 1960, political activists Minerva and María Teresa Mirabal (also known by their code name, “las mariposas,” the butterflies) were killed by secret agents for their intimate involvement in resistance movements against the Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo. In commemoration of the Mirabal sisters, November 25 became the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women as well as the start of a UNiTE, an initiative of 16 days of activism concluding on the International Human Rights Day (December 10). This year’s UNiTe campaign focuses on digital violence, one of the most prevalent and pervasive human rights violations that disproportionately victimizes women and girls.
The Internet and social media have become technological tools used to perpetuate violence. Research on digital media has revealed how speed, anonymity, and [geolocation tools] play a significant role in facilitating hate through bridging, filing false rape reports, coordinated bots, stalking, coercive control, and revenge porn. Furthermore, “platform architectures and algorithms are not neutral” but created to maximize profits through “online conflict, political divisiveness, and the colonization of personal data” (Debbie Ging, 2023), forming a cycle of online and offline violence that supplement each other. Specifically, technology-facilitated violence against women and girls–any act that is committed, assisted, aggravated, or amplified by the use of information communication technologies or other digital tools, that results in or is likely to result in physical, sexual, psychological, social, political, or economic harm, or other infringements of rights and freedoms as described by the UN Women–has surged in the recent years.
Perhaps one of the most recent and prolific cases of technology-facilitated gender-based violence would be the “Telegram Nth Room,” a cybersex trafficking case from late 2018 in South Korea that victimized at least 58 women and 16 minors, whose pictures were taken from fake online job ads and hidden cameras to generate deepfakes and pornographic materials. The horrors of the Nth Room inspired the 2022 Netflix documentary Cyber Hell, and while the criminal case itself ended in 2020 with the arrests of its major offenders, non-consensual creation and sharing of sexually explicit images proliferated by and precedent to the Nth Room persisted on Telegram and other online platforms globally. In mid-2025, a similar incident broke out in China exposing a Telegram channel named “MaskPark,” another enormous ecosystem trading-in deepfakes, voyeuristic videos, and sextortion materials involving thousands of women, many of whom were victimized by hidden cameras as well as intimate partners. Closer to home and yet still international due to the characteristics of the Internet, arrests of US citizens Leonidas Varagiannis and Prasan Nepal in April 2025 revealed an online child exploitation enterprise in connection with an extremist network known as the “764.” According to the Department of Justice, the defendants allegedly directed, produced, facilitated, and distributed child sexual abuse materials (including contents of self-cutting).
A global study found that 58% of girls and young women have experienced some form of technology-facilitated violence, with 23% of women in Europe and the US reporting at least one experience of online abuse or harassment. Women from marginalized communities and women who are active in political life face increased rates of digital violence as well. Technological innovations not only expanded the scope of victimization, but created new barriers to justice as well. Traditional legal institutions rely on pre-established definitions of criminal acts that might not be able to take the rapidly changing daily life due to technological advances into account, and the international characteristics of the digital sphere further raises challenges for legal jurisdiction and forensics. Accountability of digital companies is an issue as well, as the rules they follow regarding digital violence are settled by their headquarters, which makes it much more difficult for victims to access justice at the national level. Even if law reform may catch up to penalize technology-facilitated crimes, perpetuation of gender-based violence may not be completely eliminated through law enforcement. Hence, a wider preventative and interventionist framework is necessary, which the U.N. is campaigning for starting this November 25.
This year’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, the U.N. is campaigning for:
- Governments to pass and enforce laws that criminalize digital violence, protect personal information and strengthen tech sector
- Tech companies to ensure platform safety, remove harmful content, enforce codes of conduct and publish transparent reports
- Donors to invest in feminist organizations working to end violence against women and digital rights advocates
- Individuals to speak out, support survivors, and challenge harmful online norms.
You can take action in many ways – learn and share information from this U.N. year’s campaign, support local services that support survivors of gender-based violence, participate in digital safety sessions, support campaigns that reject and prevent technology-facilitated violence, and encourage governments and companies to adopt better laws and policies. Display the color orange the symbolic color for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women (November 25th) and the related “Orange the World” campaign, which uses orange to represent a brighter, violence-free future, and and use #NoExcuse and #ACTtoENDViolence #OrangeTheWorld and #16Days on social media to raise awareness!
References
Barter, Christine and Sanna Koulu. “Digital technologies and gender-based violence – mechanisms for oppression, activism and recovery.” Journal of Gender-Based Violence, vol. 5, no. 3 (2021): 367-375. https://doi.org/10.1332/239868021X16315286472556.
Ging, Debbie. “Digital Culture, Online Misogyny, and Gender-based Violence.” In The Handbook of Gender, Communication, and Women’s Human Rights, First Edition. Edited by Margaret Gallagher and Aimée Vega Montiel (John Wiley & Sons: 2023), 213-227. DOI: 10.1002/9781119800729.ch13.
Greiman, V. and C. Bain. “The Emergence of Cyber Activity as a Gateway to Human Trafficking.” Journal of Information Warfare, vol. 12, no. 2 (2013): 41-49. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26486854.
Jiang, Yuxuan. 2025. “Chinese Women Exploited in Telegram Voyeur Rooms Urge Authorities to Act.” CNN. August 24, 2025. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/23/china/china-voyeur-rooms-telegram-intl-hnk-dst.
Hankyoreh. 2024. “I Saw Deepfakes When Exposing the Nth Room Case 5 Years Ago — the Government’s Lax Response Is to Blame for Their Proliferation Today.” Hankyoreh. September 6, 2024. https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/1157369.html.
“Leaders of 764 Arrested and Charged for Operating Global Child Exploitation Enterprise.” 2025. Justice.gov. April 29, 2025. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/leaders-764-arrested-and-charged-operating-global-child-exploitation-enterprise.
Li, Ling. 2025. “MaskPark and the Silence around China’s Gender-Based Violence Online | Made in China Journal.” Made in China Journal. November 11, 2025. https://madeinchinajournal.com/2025/11/11/maskpark-and-the-silence-around-chinas-gender-based-violence-online/.
Manley, Elizabeth. “Intimate Violations: Women and the ‘Ajusticiamiento’ of Dictator Rafael Trujillo, 1944-1961.” The Americas, vol. 69, no. 1 (July 2012): 69-94. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23270071.
Montiel, Aimée Vega. “Violence Against Women in and Through the Media and Digital Technologies.” In The Handbook of Gender, Communication, and Women’s Human Rights, First Edition. Edited by Margaret Gallagher and Aimée Vega Montiel (John Wiley & Sons: 2023), 213-227. DOI: 10.1002/9781119800729.ch17.
Nguyen, Erika. 2020. “South Korea Online Sexual Abuse Case Illustrates Gaps in Government Response | Human Rights Watch.” Human Rights Watch. March 26, 2020. https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/03/27/south-korea-online-sexual-abuse-case-illustrates-gaps-government-response.
Robinson. Nancy P. “Origins of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women: The Caribbean Contribution.” Caribbean Studies vol. 34, no. 2 (2026): 141-161. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25613539.
United Nations. 2022. “International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.” United Nations. 2022. https://www.un.org/en/observances/ending-violence-against-women-day.
UN Women. n.d. “UNITE! Activism to End Violence against Women & Girls!” UN Women – Headquarters. https://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/ending-violence-against-women/unite/theme.