Nearly seven in ten women in the Middle East have encountered technology-facilitated gender-based violence, a rate that dwarfs global averages and is climbing as artificial intelligence becomes more accessible.
A 2025 study by UN Women found that 49% of women using the internet across the region do not feel safe from online harassment, a figure that jumps to nearly 70% among journalists, activists, and politicians with a public profile.
By comparison, global studies across various organizations put the share of women who have experienced online harassment somewhere between 40% and 60%, with 65% having witnessed it directed at others.
What is accelerating the problem is not just the volume of abuse, but the tools now available to those carrying it out, with artificial intelligence enabling harassment at a speed and scale previously impossible.
Around a quarter of women who experienced online violence in a professional context had already identified abuse that was generated or amplified by AI tools, according to the UN Women briefing.
Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan, an analyst at the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which investigates extremism, pointed to a structural shift in who is being targeted by this technology.
“It’s just become easier to produce harmful content at scale and in a hyper-targeted way. And the production of non-consensual imagery is a real marker of the democratization of that technology, so it’s moving away from primarily targeting celebrities to just regular people,” he said.
A scandal in early 2026 illustrated the danger when Grok, the AI chatbot belonging to Elon Musk’s company SpaceXAI, was found capable of altering photographs to depict fully clothed subjects as nearly naked, prompting restrictions on its services.
Venkataramakrishnan noted, however, that safeguards across different AI models remain inconsistent and that users continue to find workarounds to generate similar results through other platforms.
In the Middle East, where social norms around female honor and family reputation carry enormous weight, the threat of such fabricated images carries consequences that extend far beyond the digital sphere.
A June briefing from the World Bank warned that “norms related to honor, family reputation and male control can turn digital abuse into real-world consequences,” underscoring how online abuse feeds into physical danger.
The legal architecture in most of the region is poorly equipped to address this reality, with cybercrime laws in many countries failing to specifically cover gender-based online violence or account for AI-generated abuse.
A UN Women survey found that 36% of women reporting online abuse were simply told to ignore it, while 23% were blamed for the harassment themselves and 12% faced physical punishment from their own families as a result.
Only around 7% of women who experience technology-facilitated violence report it to law enforcement, deterred in part by requirements to display sexualized images or answer intimate questions before strangers during any formal process.
Women most often respond by blocking perpetrators, with roughly a quarter becoming more guarded about what they share online and 20% deleting their accounts or withdrawing from social media platforms entirely.
The risks are compounded in countries experiencing political transition or instability, where rapid digital expansion has outpaced any corresponding legal protections.
Syria offers a stark example: following the fall of the Assad regime, citizens flooded social media to exercise a freedom of expression that had previously been criminalized, with a political post potentially resulting in imprisonment.
Journalist Zaina Erhaim, writing for the Arab Reform Initiative, argued that Syrians “are navigating this newfound liberty without guardrails, oversight or protection,” with female activists bearing a disproportionate cost.
A May policy paper by the Syrian Women’s Political Movement, drawing on focus groups with 120 women from across the country, found that the majority viewed digital abuse as a deliberate mechanism of silencing.
The organization described how “smear campaigns targeting women’s ‘honor’ and systemic defamation are actively deployed as punitive measures against any women who attempt to express a critical political opinion,” and called for legislation criminalizing digital violence.
Syrian activist Yaman Amer, who is studying law in Damascus and writes publicly about women’s rights, described the psychological weight of operating in this environment, receiving hundreds of hostile comments for her work.
“Out of every thousand offensive comments, there’s usually one or two that make me feel like I have to report them because they’re particularly vile. As in, they’re extremely vulgar or threatening. And then it’s more than just harassment. It’s on a whole other level, humiliating and degrading,” she told DW.
Iraqi journalist and editor Kholoud al-Ameri, who also runs a network of female journalists covering climate change, described unsolicited contact from men as routine, adding that women in her network are regularly advised to simply block the senders rather than engage.
