Bangladesh dreams in digital. From mobile banking to e-governance, the country has spent a decade building the foundation of a modern, connected nation. The aspiration is genuine. But beneath this gleaming vision lies a truth that demands urgent attention: for millions of women, the digital world has become another unsafe street.
Violence against women now travels through phone screens, invades inboxes, and mutilates reputations through fake profiles and manipulated images. The question Bangladesh must confront now is not whether it is connected, but whether that connection is safe—and for whom.
The scale of the crisis is global, and the data is unambiguous. A landmark April 2026 study by UN Women on the impacts of online violence, conducted across 119 countries, found that more than 27 percent of women had received unsolicited sexual advances or unwanted intimate images, and at least 12 percent had their personal images shared without their consent. Perhaps most chilling is what the abuse accomplishes: more than 40 percent of women said they had self-censored on social media to avoid abuse, while 19 percent had pulled back from speaking out in a professional context. Researchers found that the attacks were often deliberate and coordinated, designed not simply to hurt but to expel women from public life entirely.
The psychological toll is not metaphorical. One in four women surveyed reported anxiety or depression, and 13 percent had been diagnosed with PTSD. These are clinical diagnoses stemming from digital interactions—evidence that the old dismissal of online harm as “not real violence” is not only wrong but dangerous. Artificial intelligence has made the crisis dramatically worse. Deepfake tools, which can superimpose a person’s face onto fabricated sexual imagery, have become faster, cheaper, and nearly effortless to deploy. The UN Women study’s lead author, Professor Julie Posetti, described the phenomenon as “AI-assisted virtual rape,” now available at perpetrators’ fingertips, accelerating harm to women in public life and fuelling what she called the reversal of women’s hard-won rights in a climate of rising authoritarianism and networked misogyny.
The harm extends even further into immersive virtual environments. Legal scholars Clare McGlynn and Carlotta Rigotti, writing in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, have proposed the concept of “meta-rape” to describe sexual violence in metaverse spaces. Women users increasingly report non-consensual touching, image-based sexual abuses, and novel forms of gendered harm—experiences often trivialised and inadequately addressed by current laws. In a 2024 case that drew global headlines, a teenage girl’s avatar was sexually attacked by strangers in a virtual space, leaving her with the same psychological and emotional trauma as someone who has been physically sexually assaulted. The boundary between the virtual and the real is dissolving, and women are absorbing the consequences.
Governments elsewhere are beginning to respond urgently. In May 2026, London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan, calling tech-enabled violence a global emergency, announced a six million pound fund to support victims. Refuge, a charity that works with victims of domestic abuse in the UK, reported a 207 percent increase in tech abuse referrals between 2018 and 2024, with a further 62 percent increase between 2024 and 2025 alone. In England, more than 123,000 violent offences against women and girls with a technology-enabled element were recorded in a single year.
Bangladesh is not insulated from this reality. During the July movement, women who participated visibly in protests became targets of coordinated cyber campaigns—fake screenshots, morphed images, and sexual rumours deployed as weapons to push them back from the public space. The pattern aligns with what researchers document worldwide: technology is being consciously weaponised to silence women who dare to be visible. What makes Bangladesh’s position particularly urgent is the gap between its digital ambitions and its protective infrastructure. Legal frameworks addressing cybercrime exist, but institutional responses have been largely ineffective. According to a 2022-23 study by ActionAid, nearly 65 percent of women who filed complaints about online harassment saw no action taken. Many survivors also described being made to feel responsible for what happened to them.
The solution cannot rely on law alone and must also include cultural reforms. Platform design must be reformed. Media ethics must be rebuilt so that women’s trauma is no longer packaged as entertainment. Digital literacy curricula must include discussions of consent, privacy, and the real harm of virtual abuse. Ultimately, a digital Bangladesh should inspire freedom, not fear. A country cannot celebrate technological progress while half its population navigates the internet like a minefield. Until women can exist online without the threat of humiliation, harassment, or violence, the promise of a digital future remains precisely that: a promise not yet kept.
Shreonti Samiha is a law student at Bangladesh University of Professionals (BUP).
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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