The Horror: Digital Violence
Scrolling through social media, you come across an aerial photo of your house. The caption reads, “Close to giving out her address to the people that want it.” Your heart starts to pound, and you frantically click into the profile of the poster. You discover more posts about yourself, including details that would allow anyone viewing them to identify your home.
This was the experience of Heidi Allen, a British MP, in August 2019. Less than three months later, Allen resigned from Parliament, citing the "utterly dehumanizing" way she had been treated and that she was "exhausted.”
This story is not unique to Allen. Nor does it affect only those women who are currently in office. Data indicate that 84% of female mayoral candidates experience harassment while campaigning, compared with 64% of men. In 2022, Helen Tullie Apiyo was running for a seat in the County Assembly in Kisumu, Kenya. She faced so much harassment via social media that when asked if she would consider running for office again, she replied, “Absolutely NOT!”
Allen and Apiyo are not in the minority in their decision to step away from electoral politics. Roughly half of women in local and state-level politics have reported being less likely to stay in office or seek reelection because of unacceptable levels of harassment, threats, and violence. And roughly seven in ten women have stated that they had no interest in seeking office at all owing to the threat of physical or verbal abuse. Women politicians experience online hate speech, threats, and image-based harassment three to four times more often than their male colleagues.
In the past, the primary concern for women politicians was their risk of being victims of physical violence, which, to a certain extent, can be mitigated. With the proliferation of the internet and all that comes with it, however, the violence now takes place primarily online. A 2025 report of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, for example, found that 60% of female politicians in the Asia-Pacific region faced online hate speech and image abuse.
The trend is clear: targeted digital violence toward women candidates and office holders undermines political parity by deterring women's participation in the public sphere.
