It happens all the time, says Kholoud al-Ameri, an Iraqi journalist and the editor of a news website.
“Female journalists here are often getting messages, and mostly from men,” she explains. “They somehow find you online and then they say they just want to talk or they want to add you on Instagram or Facebook,” says al-Ameri, who also heads a network of female journalists working on climate change stories. “Sometimes it’s hard because the men say they’re our readers and we don’t want to discourage them. But I usually tell the women just to block these guys.”
Syrian activist Yaman Amer tells of similar experiences as a result of writing about women’s rights online — she says she gets hundreds of critical comments. “When I talk about women’s rights online in a patriarchal society, that’s just how things are,” Amer, who is studying to be a lawyer in Damascus, told DW. “Not that I accept it. 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.”
Above-average abuse
Online harassment of women isn’t unusual anywhere. Studies by a variety of organizations show that somewhere between 40% and 60% of all women worldwide have experienced it, while 65% have witnessed it.
There is no single standard for assessing the level of online harassment because surveys often use different types of questions or research methods. But in general, women around the Middle East appear to be dealing with a higher-than-global-average level of what is known as “technology facilitated gender-based violence,” or TFGBV.
The United Nations Population Fund defines TFGBV as a harmful act “that is committed, assisted, aggravated or amplified … by the use of information communication technologies,” or other digital tools, “against a person on the basis of their gender.”
According to research by UN Womenthe UN body dedicated to gender equality, 68% of women in the Middle East have had to deal with it, while almost all — close to 100% — have seen it online.
In a 2025 studyUN Women found that 49% of women using the internet in the Middle East don’t feel safe from online harassment. The number goes up to almost 70% if the women are more publicly visible activists, journalists or politicians.
And it is already clear that the increased availability of artificial intelligence-powered applications is making online harassment worse.
AI has the potential to supercharge this kind of abuse, the UN Women briefing points out, “both by facilitating the spread of targeted disinformation as well as the proliferation of image-based abuse and deepfake pornographic videos.”
Of the women who had experienced online violence while working, around a quarter had already identified “abuse that was generated or amplified by AI tools,” the briefing said.
AI makes abuse easier
The potential for using the latest technology in order to harass people online has always been there, says Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan, an analyst at the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), which investigates extremism. “But 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.”
Venkataramakrishnan has been researching incidents that occurred at the beginning of 2026 when Grok, the AI-powered chatbot belonging to Elon Musk’s company SpaceXAI, became able to alter photographs to depict a fully dressed subject as nearly naked. The scandal caused Grok’s services to be restricted but, as Venkataramakrishnan pointed out, safeguards across different AI models tend to be inconsistent and users can still find work-arounds to get similar results.
In conservative cultures in the Middle East, the threat of this kind of half-naked picture of a woman being published has serious real-life implications, mostly because of what is and isn’t acceptable for women around the region.
What makes the increase in AI-generated fakes even more problematic in the Middle East is that online abuse also has a higher chance of having offline effects.
“Norms related to honor, family reputation and male control can turn digital abuse into real-world consequences,” a June briefing by the World Bank notes.
Lack of specific laws
It’s also often not easy for people targeted with this kind of abuse to find legal protection or even somewhere to report it. While some Middle Eastern countries have cybercrime laws, most don’t specifically address gender-based online violence nor have they been updated to grapple with AI-related abuse.
Last year’s UN Women survey found that 36% of women said they were just told to ignore the online violence, while 23% were blamed for it themselves and 12% were subjected to physical punishment by their families because of it.
Other studies indicate that only about 7% of women who experienced technology-facilitated violence later report it to law enforcement. Various concerns stop them from doing so, including having to present sexualized images or answer personal questions in front of strangers — often also anathema to many women in the region.
The women who had experienced online harassment said they would often just block the perpetrators and around a quarter said they then became more careful about what they posted online. Twenty percent deleted their accounts or left social media altogether.
Conflict situations
The rapid growth in AI-enabled harassment can also be more problematic in the Middle East because of the situations the women targeted find themselves living in.
Displacement, war, conflict and instability can all make women more vulnerable to online abuse and exploitation. Even the rapid development of AI-related technologies in a country without corresponding legal guardrails or digital literacy can increase the risk.
For example, observers point out that Saudi Arabiaa generally conservative country with strict rules for female behavior, is going through an accelerated program of digital transformation.
And in Syria, after the ousting of the dictatorial Assad regime, many Syrians “rushed into social media to speak freely,” journalist Zaina Erhaim wrote for the Arab Reform Initiative in July this year.
Previously. digital polices had been closely policed by Syria’s dictator and a political post could see the writer thrown in jail. But now Syrians “are navigating this newfound liberty without guardrails, oversight or protection,” Erhaim argues, and female activists are paying a high price for it, especially where “gender intersects with sect.”
In a policy paper published in Maythe Syrian Women’s Political Movement explained just how bad online abuse had become. In focus groups with 120 women from all around Syria, the majority of participants agreed that digital abuse had become a way of shutting them up. Younger activists reported personal pictures were being stolen from social media, then used against them.
“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,” the organization wrote, arguing that what was needed was a law that criminalized digital violence.
If you or someone you know have experienced any kind of gender-based violence, the website lila.help (https://lila.help) lists trustworthy helplines and NGOs that offer support in almost every country around the world.
Source: www.dw.com
