Summary

Our project addresses the growing challenge of technology-facilitated violence against women and girls by examining how misogynistic discourse emerges, circulates, and becomes normalised within hidden online environments. While much attention has focused on abuse on mainstream platforms, far less is understood about the anonymous and unmoderated spaces where harmful narratives may be incubated, reinforced, and shared. Our project responds to that gap by investigating the hidden digital ecosystems that can sustain misogynistic ideologies and shape abusive online behaviours.

This is important because violence against women and girls is increasingly recognised as a major national and strategic priority, and technology-facilitated abuse must be understood as part of that wider continuum, not as a separate or less serious category of harm. Online abuse, harassment, intimidation, and coordinated misogyny can have profound effects on women’s safety, participation, wellbeing, and freedom, while also reinforcing wider patterns of gender inequality. Digital spaces are now part of the social environments in which abuse is experienced, enabled, and normalised, so responses to VAWG must take these technological dimensions seriously.

The impact of this project lies in its potential to generate new evidence that can improve prevention, safeguarding, and response. By identifying patterns of misogynistic discourse in hidden online spaces, the research can help inform earlier detection of harmful behaviours, strengthen investigative and safeguarding capabilities, and support more effective policy and practitioner responses. This matters deeply to us because it builds directly on our previous Innovate UK funded work on CyVAWG and CyberDIVA, where we identified important gaps in how online misogyny and cyber violence against women and girls are currently understood and addressed.