Does speaking up make things worse? How young girls can be better protected from cyber violence

In part II of this news series, EIGE's research shows that when girls speak up, too often the system fails them - and that platforms and institutions must be accountable for effective prevention and response.

When girls experience cyber violence, the path to help is rarely straightforward or has a promising end result. The new research from EIGE's report on combatting cyber violence against girls, documents a widespread pattern of silence driven by hard-learned experience.

Why young girls don't report

While some girls in the study spoke of teachers who dismissed their concerns, counsellors who promised confidentiality and then broke it, and police failing to act, others mentioned examples of students being expelled for sharing intimate pictures without consent.

Older girls, aged 16 to 18, were the most skeptical, with some describing school as "the last place to ask for help."

Asha Allen's experience on the frontline means she is unsurprised by this prevailing sense that "the solution lies within us, and not in seeking help."

"A lot of victims experience re-victimisation, especially when it comes to non-consensual sharing of images," she says.

"They came across enforcement agencies who say: 'well, you did share the photo.' That fundamentally misunderstands where the consent was broken.

"It's akin to the general experience of women who report gender-based violence in the first place. They don't often have great experiences with figures of authority."

Dr Leonie Tanczer agrees but highlights the responsibility of technology companies.

"The question is whether these products have been designed from the get-go with safety by design in mind, and whether anyone has thought about how women and girls might see certain features being misused."

Platforms: the missing piece of the puzzle

While the new research from EIGE suggests institutions are failing girls, it's clear that the online platforms are failing them too.

The EU's Digital Services Act requires the largest platforms, such as Instagram and TikTok, to assess and mitigate systemic risks, including gender-based violence and harm to minors.

"But what we don't want is companies marking their own homework," says Asha.

She points to internal TikTok documents, which showed the company's leadership imposed guardrail metrics requiring that new screen time tools reduced usage by no more than 5%, which in some cases translates into a 20-minute reduction.

"I think many would argue that a 20-minute difference in seven or eight hours is not a significant enough difference to address those particular harms," she adds.

The pace of technological change makes this harder still. Earlier this year, Grok, the AI chatbot hosted on Elon Musk's platform X, became the centre of a global scandal when its image tools were used to generate sexualised images of women and girls at scale.

More than 3 million sexualized images of over 23,000 children were produced in under two weeks. Regulators in the EU, the UK and the US launched investigations. X acted only after nine days of sustained public pressure.

Asha says EU lawmakers are working on changes to its flagship AI regulation, to now include bans on nudification apps and mandatory safeguards for the kind of tools that were misused in the Grok scandal. But she cautions that the real test will be how well those measures work in practice.

"Civil society partners are the ones who are going to be able to point to the smoke where there might be fire," she says.

"My advice is for lawmakers to think about a co-enforcement, co-regulatory approach. They will need partners in the room to help bring those laws to life and make sure there's a safer online space for all of us."

What positive change looks like

EIGE's report calls for gender-transformative education: long-term programmes that challenge the behaviours that drive abuse, rather than just teaching girls to avoid it.

That means reaching boys and young men, redesigning the systems that make abuse easy, and giving legislators the evidence to act.

Leonie argues for a concept she calls "digital consent" - extending the principle of bodily autonomy to people's data and devices.

"As a society we have spent years building awareness around sexual consent. People have come to recognise that you always have the right to say no. Unfortunately, I think we don't have the same understanding when it comes to our digital lives and digital devices," she says.

For girls who have already experienced image-based abuse, practical help and resources exist through sites such as StopNCII.org and the Better Internet for Kids network.

But changing how we think about digital consent also means examining what we normalise at home. From sharing passwords through to sharing locations.

"It sends quite a troubling message if I track my 14-year-old daughter and tell her I do this because 'I love you'," argues Leonie. "That's the exact same logic and language an eventual abusive partner may use when they say 'I want you to be safe, so you have to send me your location as I need to know where you are'."

Changing all of these patterns will take time.

Combatting cyber violence against girls calls for peer-led support, bystander training and anonymous reporting mechanisms alongside the longer-term work of challenging norms.

And both experts believe that change can happen.

Asha points to #MeToo, facilitated through Twitter, as proof of what is possible when women's voices are amplified rather than silenced.

"We should always remind ourselves of what we've been able to do with the online space, and how we've been able to change our societies. We should always look back, and look forward as well."

Leonie shares that optimism. "My biggest hope is that we have the same revelation and awakening around digital consent that we had around sexual consent," she says.

The girls who contributed to EIGE's research did so because they believed their experiences should count. The challenge for policymakers is to listen to their evidence.

Read the full report on combating cyber violence against girls in the EU