More than 70 national elections are scheduled for 2024, including in eight of the 10 most populous countries. But one group is likely to be significantly under-represented: women. A major reason is the disproportionate amount of abuse female politicians and candidates receive online, including threats of rape and violence. The rise of artificial intelligence, which can be used to create sexually explicit deepfakes, is only compounding the problem.

And yet, over the past year, platforms such as Meta, X and YouTube have de-emphasised content moderation and rolled back policies that kept hate, harassment and lies in check. According to a new report, this has fuelled a ‘toxic online environment that is vulnerable to exploitation from anti-democracy forces, white supremacists and other bad actors.’

Online attacks against women in politics are already on the rise. Four out of five female parliamentarians have been subjected to psychological violence such as bullying, intimidation, verbal abuse or harassment, while more than 40% have been threatened with assault, sexual violence or death.

The 2020 US election was particularly revealing. A recent analysis of congressional candidates found that female Democrats received 10 times more abusive comments on Facebook than their male counterparts. And immediately after presidential candidate Joe Biden named Kamala Harris as his running mate, false claims about her were being shared at least 3,000 times per hour on Twitter.

Similar trends have been documented in India, the United Kingdom, Ukraine and Zimbabwe. Minority women face the worst abuse, together with those who are highly visible in the media or speak out on feminist issues. In India, one in every seven tweets about female politicians is problematic or abusive. Muslim women and women belonging to marginalised castes bear the brunt of the vitriol.

The disproportionate targeting of women discourages them from running for office, drives them out of politics or leads them to disengage from online discourse in ways that harm their political effectiveness—all of which weaken democracy. In Italy, ‘threats of rape are used to intimidate women politicians and push them out of the public sphere,’ says Laura Boldrini, an Italian politician who served as president of the country’s Chamber of Deputies, adding that political leaders themselves often issue these menacing remarks. This creates a vicious cycle—a dearth of women in government has been shown to result in policies that are less effective in reducing violence against women.

Technology companies should take four steps to counter this trend. For starters, they should publish guidelines on what constitutes hate speech and threatening and intimidating harassment on their platforms. Some tech giants have included, and even provided examples of, gendered hate speech in their policies. Google’s YouTube policy is one example.

Second, platforms need to reinvest in effective content moderation for all countries, not just the US and Europe. That means using a combination of human capital and improved automated systems (during the Covid-19 pandemic, when tech companies relied more heavily on algorithms, campaigners in France noticed that hate speech on Twitter increased by more than 40%). Equally important is training human moderators to identify online violence against women in politics and more equitable investment in effective content moderation. Until now, the unpleasant job of finding and deleting offensive content has typically been outsourced to regions where labour is least expensive.

Third, ‘safety by design’ principles should be embedded in new products and tools. That could mean building mechanisms that ‘increase friction’ for users and make it harder for gendered hate speech and disinformation to spread in the first place. Companies should improve their risk-assessment practices prior to launching products and tools or introducing them in a new market. Investing in innovation, such as the ParityBOT, which serves as a monitoring and counterbalancing tool by detecting problematic tweets about female candidates and responding with positive messages, will also be important.

Lastly, independent monitoring by researchers or citizen groups would help societies keep track of the problem and how well tech platforms are handling it. Such monitoring would require companies to provide access to their data on the number and nature of complaints received, disaggregated by gender, country and responses.

In the context of social-media companies’ rollback of content policies and lower investment in moderation, it’s important to note that the percentage of women in tech leadership roles is currently 28% and falling. If, as in politics, female tech leaders are more likely to address violence against women, this trend could create a similar vicious cycle.

Crucially, governments must also take steps to prevent gendered online abuse from undermining democracy. Tunisia and Bolivia have outlawed political violence and harassment against women, while Mexico recently enacted a law that punishes, with up to nine years in prison, those who create or disseminate intimate images or videos of women or attack women on social networks.

In the UK, legal guidelines issued in 2016 and 2018 enable the prosecution of internet trolls who create derogatory hashtags, engage in virtual mobbing (inciting people to harass others) or circulate doctored images. In 2017, Germany introduced a law that requires platforms to remove hate speech or illegal content within 24 hours or risk millions of dollars in fines (a similar measure was struck down in France for fear of censorship).

But even when laws exist, female politicians speak of ‘virtually constant’ abuse and report that law-enforcement officials don’t take online threats and abuse seriously. In the UK, for example, less than 1% of cases reported to Scotland Yard’s online hate crime unit have resulted in charges. Police officers and judges need better training to understand how existing laws can be applied to online violence against female politicians; too many think that it’s simply ‘part of the job’.

Tech companies and governments must act now to ensure that both men and women can participate equally in this year’s elections. Unless they do, representative democracies will become less representative and less democratic.

During the 2022 South Korean presidential race, conservative candidate Yoon Suk-yeol denied that structural inequality between men and women exists and threatened to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. He narrowly won the presidency in March 2022 by catering to young men, who overwhelmingly believe that discrimination against men in South Korea is severe.

Yet Korea ranks low in global indexes of gender equality, such as the World Economic Forum’s global gender gap report. Incidents of violence against women, including domestic assault, workplace sexual harassment, rape and murder have become alarmingly frequent. In a 2015 study by the South Korean government, 80% of respondents—the vast majority of whom were women—reported they had been sexually harassed in their workplace. Human Rights Watch reported that nearly 80% of male respondents admitted to violent acts against an intimate partner in a 2017 survey.

Women constitute more than half of South Korea’s reported homicide victims—one of the highest gender ratios in the world. In September 2022, a female employee of the Seoul subway system was beaten to death in a subway station restroom by a male co-worker who had stalked and threatened her for three years. Similar deaths occurred in prior years. According to the South Korean Supreme Prosecutor’s Office, 90% of the victims of violent crime in 2019 were women, a significant increase from 71% in 2000.

Digital sex crimes have become an epidemic in one of the most wired nations in the world. Men have set up spy cameras in public bathrooms, women’s locker rooms, stores and subways to film women, distributing the videos online without consent. Less than 4% of sex crime prosecutions involved illegal filming in 2008, but the number rose to 20% in 2017.

Thousands of women’s lives have been impacted, but the prosecution of digital sex crimes and the punishment of convicted perpetrators are notoriously low and lenient. The overwhelming male grip on the police and judicial system—where women comprise only 30% of judges and 4% of police—contributes to the problem.

Young, educated and tech-savvy men have been the main drivers of misogyny and hate speech against women online. They blame women and feminism for their economic and social difficulties in a society distressed by high youth unemployment, spiking housing prices and growing economic inequality. Some of these men have formed the base of the alt-right movement in South Korea, brandishing the conservative flag against women, immigrants, sexual minorities and the disabled. These sentiments have been manipulated by conservative politicians into potent public weapons of battle.

Recent surveys reported that 76% of men in their 20s oppose feminism, in contrast to 64% of women in their 20s who support feminism. Unsurprisingly, almost 60% of respondents in their 20s believed gender issues are the most serious source of conflict in South Korea.

Despite the turbulent anti-woman environment, South Korea’s Constitutional Court recognised women’s right to abortion in 2019 and decriminalised abortion in late 2021. This meant that women who had abortions and medical professionals who administered abortions were no longer subject to fines and jail sentences.

When the court ruled that the 1953 abortion ban violated pregnant women’s right to self-determination, they were freeing women from decades of state control. From the 1960s to the 1980s, the authoritarian state coerced or forced abortion and sterilisation to lower the population rate in the service of economic development. In the 1980s and 1990s, the state had mostly condoned the abortion of thousands of female foetuses by citizens who favoured male sex selection after prenatal sex screening.

Since the early 2000s, the state has been urging and subsidising women to have more children to reverse South Korea’s demographic crisis—the country with the lowest birth rate in the world. Men have blamed the declining birth rate on women and feminism, a sentiment publicly echoed by Yoon.

Since the mid-2010s, South Korean women and various civic groups have developed an effective reproductive justice platform that specifies the state, not pro-life advocates, as the enemy of abortion rights. They have staged mass protests, lobbied government ministries and political parties, engaged the media, educated the public and filed amicus briefs in support of decriminalising abortion.

But constitutional promises remain impotent when national laws to protect women’s rights are absent or inadequate. The National Assembly failed to create laws that clarify guidelines for lawful medical abortion by the end of 2020, as mandated by the Constitutional Court in its 2019 decision. This has left medical professionals and women seeking abortion in a legal vacuum with no legislation sanctioning abortion to guide the medical community and health insurance system. Aligning laws with the newly earned constitutional right to abortion is an urgent duty the state needs to fulfil.

The anti-stalking law created in October 2021 also needs to be revised to eliminate loopholes that protect the perpetrator rather than the victim and strengthen enforcement to deter and punish the stalking and killing of women. Otherwise, the misogynistic threats to women and the inadequate legal protections of their bodies and rights will continue to be a fundamental weakness in South Korean democracy.

On 24 February, a 17-year-old boy stabbed a young woman to death at the Crown Spa massage parlour in North York, Canada, and left two other people with serious injuries. The alleged perpetrator (who cannot be named because he is a minor) was charged with first-degree murder and attempted murder. While the details of his motivation remain murky, he reportedly told police officers that his goal was to kill as many women as possible.

On 19 May, the Toronto Police Service and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police jointly announced that they would also be laying terrorism charges against the suspect, saying that investigators had found that he ‘was inspired by the Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremist (IMVE) movement commonly known as INCEL (involuntary celibate). As a result, federal and provincial Attorney Generals’ [sic] have consented to commence terrorism proceedings.’

This is believed to be the first time a terrorism charge has ever been laid in connection to incel ideology, despite the multitude of previous violent and mass-casualty attacks linked to the movement.

Earlier this year I wrote about the need to take violent misogyny seriously as a form of violent extremism and the formation of online communities united by their antagonism to women. Some might object to considering misogynist ideologies as a form of extremism, or misogynistic attacks as a form of terrorism, on the basis that terrorism is political violence and that misogyny is somehow not political. However, any ideology which asserts that approximately half of the population are inferior beings and advocates their subjugation, with violence if necessary, is inherently political.

Incels are only one manifestation of this phenomenon, which exists on a spectrum that ranges from the casual but constant denigration of women on forums like 4chan or 8kun to the fixation with control over women and women’s bodies shown by Islamic extremists and white nationalists alike.

Promotion of misogynist violence is not limited to small audiences or fringe online spaces. Just this week, popular Indian TikTok content creator Faizal Siddiqui was finally banned from the platform after one of his videos glorifying acid attacks against women went viral. Many Indian commentators have noted that Siddiqui’s video is only the tip of the iceberg.

‘One of the most common kinds of content amid TikTokers, young and old, in India, revolves around beating or harassing women and making light of serious offences such as domestic abuse and gender violence’, writes Rakhi Bose.

The decision to charge the alleged perpetrator of the North York stabbing attack with terror offences stands in contrast to the charges laid against Alek Minassian, a self-professed incel who deliberately drove a van into a crowd in Toronto in 2018. Minassian killed eight women and two men and injured 16 others in what he told police was ‘retribution for years of sexual rejection and ridicule by women’. Minassian is charged with 10 counts of first-degree murder and 16 counts of attempted murder. His trial was due to begin in April, but has been delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The terrorism charges for the North York attack are the latest sign that law enforcement and the broader national security community are slowly beginning to take violence linked to misogynist movements more seriously as a form of extremism and not just criminal violence.

In June 2019, for example, Joint Base Andrews near Washington DC issued a warning to troops about the incel movement after it emerged that Brian Isaack Clyde, an army veteran who launched a failed terrorist attack on a Dallas court, was an active member of the incel community.

‘The content of this briefing was based upon law enforcement as well as public sources and was used to inform both military commanders and law enforcement personnel about a very real threat to military members and civilians’, a base spokesman told Military Times.

The US military also reportedly warned about the potential for incel-linked shootings at screenings of the controversial Joker movie in September. The incel movement was listed as an ‘emerging domestic terrorism threat’ by the Texas Department of Public Safety in January.

In Australia, recent research from the University of Western Australia found that attacks connected to the incel movement had killed at least 50 people and injured at least 58 more since 2014, numbers comparable to the deaths associated with Islamic extremism in the same period. Despite this similarity, far less attention has been paid to prevention and counter-extremism efforts in connection with violent misogyny in comparison with Islamic extremism.

‘What Incel has done is make misogyny dangerous to everyone, not just women. The very broad and public nature of this threat means that the government must now deal with misogynistic attitudes as an issue of national security’, report author Dr Katie Attwell said. The researchers are calling on the Australian government to designate the incel movement as a security threat and establish prevention and counter-radicalisation programs to address the rise of misogyny in the community.

The Covid-19 pandemic and accompanying economic crisis are likely to make the need for such prevention efforts all the more pressing by heightening risk factors such as social isolation, stress and unemployment, especially for young people.

The decision by Canadian authorities to designate the North York attack an act of terrorism is a recognition of the very real threat to national security and public safety which extreme misogyny poses. Governments and law enforcement agencies in other nations, including Australia, should be watching closely.

Online radicalisation has been a significant point of focus for the national security community in recent years. Much of this attention has been directed, rightly, at the risks posed by Islamic extremism, far-right extremism and white supremacist movements.

However, far less attention has been paid to an equally dangerous and arguably more pervasive form of radicalisation taking place online: extreme misogyny.

If there’s one common feature which unites communities of online extremists—from pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine to white supremacists in the US and Islamic State supporters in the Middle East and Asia, it is a fundamental disrespect for women. Each of these ideologies, in its own way, propagates strict conceptions about the role of women, undermines their agency and autonomy and—with varying degrees of openness—advocates violence against women who dare to transgress the limits imposed on them.

And yet, in national security circles, the role of misogyny in extremist movements is barely discussed. If it is, it gets hived off into some special section called something like ‘women and gender’, implying that it is separate from the core of the problem and that it is about women. Both of those notions are wrong. Misogyny is fundamental to these movements, and the heart of the problem is the beliefs, attitudes and actions of men.

The casual acceptance of violence against women is a broader conversation which needs to involve the whole of society. As reactions to the murders of Brisbane woman Hannah Clarke and her children show, there are still problems with how even leadership in law enforcement handles this issue. It’s hard to imagine any other scenario in which the lead police investigator might imply there was a choice of ‘which side to take in this investigation’ in a case in which one person burned four others to death.

The national security community needs to engage with this conversation, both because it is a part of that broader social tapestry and because violent misogyny has serious security implications for at least 50% of the population.

This includes no longer treating the online radicalisation of people (largely but not exclusively men) into extreme forms of misogyny as less serious or relevant to national security than other forms of radicalisation.

In addition to the incalculable toll of women who have been murdered in domestic violence cases, multiple terror incidents in recent years have been directly linked to radicalised online misogyny. In 2009, George Sodini opened fire on a fitness class full of women (none of whom he knew) in Pittsburgh, and killed three, before committing suicide. A webpage registered in Sodini’s name detailed his grievances with women, and how he had scoped out the dance aerobics class prior to the attack.

In 2014, California man Elliott Rodger killed six people and injured 14 more in a stabbing, shooting and car rampage, before committing suicide. Rodger’s rambling, narcissistic manifesto directly and explicitly linked his hatred of women to the attack. ‘Women are like a plague. They don’t deserve to have any rights. Their wickedness must be contained in order to prevent future generations from falling to degeneracy. Women are vicious, evil, barbaric animals, and they need to be treated as such’, he wrote.

In 2015, Chris Harper-Mercer killed nine people including a woman in a wheelchair in a shooting rampage in Oregon. Harper-Mercer appears to have had a range of motives for his attack, including frustration at not having a girlfriend.

In 2018, Alek Minassian drove a van into a crowd in Toronto, killing 10 and wounding 15. In an interview after his attack, Minassian told police about his self-described ‘radicalisation’ online on sites like 4chan and Reddit, and about how he had been inspired by Rodgers. Also in 2018, Scott Beierle killed two women and injured four others in a yoga studio in Florida, after years of online rants against women.

Even in attacks where misogyny isn’t the primary motive, it is often nonetheless present as a contributing factor. Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in an attack in Norway in 2011, wrote a manifesto which was riddled with misogyny and opposition to feminism. Christchurch gunman Brenton Tarrant and John T. Earnest, who killed one person at a synagogue near San Diego, both referenced feminism in their manifestos (Jewish people, Earnest said, deserved to be killed, among other things, for their role in creating ‘feminism, which has enslaved women in sin’).

All of these terrorist attackers were active in online communities linked to the ‘manosphere’, a loose collection of online communities ranging from more or less mainstream activism for men’s rights through to pick-up artists and reactionary anti-feminist movements like ‘incels’ and ‘men going their own way’.

As a researcher and journalist, I have spent a lot of time in these online spaces. The casual denigration and dehumanisation of women is constant and all-pervasive. It becomes so normalised that it no longer seems remarkable. Perhaps this is at least in part why it is so often not remarked upon by those working on online radicalisation.

This is not normal. It is not insignificant, and it is not harmless. Dozens of deaths in the past decade can be directly attributed to violent misogynists who radicalised online, and the true number is likely to be far, far higher. Violent misogyny is a form of extremism which is no less serious than Islamic or far-right extremism, and it’s past time for the national security community to start treating it as such.