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Have your say - Ofcom guidance to improve women and girls' safety online
Created: 01/04/2025
News/Events Category: Consultations
This item will show under the following categories: Children and Families Technology
Ofcom has proposed concrete measures that tech firms should take to tackle online harms against women and girls, setting a new and ambitious standard for their online safety.
With insights from victims, survivors, women’s advocacy groups and safety experts, the draft guidance sets out practical, ambitious but achievable measures that providers can implement to improve women’s and girls’ safety. It focuses on four issues:
- Online misogyny – content that actively encourages or cements misogynistic ideas or behaviours, including through the normalisation of sexual violence.
- Pile-ons and online harassment – when a woman or groups of women are targeted with abuse and threats of violence. Women in public life, including journalists and politicians, are often affected.
- Online domestic abuse – the use of technology for coercive and controlling behaviour within an intimate relationship.
- Intimate image abuse – the non-consensual sharing of intimate images – including those created with AI as well as cyberflashing – sending explicit images to someone without their consent.
Why it matters
Under the UK’s online safety laws, services such as social media, gaming, dating apps, discussion forums and search engines have new responsibilities to protect people in the UK from illegal content, and children from harmful content – including harms that disproportionately affect women and girls.
This means companies must assess the risk of gender-based illegal harms, such as controlling or coercive behaviour, stalking and harassment, and intimate image abuse on their services. They must then take action to protect users from this material, including by taking it down once they become aware of it. Sites and apps must also protect children from harmful material, such as abusive, hateful, violent and pornographic content.
To help services meet these duties, Ofcom has already published final Codes and guidance on how we expect tech firms to tackle illegal content, and we’ll shortly publish our final Codes and guidance on the protection of children. Once these duties come into force, Ofcom’s role will be to hold tech companies to account, using the full force of our enforcement powers, whenever and wherever necessary.
But beyond enforcing these core legal duties, the Act also requires Ofcom to produce additional, dedicated industry guidance setting out how providers can take action against harmful content and activity that disproportionately affects women and girls, in recognition of the unique risks they face.
Have your say
Ofcom is now inviting feedback on their draft guidance, as well as further evidence on any additional measures that could be included to address harms that disproportionately affect women and girls.
Once they have examined all responses, they will publish a statement with our decisions, along with final guidance, later this year.
Click here to share your views.
The closing date for responses is Friday 23 May 2025.
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