Youth
UNITED NATIONS, New York – As technology reshapes our world, a staggering 85 per cent of women have witnessed online violence against other women, and 38 per cent have been personally affected.
Yet despite its proliferation, technology-facilitated gender-based violence is still too often dismissed or inadequately addressed, by both policymakers and technology companies.
At the 59th Commission on Population and Development, held at the United Nations Headquarters this month, global leaders agreed there can be no digital inclusion without digital safety. As they convened to discuss how technology and research are influencing sustainable development, participants also examined the urgent need for digital spaces that are designed and governed with safety and human rights at their core.
A central concern is the rise of technology-facilitated gender-based violence – including cyberstalking, doxxing, digital surveillance and non-consensual sharing of intimate images – which disproportionately affects women, girls and other marginalized groups.
Dhaka: Bangladesh is witnessing a quiet yet devastating rise in the misuse of technology with rising incidents of women being targetted by superimposing their faces onto pornographic content.
Enabled by Artificial Intelligence (AI), this practice, known as 'deepfake', primarily targets women, with consequences - such as social ruin, forced withdrawal from public life, and, in the worst cases, death - borne almost entirely by the victims, a report said.
According to a report in Bangladesh's leading newspaper 'Daily Sun', the victims come from diverse walks of life, including students, activists, professionals, politicians, actresses, and anonymous private individuals.
"In one of the most devastating cases documented in Bangladesh, a woman took her own life after an AI-edited video of her was shared with her family. The perpetrator understood precisely how Bangladeshi social structures work — family honour, community judgement, and the irreversibility of digital shame — and used a fabricated video to trigger all three at once. Her death was not an accident of technology. It was the intended result of its deliberate misuse," the report detailed.
Today, on International Women’s Day, UNICEF reaffirms its commitment to advancing the rights of every girl – and ensuring that girls can thrive in an increasingly digital world.
Around the globe, progress toward gender equality remains uneven. Despite decades of advancement, harmful social norms and discriminatory practices continue to limit the opportunities of millions of girls. As societies become more connected through technology, these inequalities are not only reflected online – they are often amplified in digital spaces.
Maldives is among the most digitally connected societies in the South Asia region. With internet access reaching the vast majority of the population and social media widely used across islands and generations, digital platforms have become an integral part of daily life, shaping how young people learn, communicate, and participate in society.
For girls, these platforms offer powerful opportunities to learn new skills, access information, and raise their voices. Yet the same spaces can also expose girls to new and evolving forms of harm.
Gender-based civil society organisations (CSOs) have described the use of Technology Facilitated Gender-Based Violence (TFGBV) to silence and discourage women from seeking or holding positions of influence as a threat to equal and meaningful participation.
According to them, women in public life, human rights defenders and peacebuilders, among others, played essential roles in advancing the gender equality agenda.At
a meeting organised by the Gender Studies and Human Rights Documentation Centre (Gender Centre) in Accra, which brought together women's rights organisations, they called on stakeholders to work together to address TFGBV in the country and beyond.
Activists and lawyers in Africa are calling for urgent action to protect women, girls and boys as digital violence surges across the continent.
A massive rise in internet users, coupled with huge numbers of people aged under 30, has fuelled an increase in gendered online violence across the continent, according to experts, by giving perpetrators new tools to control and silence women and girls, and influence boys.
“Unfortunately the world offline is not safe, equal and inclusive. But the world online is proliferating that to such an extent that it’s creating a foundation for a very, very unequal future,” said Ayesha Mago, global advocacy director at the Sexual Violence Research Initiative, a global network that supports research on violence against women and children in low- and middle-income countries.
The recent Grok scandal saw an avalanche of non-consensual sexualized deepfakes of women and girls created and shared directly on X, following the rollout of Grok’s picture-editing capabilities in late December 2025.
This provided a crucial opportunity to test the effectiveness of the existing EU legislative framework to prevent and address non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) and child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Investigations into X were opened almost immediately under both the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). At the same time, calls for additional safeguards and protections under EU law echoed across the Union, leading to the European Parliament and the European Council remarkably coming together to introduce a ban on such practices under the AI Act and pushing for additional restrictions against a rising tide of deregulation.
In a recent brief, the Centre for Democracy and Technology Europe explored the merits and gaps of existing legislation to address this issue. Building on that analysis, we reflect on the existing safeguards, the opportunities, and the challenges that a new ban under the AI Act would need to overcome.
By Angela L. Bos, Jill S. Greenlee, Mirya R. Holman, Zoe M. Oxley and J. Celeste Lay
This article develops and tests a new theoretical framework, gendered political socialization, which offers important insights into how children perceive gender in politics and the consequences of these perceptions on sex differences in political interest and ambition. Based on data from 1,604 children who live in four different regions across the United States, we find that children not only perceive politics to be a male-dominated space, but with age, girls increasingly see political leadership as a “man’s world.” Simultaneously, as children grow older, they internalize gendered expectations, which direct their interests toward professions that embody the gendered traits that fit with their own sex. One result of this mismatch between women and politics is that girls express lower levels of interest and ambition in politics than do boys.
Click here to read the full article.
By Lucas Ledwaba
Statistics suggest women and youth dominate the country’s population, but with the local government election just weeks away the question of their participation in decision making remains a contested issue.
The Independent Electoral Commission’s announcement that the voter registration process for the upcoming election has elicited a good response from young persons augurs well for efforts that counter youth voter apathy.
This issue has been consistently raised in previous municipal elections, with the general feeling being that youth are not playing the active role they should be on this front.
Click here to read the full article published by Mail & Guardian on 21 October 2021.
The global proportion of MPs aged under 30 has edged up to 2.6 per cent, according to the latest IPU report on Youth Participation in National Parliaments. This represents an increase of 0.4 percentage points compared with two years ago. However, with 50 per cent of the world’s population under 30, the report highlights a sizeable deficit in the political representation of young people worldwide.
Just over ten years ago, the IPU’s Member Parliaments adopted the 2010 resolution on youth participation in the democratic process. The resolution led to the creation of the Forum of Young Parliamentarians, the premier global body for the world’s youngest MPs. It also led the IPU to collect data and information on youth participation in parliaments. This latest report is the fourth in the series and is based on data from 2020.
Click here to access the report.
Summary of facts and figures on the participation of young people in politics based on 2020 figures.
Click here to access the infographic.
This Discussion Paper puts together relevant data on the inclusion of young people and women in European Parliament elections.
It is focused on two pitfalls of EU electoral democracy: voter absenteeism on the part of young people, and the under-representation of women in the European Parliament. Data have been combined from the European Election Studies (EES), the European Parliament, the Gender Statistics Database of the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE), face-to-face and telephone interviews, and semi-structured questionnaires. Additionally, policy papers and other relevant texts (authored by organizations dedicated to young people, women and think tanks, as well as Europarties and groups in the European Parliament) have been considered. The scope of the paper is European, although data at a national level from France, Poland and Spain (a founding EU country, an Eastern European country and a Southern European country) are introduced in different sections to shed light on national differences. With the purpose of enriching and making EU electoral democracy stronger, the author presents, as food for thought, some evidence on key elements to foster participation in European Parliament elections, as well as to reach a more balanced composition of the European Parliament in terms of age and gender.
Click here to see the academic article.
The Second Annual Summer School for Young Leaders from African Political Parties took place in Kigali, Rwanda, on 6–8 June 2018. The overall theme was ‘Youth participation in political processes: emerging trends of the negative aspects of money in politics’.
The Summer School unfolded in a context that recognized that youth participation in politics, especially by young women, either in the form of direct representation in political structures or within less formal modes of political engagement, remains limited across Africa.
These low levels of active participation and influence by young people unfold in a situation where young people constitute a very large and growing proportion of the general population.
Click here to see the report.