"When I was 17, my "boyfriend" at the time (in quote marks as I don't class him as an ex-boyfriend, but at the time this was how I labelled him) videoed us having sex. I wasn't aware there was a video of us until one of my friends told me that she'd been told by someone she knew that my "boyfriend" had been sending a video of me and him round. I confronted him and he denied it and told me I was being silly and he would never do that. I ended the relationship and he told me he "didn't want to live without me" and was very manipulative about me breaking up with him to place me in the wrong and take attention away from the fact he shared a video round of us having sex without my knowledge. I did not report this, for fear of victim-blaming as school sex education made speaking up seem scary and that I would be in trouble, either as well as him or instead of him. I hoped to forget about it and that nothing would happen in future. However, when I was 19, an old friend from 6th form (who I was friends with when it happened at age 17) reached out to me and told me he was in a club on a night out showing the video round. I still did not report this for the same fear of negative repercussions for myself. Now, at 22, I haven't heard of anything since and just hope it never surfaces. I coped well and had a good supportive friendship group, but it still makes me upset and anxious that someone may have a video of me having sex that I do not know about. Since, I have undertaken research myself on tech-facilitated abuse and I hope to one day return to researching in this field as it's so deeply personal to me".
"An anonymous email account was set up in order to email my manager to raise concerns about me. It was sent Christmas Eve to maximise impact as my manager raised it with me before the holidays saying it would need to be investigated in the new year. I later found out it was a colleague using fake email accounts to abuse me and two others".
"An ex colleague got very intense with me. Had an image of me in a vulnerable state and threatened to share this with other colleagues. When I asked him to leave me alone, he turned to cyberstalking / harassment, using different methods to try to regain communication with me, calling me from different phones, including the main work phone. I was able to block the other forms of communication through my device but I could not block the work number. He would check the work rota to ensure he was on site during my shift. Working across different sites, I thought I would be safe at the 2nd site, but he turned up there too, despite him not working at that site. When he failed at communication with me, he would attempt to get in contact with my friends. I went to the police, they rang him and told him to stop contacting me - that was all. The attempted contact did not stop. I was scared to turn up for work, my brother worked at the same place and he would guard the changing rooms so I could get changed safely without fear of harassment / unwanted contact. I put in a formal grievance at work, supported by 18 A4 double sided pages of evidence of harassment - the police were not interested in this! My duty manager took the allegations seriously and started formal procedures. The colleague handed in his resignation during the formal procedures. The contact / attempted contact then seemed to come to a conclusion. Police were rubbish in this situation, I'm lucky my employers were supportive".
"As a teenager i was in an on-again-off-again coercive situation. Technology, particularly SMS texts, phone calls, and video calls via skype, were vital to the continued coercion. I was told to delete my abuser's phone number so many times that I ended up memorising it. He would call me all night, tell me he'd die if I hung up the phone, and then leave me with an enormous phone bill (even in the 2010s, 4+ hours per day adds up). If i said something he didn't want to hear by text (including breaking up with him multiple times) he would claim not to have received the message and act as though I'd never said it. We would video call using Skype and he would have me masturbate for him on camera, telling me where he wanted the webcam pointed and filling my screen with images of his own genitals. It's been over a decade since it ended and I still feel sick any time i hear the skype notification sound".
"My ex-partner has used technology to harass me. I tried to end the relationship in 2024, yet she relentlessly called and emailed me afterwards. I felt forced into restarting the relationship at the beginning of 2025 because she made worrying threats. The relationship ended again in mid-2025, and I have been clear about my desire to have no contact. Yet, she has used multiple email addresses and telephone numbers to contact me since. I've never had to block someone before, but when she blocked me on Whatsapp I felt it would be OK to do so back. This resulted in her emailing me to tell me how awful I was for blocking her! I then proceeded to block her email. She then used multiple email accounts to contact me through both my personal and work email addresses. Eventually she used another telephone number (a "friends" apparently) to contact me. I told her this harassment wasn't OK, and she seemed to acknowledge this. However, the unwanted contact has persisted. I know she continued to email me through a blocked email account - unfortunately I had to check my spam folder (where blocked emails also end up) for another reason. One of these included an email where she had found a picture of me from an event I attended (posted on some social media) and was asking if I was with some random person in the crowd etc. It's unlikely she randomly came across this image, and I worry she was actively looking for me online - knowing this was an event I regularly attended. She has used other phone numbers to leave me voice messages. In the new year (2026) she sent me an email (to both my personal and work addresses) where she made a Google form asking for a response. While she hasn't contacted me in the 4 days since, I am almost certain she will try to contact me again. I have had to stop using social media - using a secret account for things I can't do otherwise. I am considering whether I need to change both my personal phone number and email address - and perhaps ask if it is possible to get a new work (uni) email address. I'm also increasingly worried that she may be following online accounts that I do have - such as my Google account or Letterboxd. While I wish her nothing but the best, and understand being sad about a relationship ending, this is harassment and make me feel awful because it's something I have absolutely no control over - besides restricting my own online behaviour".
"I once noticed on Douyin (tiktok) that an English-teaching blogger I had followed for a long time used a misogynistic slur – "tā mā de" (similar to the English phrase "fuck your mother") – during a situational teaching demonstration. After giving it some thought, I left the following comment under his post: "I recognize the value of your teaching content, and I also understand that we all have moments when we need to express our anger. But please choose your words carefully; vulgar language doesn’t have to be misogynistic." I believed my suggestion was neutral and tactful enough. However, shortly after I posted the comment, around a dozen people – regrettably, including some women – replied to me in a highly contemptuous tone. Their message was essentially that I was overreacting, that what I did was a buzzkill and completely unnecessary. These were the relatively mild responses, of course; there were also people who tried to confront me with more extreme language. I chose not to reply further. After thinking it over for a long while, I decided to delete the comment and switch my account to private. Since my profile page had photos I had shared, I was worried that some extremists might take even more excessive actions. This experience wasn’t extremely distressing, probably because I have long been engaged in research on TFVA-related topics and thus saw it coming. But I also know that countless women must have withdrawn from online spaces after being subjected to cyberattacks – and this is deeply unfair.The perpetrators continue their revelry, while the victims have no choice but to hide away".
"Frequent non-consensual sexting on dating apps from men I have barely chatted to - the most recent one was a man I had not replied to who, several days after his initial greeting, messaged to inform me: 'I want to paint your pretty face with my cum'.
I have also experienced a man I was briefly dating use technology to track and control me in subtle ways - pressuring me to send him selfies daily (in hindsight, to check I was actually where I said I was), if I declined I would be accused of being with another man. He also demanded a response to his texts within a short time frame, if this wasn't adhered to he would text again with similar accusations. The same man also forced me to login to my online dating accounts to ensure I wasn't still using them and proceeded to read through my old messages in my presence.
I have also in my teenage years experienced a man who sexually assaulted me go on to use social media to continuously message me to attempt to engage in friendly chat, despite getting no response due to the sexual assault he inflicted on me. I had to block him to stop this behaviour, and indeed have had to block every man I have mentioned in this response to stop them from bothering me.
Also as a teenager, I recall several occasions where I would go on Omegle with my friends at sleepovers and grown men would cyberflash or masturbate on camera in the hopes of coming across young girls in order to shock/frighten us. We would quickly exit the chat but it happened that regularly that it was expected as something you had to 'filter' through to get connected to another teenager your own age for a normal chat. While I have thankfully not experienced deepfakes or doxxing, it is something I am constantly worried about due to the nature of my job. I search my own name on Google on a regular basis to ensure this has not happened".
"A man I know found a photo of me on a porn site. After this, I discovered years of my nudes, alongside the name of my town, had been uploaded to a porn website without my consent. I do not know how these photos were obtained. I suspect my iCloud was hacked, as the nudes were taken over many years and sent to different people. I reported this to the site and the photos were taken down, but the ordeal was horrifying. I would never have known they were out there if the man I know hadn't recognized me and had the goodwill to call (after years of no contact) to let me know. The photos were published on a porn website called Erome, in case that matters".
"Someone sent a naked photo of himself, from his waist down, full frontal to an inbox I manage. I was completely shocked, stunned. I don't understand why anyone thinks it is okay to do that, it's not. I don't want to see someone's private bits, I came to work to do my job. It really isn't nice, it's horrible. We don't know if he is a patient, customer or just a random person who decided he was sending a photo at 06:30am. We checked the email address to see if we could find out who he was but we couldn't. We contacted the police but within 24 hours of the police taking my statement they emailed to say they couldn't find the email address on their database and that was that. This random person got off on sending someone a photo of himself and got a way with it. I have to say nothing shocks me anymore, nothing. And that is not a good thing is it!"
"What happened to me was that someone pretended to need help because she was being abused by her partner and contacted me on Instagram. I believed her and started guiding her on where to go or how to report the abuse. Eventually, I suspected she might be lying because she seemed more interested in what I was doing than in what she needed to do, so I asked her if it was true. After a long silence, she replied no, that she just wanted to see what I would say, and then she disappeared. When I went to the website to report her as a fake account, she had already deactivated it. How did this affect me? After this incident, I closed my Instagram account and stopped accepting new friend requests, even though I had opened it to work as a social psychologist. In 2025, I reopened it with a lot of fear, but I only respond to messages from acquaintances and friends. In other words, it affected my security and my confidence. The fear didn't go away, and neither did the distrust. I wanted to provide a service to the community with my knowledge, but now I only use the account to upload photos or reels when that wasn't the original idea; it was precisely to be able to provide online assistance to women who suffer violence".
"1. Stalking, 2. Coercion, 3. Blackmail, 4. Monitoring, 5. Threats of harm. These came from random men online, state transnational repression, men affiliated to terrorist groups. Impact: 1. I went low profile online, 2. reduced online activity, 3. went private, 4. subconscious self-censorship that still continues today. While other researchers will argue and say this is a loss of online digital citizenship, I argue and say that the online and offline are interconnected".
"The app Kik is used for pro-anorexia and grooming activities. From the age of 13, I had men forcing me to send naked photos and videos doing certain things, with them promising to help me lose weight and coaching me through anorexia to be thinner".
"What I'd like to share concerns my experience using Chinese social media platforms. From a certain year onwards, the vast majority of Chinese social media applications began mandatorily displaying users' real-time IP addresses, purportedly to prevent fraud on these platforms. My experience relates to this. Several years ago, I was the victim of an attempted rape by a male acquaintance. At the time, I was living in China, and this individual had access to all my social media accounts. After moving to the UK for study and residence, my IP address changed to reflect my new location, and he ceased his harassment. However, whenever I returned to China and used social media there, my IP address would pinpoint my province of residence. He must have noticed my address reverting to a specific province in China, as he began persistently adding me across various social platforms using different accounts, accompanied by harassing messages. This behaviour caused me significant concern for my personal safety. Although I have not added him and he has not inflicted any physical harm, I am certain his actions are linked to my IP address as displayed on social platforms. Consequently, I experience anxiety and nightmares before every trip back to China—a time that ought to be a joyous reunion with my family. This has had a profound impact on my wellbeing".