This piece was written for the UN Women’s 16 Days of Activism 2025, held under the theme “UNiTE to End Digital Violence against All Women and Girls”, and is informed by ongoing work within the Faith & VAWG Coalition.

Northern Ireland is beginning to reckon more honestly with the scale of violence against women and girls. The Executive’s Strategic Framework describes VAWG as “deep-rooted” and culturally ingrained - a reality shaped by decades of conflict where threat, surveillance and coercion became embedded in everyday life. The legacy of sectarian division, paramilitary control and generational trauma continues to create conditions in which gendered harm persists.

The statistics are stark. Northern Ireland has been described as having one of the highest femicide rates in Western Europe. Women here are reported to be around twice as likely to be murdered as a result of domestic violence compared to the rest of the UK, and in 2024 the PSNI recorded over 30,500 domestic abuse incidents. One recent survey found that 98% of women in Northern Ireland had experienced some form of violence or abuse in their lifetime. These harms are not isolated from the region’s history; they are entangled with a past where violence functioned as a form of social regulation and where communities closely monitored one another.

This context now intersects with digital abuse, which is far from evenly distributed. Women of faith, in particular, experience harm through the lens of religious identity and community pressure. In a region where Catholic and Protestant identities continue to shape social belonging - and where Muslim, Jewish and migrant communities face rising hostility - online abuse can escalate offline quickly. Tight-knit communities mean a rumour spreads faster, a deepfake travels further, and the personal consequences can be immediate.

Compounding this is Northern Ireland’s position as the UK’s “porn capital”: over one third of adults accessed online pornography in May 2024, the highest proportion nationally. Much of this content normalises sexual violence, humiliation, misogyny, coercion and non-fatal strangulation - all of which filter into wider cultural and online spaces. When a society already grappling with domestic abuse and legacy trauma becomes saturated with violent sexualised media, the threshold for what is considered “acceptable” harm shifts downward.

Why context matters

These intersecting dynamics - conflict legacy, high VAWG prevalence, dense community networks, porn consumption patterns and digital misogyny - shape how women of faith experience risk. Ending VAWG in Northern Ireland means understanding context as carefully as content. 

Online harms do not land evenly across society, and women of faith often face distinct forms of digital abuse shaped by religious identity, modesty expectations, and community dynamics. These forms of harm remain largely invisible in mainstream policy conversations, but they carry serious offline consequences.

For Muslim women, image-based abuse illustrates the stakes clearly. A non-sexual photograph - or increasingly, an AI-generated fabrication - can be used to threaten honour-based repercussions. Investigations by Glamour UK and the “Exposed” campaign from Amina MWRC document cases where images showing hair, shoulders or midriff were weaponised for blackmail, coercion, and threats of forced marriage or family retaliation. The legal system often fails to recognise these images as intimate given that they do not contain anything “explicit” in the conventional sense, yet within community contexts the perceived transgression is treated as severe. That mismatch creates acute vulnerability.

Christian women may encounter different forms of faith-shaped digital harm. In some online environments, scripture is deployed to shame or silence women who speak about domestic abuse, coercive control or gender equality. This increasingly merges with broader manosphere narratives such as the fetishisation of the “trad wife” aesthetic - which present hyper-submission as an aspirational model and frame any deviation as moral or spiritual failure. These dynamics repackage patriarchal control in religious language, making online abuse harder to recognise and challenge.

Building a better policy response

Across these examples, the pattern is consistent: digital abuse becomes context-dependent, faith-coded and capable of escalating rapidly offline. Any policy response that treats online harm as generic will fail to grasp the mechanisms that make it so dangerous for women of faith.

Much of this harm is shaped not only by individual behaviour but by the design of digital platforms themselves. Algorithms prioritise content that is sensational, sexualised or hostile - conditions under which misogyny and identity-based abuse thrive. This means that material targeting women of faith is not just visible but actively amplified. Moderation systems, meanwhile, frequently miss cultural context, creating the conditions in which online hostility can spill rapidly into community-level tension, as recent events in Northern Ireland have shown.

One of the clearest contemporary risks in Northern Ireland is the growing tendency to weaponise women’s safety as a justification for racialised hostility. The Ballymena riots, analysed by the Committee on the Administration of Justice, showed how allegations of sexual violence were used to manufacture a sense of threat that could be directed towards migrant communities. Online posts framed immigration as a danger to “our women,” collapsing complex issues such as strained public services, housing pressures, as well as genuine concerns about violence into a single, simplified and racialised narrative.

This framing is not accidental; it is strategically effective. Claims about protecting women carry moral weight in a society already grappling with high levels of domestic abuse and femicide. Yet the data tells a different story. According to investigative reporting, almost half of those identified and reported for involvement in recent race riots in Northern Ireland have themselves been reported for domestic abuse. That contradiction exposes how rhetoric around “protecting women” can often serve more as a rhetorical shield than a genuine commitment to their safety.

Northern Ireland’s Strategic Framework to End VAWG sets out a comprehensive ambition, but it is clear that digital harms - particularly those shaped by faith, culture and community dynamics - remain underdeveloped within current policy thinking. The recent consultation on the criminalisation of sexually explicit deepfakes recognises the urgency of synthetic image abuse, yet existing legislation still struggles to capture harms that fall outside narrow definitions of “intimate” imagery. Likewise, online coercion framed through scripture, honour norms or modesty expectations rarely triggers intervention, despite carrying real-world consequences.

Faith communities therefore have a crucial role to play. They are often the first places where women seek support, the first to recognise reputational or relational risks, and the first to challenge narratives that weaponise women’s safety for other agendas. Embedding faith-informed expertise within NI’s implementation of the Strategic Framework - through prevention work, digital literacy initiatives and community engagement - would undoubtedly strengthen its ability to respond to harm as it is actually experienced.

Mischa Gerrard is a postgraduate student, researcher, and activist specialising in digital misogyny, algorithmic harms, and online radicalisation. She is a member of the Faith & Violence Against Women and Girls Coalition, and works at the intersection of technology, gender, and security.