The Tirana of violence against women and the online battlefield

2025-11-26 07:43:00, Editorial Majlinda Bregu

No form of violence has shown as much resilience and ability to reinvent itself as violence against women. It has not faded away, on the contrary, it has found new terrain, now also in the digital space.

This year, the global 16 Days of Activism against Violence against Women campaign is dedicated to digital violence. And rightly so. Because the new front of violence is no longer just the doorstep, but the screen. Not just the violence of the hand, but the violence of the keyboard.

Not just physical intimidation, but public lynching.

As a "veteran" (without pathos) of the battle to recognize the effects of online violence against women and girls, without claiming to compete with anyone for the toxic level of online attacks, today I am starting the day with the same thought as the whole world: Online violence is a crime!

For more than ten years I have been calling for this reality to be clearly recognized in law. Back then, few believed that digital violence was as real, as dangerous, as destructive as physical violence.

Today, finally, the new law "On the Prevention and Protection of Violence against Women and Domestic Violence" is being discussed, which recognizes hate speech, threats, degrading and insulting descriptions of a person, the distribution of personal data, digital harassment, etc., as punishable forms of violence spread by viral technology, giving women and girls a legal weapon that was missing until yesterday.

In practice and until the law is implemented, the lines will not be so clear. Nor will the law and its implementation eliminate digital violence, but it could be a new instrument for justice and a new chance for every woman and girl who decides to sue for online violence, the terrain conceived and easily used as a weapon of mass destruction.

But like the whole world, neither too just nor too unjust, we too can start talking more about our microcosm of violence today.

For the windows in all corners of the country, which close faster than night, for women who have faced violence and have seen only the cold wall of procedures, for the voices that have never been heard and where help has arrived when it was too late.

But above all, we can break free from the misogynistic consensus that portraying women and girls as “c…, easy, wonderful targets for click-profits” is permissible, acceptable, wonderful, gem, brilliant find” and so on. No! It is simply reprehensible!

Because digital violence doesn't hide behind the screen, it hits real life.

Every people that has wanted to be called worthy has known how to protect its most vulnerable. Entire histories have fallen because of indifference. Empires have fallen because they did not know how to protect their people. We are neither greater nor more invulnerable than they.

So today, let's at least agree like the whole world: Digital violence is a crime!/ CNA