Stopping Violence Against Women and Girls

Every woman and girl, regardless of who they are or where they live, has the fundamental right to live free from fear, harassment, and violence. Yet in the digital age, misogyny has evolved into a toxic online threat. The rapid rise of the "manosphere" and "incel culture" is spreading hateful ideologies that translate into real-world harm.

The numbers are damning: over 10% of women in England have experienced online violence - a figure that leaps to 25% among young women aged 16–24 and 35% among LGBT+ women. Ethnic minority women bear a disproportionate brunt of this abuse, with Black women 84% more likely to be targeted in abusive tweets. Meanwhile, generative AI tools have turbocharged the crisis, enabling non-consensual sexually explicit deepfakes and automated harassment at scale.

Both Conservative and Labour governments have failed to treat violence against women and girls (VAWG) with the urgency of a national emergency. Existing measures like Ofcom's voluntary guidelines leave platforms to mark their own homework with no formal review until 2027, while seven in ten women report that current legislation is ineffective at keeping them safe from violence online.

Liberal Democrats believe that law must keep pace with technology to hold tech giants accountable. Today, Liberal Democrat members passed a decisive policy to tackle technology-facilitated abuse, enforce platform accountability, and speed up justice for victims.

Our new policy contains a number of measures, primarily aimed at ensuring Ofcom has the powers and legal backing to hold Big Tech to account, including: 

• Review the Online Safety Act so Ofcom uses its enforcement powers as a first, not last resort to hold platforms to account.
   
• Make Ofcom’s guidance on VAWG legally binding with real consequences for failure to comply.
   
• Require platforms to publish regular assessments of their role in facilitating misogynistic abuse and the steps taken to mitigate it.
   
• Reinvest fines levied under the Online Safety Act into online gender-based violence prevention, digital literacy and healthy relationships education.

It would also expand police powers to charge VAWG offences like online stalking, and technology-facilitated domestic abuse and harassment directly to speed up the process. 

Online harms do not stay online - they ruin lives, stifle women from participating in public life, and foster physical violence.

The Liberal Democrats are taking a stand to hold tech companies accountable, equip the police with the right powers, and build a digital world where women and girls can live safely and without fear.