Bridging the Gap: Addressing Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence in AI Governance

• AI governance frameworks and gender-based violence norms are currently operating in silos, leaving vulnerable populations unprotected against emerging digital harms.
• AI significantly amplifies the speed, scale, and persistence of harassment, deepfakes, and gendered disinformation.
• Structural harms, such as women and marginalized groups withdrawing from public life due to abuse, reinforce existing societal inequalities.
• Current AI policies often treat gender as an "add-on" principle rather than embedding it into concrete, operative, and auditable measures.

Key Research Findings

• APC's report, Bridging the gap: Addressing technology-facilitated gender-based violence in global AI governance, identifies three core intersectional areas: structural gendered risks, AI-amplified violence, and governance gaps.
• AI is not creating entirely new forms of violence but is enabling coordinated harassment campaigns that were previously cost-prohibitive or physically impossible to sustain.
• The absence of inclusive participation in AI design leads to governance frameworks that fail to account for the lived realities of women, queer, and gender-diverse individuals.

Policy Limitations

• Many existing TFGBV (technology-facilitated gender-based violence) instruments predate current AI capabilities and lack the mandate to address modern threats like algorithmic bias or deepfakes.
• "Mainstreaming" gender into policy requires going beyond gender-balanced panels; it demands evaluating who benefits, who bears the risk, and who has access to remedies throughout the entire AI lifecycle.
• Principles like "fairness" and "diversity" are often included in preambles but fail to translate into legally binding, actionable requirements.

Strategic Recommendations

• Implement gender-responsive human rights impact assessments throughout the AI development lifecycle.
• Explicitly classify TFGBV as a specific category of AI-related risk.
• Bridge institutional silos by enabling better communication between gender ministries, human rights bodies, and AI regulatory authorities.
• Ensure the meaningful participation of women, gender-diverse people, and civil society organizations in all stages of AI governance and decision-making.