Sawubona: Global Rights, UKaid seek end to digital gender violence

The Global Rights and other partners have called for concerted and lasting efforts to tackle the rising digital gender-based violence across Nigeria’s rural communities and cities.
The international civil society organisation made the call at a creative advocacy event for the 2025 16 Days of Activism titled “Sawubona: Artvocacy for Change”.
Speaking at the event organized in partnership with the UKaid, the Global Rights Programme Officer, Ms Noya Sedi, said that digital violence is still poorly understood thus making it more complicated.
The event was attended by activists, community responders and development partners among other stakeholders in Abuja to highlight the growing threat of digital gender-based violence across the country.
Sedi said the goal was to make digital harms more visible and to help communities understand how online abuse is shaping real life relationships, safety and peace.
“Many survivors still do not know where to report digital abuse or how to get help. This silence allows violence to thrive in communities that are becoming increasingly connected. One thing we’ve seen across Nigeria, both in cities and in rural communities, is that violence is increasingly taking digital forms.
“More young people have smartphones, more interactions now happen online, and with that has come a rise in behaviour that harms, manipulates, shames, or intimidates women and girls long before anyone notices the impact offline.
“The challenge is that digital violence is still poorly understood. Many people don’t have the language for it. Survivors often don’t recognise it as abuse. And even when harm is clear, most don’t know where to take it or how to seek help. That gap in understanding creates silence, and silence creates conditions where violence thrives.
“At Global Rights, our work, especially through the community structures we support, has shown us that this isn’t just an ‘internet issue’, but one that affects relationships, safety, participation, and even community peace.
“And the more digital our lives become, the more important it is that the people who respond to GBV at the community level can recognize these new patterns of harm and talk about them in ways that resonate locally.
“That is why tonight’s showcase matters. This gathering uses art, storytelling, and dialogue to make digital violence visible. We want to show what it looks like in real life, how it shows up in everyday interactions, and why it deserves just as much attention as physical forms of abuse,” she said.
The Global Rights officer called for urgent local GBV responders to recognise new patterns of digital harm and to speak about them in language that resonates with the people they serve.
Also speaking, Senior Programme Manager, UK Integrated Security Fund (ISF), Mr Cliff Gai, said the rise of digital gender-based violence is one of the unintended consequences of increased online connectivity.
He commended Global Rights for pushing the issue to the forefront and urged participants to leave the event more conscious of how their digital actions affect others.
Gai said that beyond the screen, online harassment and manipulation have deep impacts on victims’ lives and urged citizens to become activists within their digital spaces and to support safer online communities.
He said, “I must commend Global Rights, one of our standing implementing partners at the UK ISF, for taking the initiative to bring this conversation to us today. I can only hope that we use this space as an opportunity to look at the real consequences of digital gender-based violence and the consequences that it has on real people.
“Beyond the online space that we engage with every day and but most importantly that when we leave here from the conversations and the presentations that we will be benefiting from, they will spur us to take a stand to take a decision to be activists and actors within the space, who will be conscious in their engagements in the digital space and will also encourage others to be conscious as they do so.”