Why Women Can’t Escape Violence—Even Online

By Anna Rose Wilson, QUT Guild Advocate

Content warning: This article contains discussions of sexual assault, abuse, child abuse, violence, death and dying, & sexism and misogyny.

Sherele Moody runs the Red Heart Movement’s Femicide Watch Australia website that hosts the harrowing Australian Femicide & Child Death Map. The Australian landscape is inundated with overlapping red hearts, representing each death of a woman or child caused by a male perpetrator. There is not enough time in the day to be able to acknowledge each victim, with data spanning back to 1838. In 2025, 78 women and 27 children’s untimely deaths were caused by male-perpetrated violence. It is only March and the current statistics for 2026 are already too high, with 12 women and 4 children murdered. Every year this horrifying number fails to decrease while the cases of violence against women continue to rise.

Despite this, the LNP Crisafulli Government has decided to scrap the Queensland Police specialist unit providing support for domestic and family violence. This decision was allegedly made as domestic violence case management was not “core” police business. If preventing violence within the Queensland community is not core police business, then what is? The Government has fundamentally declared that femicide is not something they take seriously, nor do they believe it is an issue to be resolved.

The coronial inquest into Kelly Wilkinson’s death in 2021 heard that just four days before being burned to death by her estranged husband, Kelly was turned away from the Southport police station and told to let her ex-husband “cool off” and to “give him a break”. The LNP has effectively removed the limited (and frankly incompetent) police intervention that was available to protect Queensland women. Since the creation of the web, violence against women has been insidiously infiltrating online spaces, removing any hopes of creating safe, online spaces for women.

In 1985, Donna Harraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto planted the first seeds of cyberfeminism and the belief that technology is something to seize, rather than fear as a tool of patriarchal dominance. Harraway urged women to shape these new online spaces to create a virtual society that is more accepting and less binary than the real world. In 2026, over 40 years since Harraway’s book released, we can recognise that the tech sector has evolved into a “brotopia” that historically excludes women from the wealth and influence within Silicon Valley and beyond. The realities of patriarchy infiltrating the online realm means Harraway’s visions of what this new technology could provide women were grossly overestimated.

The United Nations have found that the lack of online safety legislation globally implies that 1.8 billion women and girls are currently without legal protections for online abuse. This lack of legal protection is concerning; however, Australia has attempted to criminalise the creation of sexual material without consent (deepfakes), which has for the first time this year been used to prosecute a 19-year-old South Australian man. Under the laws, sharing non-consensual deepfake sexually explicit material carries a maximum penalty of six years in jail, whilst the creation of the content has a penalty of seven years in jail.

The creation of explicit deepfakes illustrates the online world that Harraway imagined is far from the truth. Deepfakes are created through artificial intelligence to generate realistic but misleading and usually sexually explicit content. Deepfake sexual images make up the majority of deepfake content, with almost all images depicting women and 98% of all online deepfake videos being made with non-consensual pornographic images.

No matter your wealth or power, if a deepfake is created of you, current laws do not protect women. A prime example of the lack of legal protection can be seen in the deepfakes of one of the world’s most influential people, Taylor Swift. Sexually explicit deepfakes were created of her in 2024 and had over 45 million views before being taken down. If the law cannot protect someone who can afford its protection ten times over, then how will the other billions of women and girls without Swift’s resources be protected?

For many women, they are told the responsibility to stop online abuse begins with them, what they post, and how they interact online. Why should the onus be on the women and girls who are seeking help and not the apps/platforms that are allowing this content to be created and distributed? Social media apps have the capacity to monitor the posting of deepfake material, they have the technology and funds to be able to scan through mountains of data to detect deepfake images and videos. Governments need to place more pressure on social media platforms to do this—it is not enough to simply ban under 16s from accessing social media, as inappropriate and sexually explicit content can be shown to or created of any individual, no matter their age.

Schools have begun incorporating information on deepfakes into their lessons on consent and respectful relationship education, so students become aware of the skills needed for safe and respectful digital interactions. Considering the only person to be charged under the new deepfake laws was a 19-year-old young man, implementing education around respect, consent and deepfakes in schools is vital.

If any of this information was triggering for you and you wish to seek support, or report a deepfake, please see the below information.

Domestic Violence Support: