Her Space with Bridget Mensah: 16 days of activism: The threat in the comments

Fifty-eight percent of girls across multiple countries have experienced online harassment, according to Plan International. Not girls courting controversy or pushing radical agenda. Just girls existing online, sharing photos, voicing opinions, daring to take up space.

Meanwhile, two thirds of young men now regularly engage with masculinity influencers online who teach them that women are the enemy, that female success comes at male expense, that feminism has victimised men. This is the digital battleground where being a woman has become a prosecutable offence.

Here is what modern womanhood looks like. You are 25, you’ve just landed a promotion. You post about it on LinkedIn, proud of your achievement. Within hours, your inbox floods with messages calling you a “corporate whore” who “slept her way to the top.” You celebrate buying your first car with your own money on TikTok. The comments become a cesspit: “Bet zaddy paid for it,” “Attention seeking slut.” This isn’t an isolated incident. This is women’s life every day they log online.

As the world marks the 16 Days of Activism against Gender Based Violence, running from November 25 to December 10, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, Human Rights Day, UN Women has issued a stark warning that should terrify us all. Digital violence is intensifying at an alarming rate, and fewer than 40 percent of countries have laws protecting women from cyber harassment or cyberstalking.

This leaves 44 percent of the world’s women and girls, 1.8 billion people, without access to legal protection. The 16 days campaign, led by UN Women under its UNiTE to End Violence against Women initiative, focuses this year on ending digital abuse against women and girls, one of the fastest evolving forms of violence worldwide.

It calls on governments, technology companies and communities to strengthen laws, end impunity and hold platforms accountable. The urgency cannot be overstated because what begins online doesn’t stay online. Digital abuse spills into real life, spreading fear, silencing voices and, in the worst cases, leading to physical violence and femicide.

The so called “manosphere,” that growing network of online communities spreading toxic masculinity, has moved from Internet fringes into our schools, workplaces and relationships. These aren’t random content creators offering harmless advice. They are part of a coordinated ecosystem promoting the idea that men are victims of feminism, that women are the enemy, that female success comes at male expense. Their content doesn’t stay confined to dark corners of the Internet. It seeps into real world attitudes and behaviours, shaping how an entire generation of young men view women.

I know this exhaustion personally. Every woman with any online presence knows it. That calculation before hitting “post” where you weigh whether what you are saying is worth the inevitable backlash. That moment of hesitation where you wonder if sharing your success will invite a tsunami of abuse. A friend who runs a successful business stopped posting about her company’s growth because the abuse became unbearable. Not criticism of her business model. Not questions about her strategy. Graphic sexual threats. Detailed descriptions of what men wanted to do to her. Comments picking apart her appearance, her voice, her clothing choices.

Another friend, a journalist covering technology, receives rape threats so regularly that she’s developed a system for categorising them by severity. The “mild” ones, the ones that are just vague threats of violence, she ignores. The detailed ones, the ones that include her home address or photos of her children, those go to police; who do nothing. Because our legal frameworks were built for physical spaces, and online harassment exists in a grey area where evidence is screenshots, perpetrators are anonymous and enforcement is nearly impossible.

Women in leadership, business and politics face deepfakes, coordinated harassment and gendered disinformation designed to drive them to deplatform or leave public life altogether. Across the world, one in four women journalists report online threats of physical violence, including death threats.

Think about what this means. A woman writes an article about economics and receives threats of sexual violence. A woman launches a start-up and strangers create pornographic deepfakes of her face. A woman runs for local council and wakes up to find someone has posted her home address alongside suggestions of what should be done to her. The message is always the same: you don’t belong here, stay silent or face consequences.

The double bind has gone digital and weaponised in ways that would be darkly funny if they weren’t so damaging. Share your success? You are showing off, you’re arrogant, you clearly slept your way there. Need support? You are weak, you are incompetent, you’re proving women can’t handle pressure. Independent? You are a man hater, you’re bitter, no wonder you’re single. Dependent? You are a leech, you’re using men, you’re lazy. There is no right way to be a woman online because the game was rigged from the start. The goal was never for us to win. The goal was for us to stop playing.

What strikes me most is how young women are internalising this. They are watching older women get torn apart online and learning that safety requires silence. A 16 -year- old girl told me recently that she’d decided not to pursue her dream of becoming a science communicator on YouTube because she’d watched every woman in the field get relentlessly harassed.

She’d watched them picked apart for their looks, their voices, the way they explained concepts. She’d watched men with a fraction of their qualifications get praised while women with PhDs got called stupid in their own comment sections. So, she decided her safety mattered more than her dreams. We are raising brilliant young women who are being taught that their voices matter less than the comfort of men who feel threatened by their existence.

The Equality Now report published this month found that survivors often don’t bother reporting to police because they don’t believe it will be taken seriously. Why would they? When women report online harassment, they are asked what they did to provoke it. What were you wearing in that photo? Why did you share that opinion? Couldn’t you have been nicer? The implication is always that women invited the abuse, that we should have known better than to be visible online.

Meanwhile, the men sending rape threats, creating deepfakes, coordinating harassment campaigns face no consequences. As UN Women Executive Director Sima Bahous states, reporting remains low, justice systems are ill-equipped and tech platforms face little accountability. The rise of AI-generated abuse has only deepened impunity across borders and platforms.

This is not about being overly sensitive. What I cannot accept as normal is the systematic campaign to terrorise women out of digital spaces that increasingly determine economic and social participation. When your career depends on online presence but that presence invites abuse, you are choosing between different forms of harm.

Build your brand and face harassment, or stay invisible and watch opportunities go to men who don’t face the same impossible choice. This matters because the digital world isn’t separate from the real world anymore. It is the real world. Business happens online. Careers are built online. Communities form online. Democracy happens online. And women are being systematically pushed out of it.

The conversation needs to shift fundamentally. Stop asking what women can do to protect themselves and start asking why men feel entitled to terrorise strangers for having opinions. Stop telling women to develop thicker skin and start holding platforms accountable for the violence they enable and profit from.

There are signs of progress. Laws are beginning to evolve, from the UK’s Online Safety Act to Mexico’s Ley Olimpia to Australia’s Online Safety Act and the EU’s Digital Safety Act. As of 2025, 117 countries reported efforts addressing digital violence. But efforts remain fragmented for a transnational challenge that requires coordinated global action.

This is our digital battleground. We are not asking for special treatment. We are asking for the basic right to exist online without systematic campaigns designed to silence us because that’s what they’re really after. Not debate. Not dialogue. Silence. The 16 Days of Activism reminds us that until the digital space is safe for all women and girls, true equality will remain out of grasp, everywhere.

This campaign demands urgent action to close legal gaps, hold perpetrators accountable and ensure technology becomes a force for equality, not harm. Because digital violence is real violence and there can be no excuse for online abuse. And that silence they’re demanding? That’s the one thing we cannot afford to give them.

>>>the writer is a PR, Marketing & Communications professional and General Secretary of the Network of Women in Broadcasting (NOWIB). A dedicated feminist and advocate for women in media, she champions workplace excellence while empowering voices and building bridges across the industry. Bridget is passionate about amplifying women’s stories and driving positive change in Ghana’s media. She can be reached via email at [email protected]

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