Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence (TFGBV) has become one of the most urgent yet underreported challenges facing women and girls in Ethiopia. As digital technologies become more deeply woven into everyday life, they are also being weaponized to harass, intimidate, exploit, and silence women.
The stories behind this exhibition are drawn from interviews with survivors, experts, and advocates. Their experiences reveal a troubling reality: while countless women are targeted online, very few cases ever reach the courts, and even fewer result in perpetrators being held accountable. For many survivors, justice remains out of reach.
Informants told The Horn Frequency that they feel less safe online today than ever before. The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, including powerful generative tools such as Veo 3, has transformed how digital content is created. While these technologies offer remarkable creative opportunities, they have also made it easier to produce manipulated images and videos that are used to humiliate, threaten, and abuse women. The speed at which these technologies are evolving has outpaced the systems designed to protect those most at risk.
The rise of TFGBV in Ethiopia is driven by multiple, interconnected challenges: limited digital literacy, inadequate legal and institutional responses, insufficient technical capacity among law enforcement agencies to investigate AI-enabled abuse, and the inability of many social media platforms to effectively detect and moderate harmful content in Ethiopia’s local languages. Together, these gaps have created an environment where online abuse can flourish with little accountability.
This exhibition, created in collaboration with the Pulitzer Center, invites audiences to confront a crisis that often remains invisible despite its profound consequences. Through art, storytelling, and lived experiences, it exposes the emotional, social, and psychological toll that technology-facilitated violence takes on women and girls. It also calls for urgent action from policymakers, law enforcement agencies, technology companies, civil society organizations, and communities to ensure that innovation does not come at the expense of women’s safety, dignity, and fundamental rights.
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