By Silence Charumbira
For many women and girls in Southern Africa, the mobile phone has opened doors that were long closed to them. A schoolgirl in a rural village can follow lessons online, a woman can run her business from her handset, and women once kept out of public debate can now take part in it.
Yet the same phone has also become a way of reaching and hurting them. Women across the region describe intimate images shared without their consent, blackmail from people they have never met, and harassment that follows them from one platform to the next. For legislators, journalists and activists, the abuse is often sexual in tone and aimed at damaging their reputations until they withdraw from view.
A policy brief published by the SADC Parliamentary Forum and Equality Now shows how far the region’s laws have fallen behind this kind of harm. Across the 16 SADC member states, it finds, technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) remains something the law barely recognises.
Where the law falls short
Eleven of the 16 countries have laws on cybercrime or electronic evidence, but only five of those laws clearly treat TFGBV as an offence. Many countries still have no specific prohibition on sharing intimate images without consent, on sexual extortion or on online coercion. Most anti-trafficking laws ignore technology, even though traffickers routinely use social media to lure victims, and no country has a dedicated system for collecting data on these crimes, leaving governments with little sense of how widespread they are.
Even where such laws exist, their wording can work against survivors. In Malawi, the brief notes, the cyber law requires proof that the offender intended to cause “reasonable fear for safety”, a test that overlooks the humiliation at the heart of most image-based abuse. A woman who reports such abuse is likely to meet police officers untrained in handling digital evidence, courts with no standard forms for urgent preservation orders, and platforms under no legal obligation to help her, so the images are often widely shared long before anyone acts.
Yet the region is not short of good examples. South Africa’s Cybercrimes Act makes it a crime to share intimate images without consent and has produced convictions, and Zimbabwe has a similar prohibition. Eswatini has procedures for preserving electronic evidence, while Botswana has a data protection regulator that handles privacy complaints. Lesotho’s Counter Domestic Violence Act of 2022 defines technological abuse and allows courts to stop an abuser from contacting a victim electronically. What is missing is a region-wide effort to bring these measures together.
Lesotho’s unfinished business
Lesotho has a particular reason to care. The SADC Model Law on Gender-Based Violence, which counts online gender-based cybercrimes and bullying among the forms of GBV, was adopted at the Forum’s 50th Plenary Assembly, hosted by Lesotho’s Parliament in December 2021. Nearly five years later, the brief finds that none of the 16 member states has fully domesticated it: most are rated “partial”, some are still drafting bills and two are rated “low”. Because a model law is a guide rather than a binding obligation, it protects no one until a national parliament turns it into law.
The Counter Domestic Violence Act was an important step, but it covers domestic relationships and does little for a woman abused by strangers. Lesotho’s cybercrime legislation, meanwhile, has been rejected, withdrawn and retabled more than once since 2020, with debate centring, rightly, on provisions reviving criminal defamation and punishing “false” information, which journalists and civil society fear could be turned against critics.
That experience should give the whole region pause, because laws meant to protect women online ought not to become a route to wider controls on speech. A sound TFGBV law deals with clearly defined conduct, such as sharing intimate images without consent, sextortion, grooming and cyberstalking, and gives survivors quick remedies without criminalising insult or opinion.
A loss to public life
The harm reaches well beyond the individual. When women in politics, journalism and activism leave social media, decline to stand for office or stop speaking publicly because of abuse, public debate loses their voices, and a region still working to bring more women into its parliaments and newsrooms cannot afford that. The digital divide deepens the problem. According to figures cited in the brief, women in low- and middle-income countries are 15 percent less likely than men to use mobile internet, and those with limited access tend to be less familiar with digital tools, less aware of how to report abuse and less able to get help.
Five steps for parliaments
The brief asks parliamentarians to act on five fronts. The first is to define the offences clearly in law, with penalties for sharing intimate images without consent, for sexual coercion and extortion, for online grooming and for livestreamed abuse, and to amend trafficking laws so that they cover online recruitment and the digital control of victims.
The second is to speed up remedies, so that electronic protection orders can be issued within 48 hours and courts have standard forms and clear guidance for preserving and removing content within 24 to 72 hours. The third is to hold platforms accountable by requiring notice-and-action procedures with set response times, by negotiating formal agreements with the major platforms for reliable flagging channels, and by making sure the law reaches harm originating on platforms based abroad. On their own, small states such as Lesotho have limited influence over global technology companies, but as a bloc of 16 they would carry far more weight.
The fourth step falls to ministries of finance, which the brief urges to fund prevention, enforcement and services for survivors, including digital safety support in shelters and round-the-clock response teams in the police and prosecution services. The fifth is to prepare for harms that existing laws may not reach, such as artificial intelligence tools that can produce an explicit video from a single photograph, and to support the proposed Model TFGBV Amendment Protocol to the SADC Model Law, so that the region meets new technologies with one shared legal approach. Regionally, the Forum could lead by establishing a TFGBV observatory to track progress and by drafting templates for cross-border cooperation on digital evidence and takedowns.
The choice before SADC
At continental level, the African Union’s Convention on Ending Violence Against Women and Girls, adopted in February 2025, expressly covers violence in cyberspace, and SADC’s Model Law points the same way. Lesotho launched a national follow-up study on gender-based violence in August with European Union backing, the first since 2013, and will examine technology-facilitated abuse among other emerging risks.
That evidence ought to shape new legislation.
The brief concludes that SADC should lead in adopting rights-based, survivor-centred responses to TFGBV, which means passing laws, funding them and preparing the courts to apply them. For as long as that work is delayed, more women and girls will have their images shared without consent, be pushed off the internet or be blackmailed, with no one held to account. The commitment was made in Maseru in 2021, and it now falls to the region’s parliaments to honour it.
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