The Digital War on Women: The Link Between Online Misogyny and Human Trafficking

For decades, Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa worked as a war correspondent throughout Southeast Asia. Yet nothing, she said, prepared her for the onslaught of violent sexist abuse that she and her female colleagues endured online.

A 2022 study by UNESCO and the International Center for Journalists found that almost 75% of women journalists surveyed in 125 countries said they experienced online threats of violence, rape, or death. These attacks are often tolerated and facilitated by Big Tech. Among the top-ranked words used to intimidate women journalists was “presstitute,” a crude slur implying that a woman’s worth is insignificant and her dignity irrelevant.

Women journalists are not the only ones subjected to misogynistic attacks on social media. Women in public office or running for political positions also face relentless online sexual harassment. One candidate in the U.K. was recently asked whether OnlyFans was fronting her campaign. Studies show that such online assaults often lead to women withdrawing from the political sphere altogether, jeopardizing democracy and the equal participation of women in public life.  

The online misogyny is expected to intensify with the upcoming U.S. elections. For instance, since announcing her presidential run, Vice President Kamala Harris, who is of African and South Asian descent, has been targeted with attacks of a racialized sexual nature,  such as calling her a “Jezebel,” or layering her image into pornographic content. 

 These examples illustrate the impact of the sexual objectification and dehumanization of women in society. This issue is also at the core of a groundbreaking United Nations report, “Prostitution and violence,” presented a month ago by the Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, Reem Alsalem.  Her report describes the indisputable links between the sex trade, including prostitution and pornography, and the consequential forms of oppression of women in all spheres of life.

After reviewing over 300 submissions from global stakeholders and consulting with 86 human rights experts and survivors of prostitution, Alsalem’s report states, “Prostitution reduces women and girls to mere commodities and perpetuates a system of discrimination and violence that hinders their ability to achieve true equality.” 

This unequivocal recognition of prostitution as violence — unprecedented within the UN system — demands an urgent response from governments and the public alike to combat one of the worst forms of misogyny. The Special Rapporteur recommends that states enact a legal framework, known as the Nordic, Abolitionist or Equality Model, which holds sex buyers accountable for the egregious harm they cause, while ending the arrests of prostituted individuals and offering them life-saving services.  

Contrary to Alsalem’s recommendations, advocacy groups and legislators across the United States, including New York, Rhode Island, Illinois, and Vermont, are pushing for the expansion of the sex trade. Bills advocating the legalization and decriminalization of sex buying, pimping, and the ownership of commercial sex establishments are proliferating. In flagrant contempt of federal laws, a 2022 US Department of Justice report categorized escort services as legitimate employers by using the term “sex work,” and reassured readers that online sex trafficking is a myth. In reality, escort agencies are third-party profiteers dependent on sexual exploitation to operate. 

We see the devastating consequences of decriminalizing the sex trade around the world. A simple economic equation explains that decriminalization and legalization foster increased demand for prostitution, leading to a surge in sex trafficking, including children, to bring more “supply” to the state’s expanded commercial sex market.  In Germany, sex trafficking cases rose by 70% after legalization. Berlin alone hosts over 500 brothels with over a million men visiting them every day. In the Netherlands, which lifted its ban on pimping in 2002, the vast majority of women in brothels fit the definition of sex trafficking. 

Alsalem’s report cites the UN Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which mandates governments to eliminate harmful cultural practices that cultivate sex-based inequalities. Although the US has embarrassingly not yet ratified CEDAW, we cannot allow our federal and state legislators to promote the selling of human beings, overwhelmingly women, for sexual acts, offering impunity for sex buyers and pimps and disincentivizing police from investigating cases of trafficking. 

Thanks to thousands of years of feminist advocacy, our laws and culture finally grasped that men’s violence against women in the forms of domestic violence, rape, and sexual harassment are crimes of abuse of power. This World Day Against Trafficking, we must continue to fight for a broader understanding that prostitution is also a system stitched from the cloth of patriarchy, sexism, racism, and economic inequalities. 

Alsalem’s report makes clear that “the equal participation of women in society is impossible to achieve when prostitution is normalized.” Governments that tolerate the commodification of women and girls sanction the online and real-life abuse men commit against them. 

If one woman has a dollar bill advertised on her body, every woman does — from journalists to politicians, and every profession in between. Our governments’ tentative efforts to secure equality for half of the globe’s population will remain fruitless if they continue to ignore these self-evident truths.