'/%3E%3C/svg%3E "Youtube"){kind=small}
September 7, 2025
Ghadeer Ahmed, a feminist activist and writer, had no idea that a video recorded on a mobile phone, showing her dancing and celebrating with her friends in one of their houses, would turn into an instrument of blackmail and online violence lasting years. In 2012, after she broke up with her boyfriend, he tried to blackmail her sexually and posted the video on YouTube.
The clip was simply of a girl wearing a skirt dancing, but it put Ghadeer in a very difficult and complicated position. She was living at the time with her family in the city of El-Mahalla El-Kubra in the Gharbia governorate and wore hijab, as is customary in the provinces, which are predominantly “religious” (conservative), according to Ghadeer.
For years, the video was used against Ghadeer, especially by people who did not agree with her views: “They would post the video link in the comment section on all my social media accounts to blackmail me because of my work in the field of women’s rights. They’d write ‘this woman who defends women’s rights wants all women to dance like her on the internet.’’
This was not the only time Ghadeer faced blackmail and online stalking. In 2022, her mobile phone number and home address were leaked and shared on a Telegram group. This group would target women working in women’s rights fields, sharing their personal information in order to harm them.
For about a month, Ghadeer kept getting insulting and threatening messages on WhatsApp, as well as “disturbing” calls from unknown numbers, which she mostly ignored.
Ghadeer Is Not Alone
Ghadeer is not the only activist to have suffered blackmail and bullying. In 2017, someone tried to hack the Facebook account of political activist Nourhan Hefzy. She quickly contacted the person she was using as a guarantor to get it stopped. But things happened faster than either of them could deal with, and the SIM card for her phone stopped working.
Nourhan subsequently found out that someone had extracted the SIM card and, through her phone number, managed to hack into her Gmail and Facebook accounts, since Nourhan used her own number as a means of verification on her Google account.
Nourhan embarked on a long journey, starting with her mobile phone provider, to try to recover the number registered in her name, so that she could regain access to her Gmail and Facebook accounts. She contacted various people at Facebook and Google, but says it was far from easy and took a long time to fully restore her accounts. The blue verification badge which she had obtained shortly before her account was hacked helped her. “Throughout this, we used all the usual methods to get the accounts back, but it was impossible, really difficult,” she says.
Nourhan contacted the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression,a human rights organisation supporting and promoting freedom of expression in Egypt, for help in seeking legal redress. However, she had second thoughts, feeling there was no point at that time in reporting it.
The results of a 2021 survey by the Arab Regional Office of the UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women) showed that nearly half of female internet users in Arab countries (49 percent) reported feeling unsafe online. The highest rates , 70 percent, were among women activists and human rights advocates, while 62 percent of women reported receiving abusive or hateful messages.
In an earlier statement, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, said that “Digital media has opened the door to new forms of repression and violence, particularly for women activists and defenders of human rights. These new forms of harassment, intimidation, and defamation are frequently horrifying. And they often spill over into the real world, with threats of sexual and gender-based violence, and online smear and disinformation campaigns often of a sexual nature. They reveal the real names of victims to intimidate women who speak out.”
The former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights believes that online campaigns against women human rights advocates aim to undermine their credibility, diminish or silence their voices, and constrain the already limited freedom they have to make a difference on the ground.
Raneem Al-Afifi, a feminist journalist and trainer in gender-sensitive journalism, says that online gender-based violence is just an extension of the offline version, which women experience on a daily basis, and is just as serious.
“So online violence increases when there are other factors involved alongside sex and gender. That’s why feminist activists, women involved in politics and female journalists with a feminist ideology experience even greater violence. And this can become particularly complex and hostile because the perpetrator believes that women who have more freedom to express their opinions can pose a real threat to what they perceive as values and principles. This is what lends extreme hostility to harassment and threats online.”
Al-Afifi, believes that the problem with online violence is that, unlike real-life violence, there are no physical boundaries to prevent it, making it easy for someone to stalk their victim at a distance.
The author of this report conducted a survey into digital violence suffered by feminist activists and women’s rights defenders. Twenty Egyptian women activists reported being targeted on Facebook and WhatsApp, with all of them having experienced online violence at least once. Ninety percent of this sample had been harassed online and 50 percent had been bullied, while 25 percent reported being subjected to online blackmail.
Lawyer and feminist activist Entisar Alsaeed was surprised to find, on one of the popular social media platforms, an insulting and defamatory post against her which also contained sexual innuendo. She decided to take legal action straight away against the author of the post rather than tackle him online.
The case was referred to the Economic Court as one of defamation, slander, and sexual harassment. But, a year down the line, the court acquitted the defendant, according to Alsaeed.
Article 25 of Law No. 175 of 2018 on combating crimes involving information technology stipulates that “a person who violates any of the principles or family values of Egyptian society or the sanctity of private life, sends frequent multiple messages to a specific person without their consent, or provides their personal data to a system or website for the promotion of goods or services without their consent, or publishes through the internet or any means of information technology data, news, images or the like that violate the privacy of that person without their consent, whether the information published is true or false, shall be punished by imprisonment for a period of at least six months, by a fine of at least fifty thousand pounds and not more than one hundred thousand pounds, or by one or other of these penalties.”
Aziza El-Tawil, a lawyer with the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), believes that, although the cybercrime law punishes crimes such as defamation, violation of privacy, and blackmail with imprisonment or fines, legislation has been unable to encompass the modern nature of online crimes.
El-Tawil explains that while some crimes may be only a few hours long if someone posts a story that disappears quickly, the legal proceedings can take a year or more. Similarly, crimes committed on Telegram channels may end with the case being closed, because it is impossible to track down the owner of the channel.
Ghadeer filed a lawsuit in 2013 following the blackmail she suffered. Although she won the case and the court convicted her ex-boyfriend of defamation, Ghadeer later decided not to take further legal action against the perpetrators of the online violence against her, given her position as an activist.
According to the opinion poll we organised, 85 percent of women activists decided not to report incidents of online violence. Forty one percent said the reason they did not do so was “lack of confidence in the procedures involved and fear of having to disclose the contents of their phones.” Forty one percent also said they thought filing a report would make no difference, while 29 percent feared they would be blamed or criticised for being activists.
On the question of why some activists feel unable to report incidents of online violence, EIPR lawyer Aziza El-Tawil says that the procedures involved can be fraught with difficulty. These include the type of questions the victim is asked, such as those relating to personal matters, and having to deal with more than one officer in the cybercrime unit, which means they have to retell their story in detail more than once, which can be harmful for some. Having to wait for long periods of time means they may need to take a whole day off work. And the complainant may also be forced to hand over her mobile phone for inspection.
Al-Tawil adds, “This is why us lawyers always advise victims to empty their phones before they begin the process of making a report, especially of social media, which could hold personal photos or opinions which could expose a human rights activist, leading to prosecution or stigmatisation later on.”
In years past, feminist activist Aya Mounir decided not to take legal action over the several incidents of online violence she suffered, fearing that her family would pressure her into stopping her feminist activities. There was also the difficulty of prosecuting large numbers of people over the collective cyberattacks which she faced, and which she sometimes refers to as “collective harassment.”
Later in 2018, Aya was attacked by someone who sent a message via Messenger to a group of her female followers. She says it included “accusations of apostasy and the calls for her to be punished appropriately.” This happened after Aya had shared a post about women being denied inheritance rights. The post received widespread support, even from a group of religiously committed commentators, but had angered the sender of the message.
Although she was worried about the content of the message, Aya took no legal steps at the time because she was outside Egypt. But later, especially after the murder of Nayera Ashraf, she decided not to take online threats and harassment lightly, rather treat them more seriously.
Two years later, Aya went to SMEX to have content removed. The content included a private photo of herself along with improper comments on a Facebook page. This page targeted feminist activists, posting their photos alongside comments of a sexual nature.
SMEX, a non-profit organisation that defines itself as working to promote and defend human rights in the digital sphere across West Asia and North Africa, has an online safety platform that removes posts containing any hate speech directed against women or other online abuse. It also helps activists, journalists, and human rights advocates in the region who face cybersecurity incidents and online threats.
According to Samar Al-Halal, the technology unit lead and digital security helpdesk manager at SMEX, the platform has removed a total of 130 posts or accounts from many websites and apps which had violent content or featured other forms of online abuse since 2022,. This included blackmail, sexual extortion, account impersonation, cyberbullying, domestic violence, disclosure of personal information, hate speech, kidnapping, and disinformation.
Samar says that this online abuse was targeted at 32 male and female activists from Arab countries, 10 of them in Egypt.
The 2021 survey from the UN Women regional office found that 35 percent of women who experienced online violence in Arab countries reported feeling “sad or depressed.” Thirty five percent of the sample also said they no longer trusted those around them, while 12 percent reported having suicidal thoughts as a result of online violence.
Two years after the blackmail incident, in an attempt to put an end to what she was going through, Ghadeer reposted the video on her social media accounts, saying, “I don’t feel any shame, you can watch the video.”
