Promoting Gender Equality in Cyberspace: How to address “Cyber Gender-Based Violence” within Criminal Law Frameworks

After exploring the definitional groundwork – by seeking to substantiate notions such as ‘gender equality in cyberspace’ and ‘cyber gender-based violence’ – this paper investigates the intersection between ‘cybercrime’ and ‘gender-based crime’ through a Feminist theoretical perspective, arguing that gender should represent a central analytical category in understanding the driving factors and the social impact of conduct in cyberspace, as – by interacting with sexuality and technology – online discrimination reinforces offline gender hierarchies. Indeed, recent data demonstrate that women disproportionately experience cyberviolence – particularly enabled by AI’s deepfake – which harms individual victims and contributes to the collective degradation of women’s democratic participation. This points to the need to adopt new criminological theories, capable of accounting for the idiosyncrasies of violent digital conduct – dematerialization, desensitisation, contagion… – and gendered power dynamics. It also requires specific pathways to criminalize phenomena with differing disvalue, entangled in a ‘continuum’ between online and offline violence, that share common roots but take on different forms, hence the need for distinct but synergistic normative solutions. Therefore, we meticulously examine the EU’s response, focusing on Directive 2024/1385 and the strategies pursued by States, amidst tensions between precaution and ‘paternalism’. Finally, we call for a multidimensional approach – combining criminal law with cybersecurity and intersectional equality policies – to ensure that responses to ‘cyber gender-based crimes’ are both effective and equitable.