Addressing Gender-Based Online Harms: Ofcom’s New Draft Guidance Explained

On 25^th February, Ofcom opened consultation on its draft guidance which addresses online safety for women and girls. This new guidance underscores the need for stronger actions to protect women and girls from the pervasive harms they disproportionately experience online. As Ofcom’s CEO Dame Melanie Dawes expressed:

“Everyone should be free to live out their lives online without the fear that they will be abused, stalked or harassed. But far too often, victims and survivors are expected to keep themselves safe from online abuse, rather than tech companies taking steps to protect their users.”

Why has this guidance been published? 

Under the UK’s Online Safety Act (‘OSA’), Ofcom is required to produce various materials to assist organisations that are considered legally responsible for protecting UK users from illegal content, and content and activity that is harmful to children. The OSA applies to providers of user-to-user services, meaning where a user can encounter the content of another, and search services (‘Service Providers’), who are then required to meet various obligations including conducting risk assessments and implementing measures to mitigate user harm. You can read more about the OSA in our briefing here.

Ofcom has already published consultations on illegal content, the protection of children online, transparency, and a draft code of practice which recommended safety measures Service Providers can implement. This new draft guidance builds on these previous materials, however, a key difference is that this guidance is voluntary, as there is no actual requirement for Service Providers to implement the recommendations. This difference, however, has allowed Ofcom to provide guidance on ‘legal but harmful’ content and activities, for example, misogynistic posts and comments. This type of harm falls outside the scope of the OSA, as a result of concerns raised during early debates of the Online Safety Bill, that the inclusion of such harms would impinge on individual’s rights to free speech and expression. While the OSA has faced criticism by some groups for dropping provisions on ‘legal but harmful’ content, this new voluntary guidance signals Ofcom’s willingness to take a regulatory role that addresses the needs of women, and girls, online, even when the content in question is lawful. 

In preparing this guidance, Ofcom has incorporated insights from survivors, victims, women’s advocacy groups, and safety experts, and aims to help Service Providers adopt a safety-by-design approach, focussing on anticipating, minimising and eliminating harm. Broadly, the guidance hopes to achieve three core objectives: 

1. To summarise the types of content and activity that harm women and girls online. 
2. To offer practical and achievable recommendations that go beyond the measures set out in the previous mandatory guidance material and codes.  
3. To demonstrate the urgent need to improve online safety for women and girls. 

Recommendations under the guidance 

The guidance centres on nine actions Services Providers can take to combat gender-based harms. Ofcom has focused on four key harms - online misogyny, pile-ons and harassment, online domestic abuse, and intimate image abuse – to illustrate these actions in practice. The goal in producing these nine actions is to demonstrate that Service Providers, and all companies, need to go beyond reactive approaches, like content removal, and instead target the broader systems that allow these harms to thrive. For each action, the guidance first outlines the foundational steps Service Providers are required to take to comply with their duties under the OSA, and then provides additional good practice steps specifically aimed at tackling the harms faced by women and girls. 

For each of the nine actions, the recommended ‘good practices’ can be summarised as: 

Taking Responsibility 

1. Governance and accountability: ensure processes address online gender-based harms by including expert consultations, policy and media literacy development, and staff training. 
2. Gender-sensitive risk assessments: risk assessments should consider the specific risks women and girls face, based on input from users and experts, and attempt to understand emerging technologies that enable new types of harm.
3. Transparency: Service Providers should be transparent about their efforts to tackle gender-based harms, including publishing the effectiveness of their safety measures, while avoiding giving perpetrators insights that could be exploited. 

Preventing Harm

1. Abusability evaluations and product testing: Service Providers should attempt to gain further insight into how their services are used for example by using red teaming, personas, and working with experts to test their features. 
2. Safer defaults: build in defaults that give women more control over their privacy, interactions, and visibility online, including by creating bundle default settings and removing automatic geolocation information.
3. Harmful content reduction: a range of persuasion, removal and reduction measures should be implemented to address harms at different points, whether it be promoting users to reconsider posting content detected as misogynistic, or scanning, for duplications when a request to remove explicit content is successful. 

Supporting women and girls

1. User control: allow users more control over their online presence, such as being able to block multiple accounts simultaneously and modifying content visibility settings. 
2. Improved reporting: developing trauma-informed and tailored reporting systems, which allow users to track and manage their reports, and provide feedback throughout the process. 
3. Enforcement actions: Service Providers should take appropriate actions to prevent and address violations, including implementing moderation review and fact checking procedures, and using watermarks to identify synthetic material.

Why is this guidance important? 

The 8^th of March marked International Women’s Day, with the theme #AccelerateAction urging everyone to work towards addressing systemic barriers and biases faced by women and girls. Online harm is a major aspect of this challenge, with women 5 times more likely to experience intimate image abuse and 23% of teenage girls regularly encountering content that objectifies or demeans women.  

As mentioned, while the nine actions are voluntary, they provide an opportunity for Service Providers to reflect on their current practices and take a proactive stance on user safety, even if they are not legally obligated to do so. Organisations that are not covered by the OSA can also benefit by implementing these actions, and use this as an opportunity to stay ahead of lawmakers and regulators, while also demonstrating a commitment to the safety of women and girls. 

Next steps

Ofcom’s consultation will remain open until 23 May 2025, with the final guidance expected later in 2025. Ofcom has announced that 18 months after it issues the final guidance, it will conduct and publish an assessment on what Service Providers are doing (or not doing) to create a safer life online for women and girls.