Written by Caroline Masboungi and Lara Quarterman, UNICEF
With over 124 million views since its March 2025 release, Adolescence is now Netflix’s third most-watched series. The show’s widespread popularity demonstrates our collective interest and concern about online extremism and how to stop boys from being radicalised. Yet, the absence of Katie’s voice—and her experience as a victim—raises a critical question: Are we still failing to centre the lives and stories of those most affected by gender-based violence?
As conversations around preventing boys’ exposure to online misogyny gain momentum, we must not lose sight of the harm their radicalisation inflicts on girls and women. When we frame boys as the only ones at risk in a digital landscape increasingly weaponised to perpetrate violence, we distort the narrative. If we focus solely on how boys become violent—without also asking what happens to the girls they target—we risk turning violence into spectacle rather than confronting its devastating human cost.
“Do you know what I don’t like about all this? The perpetrator always gets the front line… Katie isn’t important. Jamie is. Everyone will remember Jamie; no one will remember her. That’s what annoys me,” says DS Micha Franck in Adolescence, standing outside the school where 13-year-old Katie Leonard was murdered—allegedly by her classmate, Jamie Miller.
In Adolescence, Jamie is portrayed as a seemingly average 13-year-old boy pulled into the toxic depths of the online manosphere—a radicalisation arc that ends in murder. While the show unpacks male online radicalisation with nuance, it does so without interrogating the adult men and influencers who build and sustain these harmful digital ecosystems. Jamie, still a child, becomes both a victim and a perpetrator—caught in a web of misogyny not of his own making. Yet even as the series explores his descent, it largely erases Katie. We learn little about her. Her voice is absent. Her pain is peripheral. Her death becomes a plot device for someone else’s story.
This erasure is not new. The experiences of girls exposed to violence are often framed as tragic but familiar, while stories of boys who enact violence are positioned as shocking and worthy of exploration. Would Adolescence have captured the world’s attention in the same way if it had centered Katie’s trauma rather than Jamie’s descent—if it had confronted both sides of online misogyny and the violence it fuels? The question itself reveals how far we still have to go in valuing the voices and pain of survivors.
There are many lenses through which Adolescence could be dissected—youth radicalisation, family dynamics, digital platform responsibility, tech regulation. But here we focus on girls. On Katie. On the millions of girls whose stories of tech-facilitated abuse are left untold. Girls who are not footnotes—they are at the frontline. While the world watches Jamie, are we also paying attention to Katie? And listening to girls like her in real life?
The impact of gendered digital violence on girls and women
What little we learn about Katie Leonard in Adolescence is reduced to a brief mention: non-consensual intimate images of her were circulated at school. We never hear how it affected her mental health, her friendships, or her sense of self. And then she’s gone—murdered by a peer and her voice never heard. Her story never told.
This reflects a grim reality. Survivors of digital image-based abuse frequently report shame, depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and withdrawal from social life.1 They are often bullied, blamed, and socially isolated. The emotional and psychological harm can be devastating and leave lasting mental scars.
And Katie’s death? Sadly, not unprecedented. Globally, an estimated 140 women and girls are killed every day—one every 10 minutes.2 These are not isolated incidents; they are part of a global pattern of gender-based violence (GBV) that persists because it is normalised, minimised, and erased.
On average, 1 in 3 women and girls globally experience GBV in their lifetimes and in humanitarian crises, the situation is even more dire: GBV rates can be up to 21 times higher in armed conflicts.3 A groundbreaking study in South Sudan showed that displaced adolescent girls are living with the daily risk of GBV; 26.5% had been targeted with non-partner sexual violence. Of those with a husband or boyfriend, 43% had experienced violence from that partner.4 Recent research by UNICEF in northeast Nigeria confirms that adolescent girls face heightened risks of GBV, both online and offline, yet their needs remain systematically overlooked in the planning and delivery of humanitarian aid.5
A new formula of an existing phenomenon
Technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) is an increasingly common form of gendered violence that disproportionately affects women and girls in their homes, their schools, their workplaces, their relationships, and in public spaces.
Despite occurring online, TFGBV has the same devastating consequences — including death as we painfully see in Adolescence. Digital technology is adding new layers to an existing problem. TFGBV includes online harassment, cyberstalking, non-consensual sharing of images, sexual exploitation and blackmail via social media, and digital death threats.
Even when the perpetrator is behind a screen these abuses have real-life impacts on women and girls’ safety, mental health, and their human rights. More than half of girls (58%) surveyed from multiple countries around the world have been harassed and abused online, including stalking and threats of sexual and physical violence. While their perpetrators were not always known, 76% of girls suspected their abusers were men or boys. Many are fearful of telling anyone due to stigma and shame.6
Survivors of image-based abuse frequently report shame, depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and withdrawal from social life.7 They are often bullied, blamed, and socially isolated and the emotional and psychological harms can be devastating.
Perpetrators exploit social media and messaging platforms to extend the reach of their threats and attacks, often with impunity due to weak cyber laws and limited enforcement when law do exist. A multi-country report covering several African countries found that significant proportions of women internet users – often between one-quarter to over one-third in each country – had experienced online GBV, ranging from offensive name-calling to credible threats of physical or sexual harm.8
TFGBV survivors’ stories are harrowing: a Ugandan women’s rights activist describes waking up to hundreds of Facebook comments calling for violence against her, and a Congolese refugee mother recounts how an unknown man on WhatsApp threatened to circulate doctored nude images of her if she didn’t meet him.9 10
While children are grappling with how to deal with face image-based abuse, online grooming, deepfakes, social shaming, trolling, and coordinated harassment and aggression, TFGBV perpetrators are able to remain anonymous and operate at scale. But the digital footprint of these violations can be difficult to remove, which exacerbates a single incident and perpetuating harm across lifetimes. The cycle of violence continues and survivors are left stigmatised, silenced, and unsupported.
As Australian eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman-Grant reminds us, “The internet’s darkness is real. But that darkness falls hardest on girls.”
We need to listen to girls to enhance online protections for all children
And yet today, we are facing a global funding crisis and growing backlash against efforts to safeguard women’s and girls’ rights. Critical protection services are being deprioritised, leaving millions of girls at greater risk while at the same time, access to technology is increasing.
While the world is currently focused on understanding what happened to boys like Jamie, we cannot forget girls like Katie—even in death. But girls are speaking, loudly and clearly and they are asking for safety, dignity, justice, and space to exist online without fear.
Technology-facilitated GBV — just as all other forms of GBV — remains under-recognised and underfunded across humanitarian responses and development initiatives. While efforts such as UNICEF’s survivor-centred online platform Laaha demonstrates an innovative way to reach girls with accurate and age-appropriate information online, we need to see scaled-up partnerships with girl-led and women-led organisations and increased investment in research to understand what works to prevent TFGBV and how this will better protect both girls and boys online.
Critically, now is not the time to cut back on prioritising and funding initiatives that aim to protect and empower adolescent girls. Funders, both institutional and private, must step up to invest in this essential, lifesaving work and we must ensure our collective response is grounded in feminist, survivor-centered, and trauma-informed approaches.
Here’s what we need to do today to end TFGBV and build a safer digital future for girls and boys:
- Fund digital technology initiatives that center girls’ voices and lived realities.
- Advocate for stronger regulation of the internet to make digital spaces safer for girls and women.
- Invest in efforts to prevent technology facilitated GBV that addressed its root causes of gender inequality.
- Amplify the role of girl-led and women-led organisations working in to make online spaces safer.
- Listen to survivors of TFGBV—believe them,c entre them, fund them.
And we must act urgently because when protection from violence is treated as optional, it is girls and women who pay the highest price.
References:
[2] https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/briefs/Femicide_Brief_2024.pdf
[3] https://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/ending-violence-against-women/research-and-data
[4] Murphy, M., Bingenheimer, J. B., Ovince, J., Ellsberg, M., & Contreras-Urbina, M. (2019). The effects of conflict and displacement on violence against adolescent girls in South Sudan: the case of adolescent girls in the Protection of Civilian sites in Juba. Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters, 27(1), 181–191. https://doi.org/10.1080/26410397.2019.1601965
[5] Listening to Adolescent Girls: A Review of the Inclusion of Adolescent Girls’ Needs within the Humanitarian Response in Northeast Nigeria, 2025 https://www.unfpa.org/publications/listening-adolescent-girls-review-inclusion-adolescent-girls%E2%80%99-needs-within
[6] https://plan-international.org/publications/free-to-be-online/
[9] https://time.com/7023553/agather-atuhaire/
[10] https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/06/27/childrens-personal-photos-are-powering-ai-exploitation
About the authors
Caroline Masboungi, GBV Specialist (Technology & Innovations), UNICEF: Caroline is a human rights lawyer and humanitarian expert with over 16 years of experience driving innovation and partnerships to prevent and respond to gender-based violence—including technology-facilitated GBV. She leads UNICEF’s work on the intersections between GBV, AI, digital solutions, and FemTech co-designed with and for women and girls in crisis settings.
Lara Quarterman, GBV Specialist, UNICEF: Lara has been working to advance gender equality and address GBV in development and humanitarian response for 20 years. She leads UNICEF’s efforts on partnership with women-led organizations in emergencies and the inclusion of adolescent girls’ needs in humanitarian responses.
This blog by UNICEF's Caroline Masboungi and Lara Quarterman challenges how we talk about online misogyny and radicalisation, urging us not to erase the voices of girls harmed by gender-based violence.
