The Escalating Crisis of Deepfake Abuse Targeting Women

Whispers followed her offline. Online, the abuse imploded, unchecked: comments, ridicule, shares, screenshots. She had never consented to any of it. That hadn’t stopped anyone. Within minutes, thousands had seen the content. Within hours, millions. The nightmare had only begun. Days passed before platforms responded. By then, the images had been seen, saved, and replicated. She was left asking: Who do I report this to? Will anyone believe me? Will the people who did this ever face consequences? Or will the blame land on me?

This is the reality for thousands of women and girls every single day. AI deepfakes are destroying real lives and justice remains out of reach for most survivors. Her story could be yours.

Deepfake abuse is the sharp edge of a much broader pattern of digital violence targeting women and girls. It’s gendered and it’s escalating. Right now, the systems designed to protect people are failing, while the tools to cause harm turn into cheaper, faster and easier to apply every day.

What is Deepfake Abuse and How Common Is It?

Deepfakes are images, audio, or videos manipulated by artificial intelligence (AI) that create it appear someone said or did something they never did. The technology itself isn’t new, but its weaponization against women and girls is a newer phenomenon, and it’s accelerating fast.

According to a 2023 report, deepfake pornography made up 98 percent of all deepfake videos online, and 99 percent depicted women. Deepfake videos were an estimated 550 percent more prevalent in 2023 than in 2019. The tools to create them are widely available, usually free, and require very little technical expertise. Once posted, AI-generated content can be replicated endlessly, saved to private devices, and shared across platforms, making it nearly impossible to fully remove.

Why Survivors Don’t Report and What Happens When They Do

Underreporting is one of the biggest barriers to accountability. For survivors who do come forward, the justice system often becomes another source of trauma. Survivors are asked repeatedly to view and describe abusive content with police, lawyers, and platform moderators while often facing questions like, “are you sure it’s not real?” or “did you share intimate images before?”

If a case reaches court, their clothing, relationships, and past behavior go under the microscope, not the perpetrator’s harm. A UN Women survey found 41 percent of women in public life who experienced digital violence also reported facing offline attacks or harassment linked to it.

Why Deepfake Creators Rarely Face Justice

Despite the scale of harm, prosecutions are rare, platforms routinely fail to act, and survivors are often re-traumatized when they try to seek aid. Here’s why:

• The law hasn’t caught up, with less than half of countries having laws that address online abuse and even fewer having legislation specifically covering AI-generated deepfake content.
• Most “revenge porn” or image-based abuse laws were written before deepfakes existed, leaving gaping loopholes.
• In many countries, deepfake porn or AI-generated nude images fall into legal grey areas.
• Survivors are unsure whether the abuse is even illegal and whether perpetrators can be prosecuted.
• Enforcement is lagging because even when laws exist, investigators need digital forensics expertise, cross-border coordination, and platform cooperation to build a case while most justice systems don’t have adequate resources for any of these.
• Evidence disappears fast as content spreads and copies multiply while perpetrators hide behind anonymity or operate across jurisdictions.
• Platforms are slow or unwilling to share data with law enforcement, especially in cross-border cases.
• Digital forensics backlogs mean cases stall before they even get started.

Tech Platforms Are Failing Survivors

Tech platforms have long hidden behind “intermediary” status to avoid responsibility for user-generated content.

What Must Happen Now

Stopping deepfake abuse requires urgent, coordinated action from governments, institutions, and tech platforms.

Five Key Actions

1. Laws that Actually Cover Deepfake Abuse: Governments must pass legislation with clear definitions of AI-generated abuse and focusing on consent, strict liability for perpetrators, fast-track removal obligations for platforms, and cross-border enforcement protocols.
2. Justice Systems that Can Investigate and Prosecute: Law enforcement needs training, resources, and dedicated capacity to collect and preserve digital evidence while digital forensics backlogs are addressed, with international cooperation frameworks becoming fast, functional, and fit for purpose.
3. Platforms Held Accountable: Tech companies must be legally required to proactively monitor for and remove abusive content within mandatory timelines, cooperate with law enforcement, and face real financial consequences when they fail to act.
4. Real Support for Survivors: Trained, trauma-informed law enforcement and legal professionals and free legal aid should be available.
5. Education that Prevents Abuse: Digital literacy, including consent education, online safety, and what to do when experiencing abuse, needs to start young and reach everyone as prevention is as significant as prosecution.

UN Women warns this is not a niche internet problem: “It is a global crisis.”

In a recent high-profile case, UK journalist Daisy Dixon discovered AI-generated, sexualized images of herself on X in December 2025, created using the platform’s own Grok AI tool; it took days for the platform to geoblock the function, while the abuse kept spreading. Deepfake abuse can serve as an online catalyst for so-called “honour-based crimes” in certain cultural contexts, where perceived breach of honour norms on digital platforms can result in extreme physical violence against women, or even death. More than half of deepfake victims in the United States of America contemplated suicide, according to recent research.

Jurisdictions Taking Action

• Brazil amended its criminal code in 2025, increasing the penalty for causing psychological violence against women using AI or other technology to alter their image or voice.
• The European Union artificial intelligence (AI) act imposes transparency obligations around deepfakes.
• The United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act prohibits sharing digitally manipulated explicit images, but does not address the creation of deepfakes and may not apply where intent to cause distress cannot be proven.
• The United States Take It Down Act explicitly covers AI-generated intimate imagery and requires platform removal within 48 hours.