A new three-year global research project will investigate how digital violence is experienced by women and girls living through conflict, displacement and refuge.
TRACE (TRAcking and Countering technology-facilitated gender-based violence through Evidence-based approaches across the conflict–refuge continuum in Europe) brings together 15 partners across eight countries, including universities, legal practitioners, humanitarian actors and survivor-led organisations.
The project, led by the University of Birmingham in the U.K, has received €3.1 million ($5 million CAD) in funding from Horizon Europe.
Technology-facilitated gender-based violence refers to acts of gender-based violence committed, assisted or aggravated through digital technologies. For those who are forcibly displaced, technology can be both a lifeline and a source of danger, yet how digital infrastructures amplify these harms remains poorly understood.
“Women and girls in conflict zones already face difficult realities, but technology is now providing the platform for committing, or deepening the harms of, gender-based violence that make daily realities even worse,” said Valerie Oosterveld, Western law professor and associate vice-president (research).
“Our work to track and counter this technology-facilitated gender-based violence is a step toward justice for these victims.”
Oosterveld, who studies sexual and gender-based violence in conflict environments, is a Canadian collaborator on the TRACE project. She has decades of experience studying gender issues within international criminal justice systems, including recent research on the investigation of technology-facilitated gender-based violence in armed conflict and mass atrocities.
That can include documenting the use of digital technologies to perpetrate violence, such as messaging apps used to sell women and girls as sex slaves or recordings made of sexual torture of captured civilians in war.
Oosterveld served as special adviser to the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor from 2023-2025.
Other Western researchers will also be part of the global project. Juan-Luis Suárez, director of the CulturePlex Lab, and Katreena Scott, director of the Centre for Research and Education on Violence Against Women and Children, will join Oosterveld in tackling technology-facilitated gender-based violence through the new international collaboration.
TRACE will examine how perpetrators weaponize digital tools to target, harm and control displaced populations, and develop methods to prevent, recognize and respond to that abuse. The research aims to demonstrate, using academic methods, the extent of the problem amid war, displacement and resettlement.
The project combines research using AI-enabled pattern recognition and survivor-centred qualitative data, as well as legal and policy analysis across multiple conflict, transit and refuge settings.
“Displaced women and girls are among the most exposed to digital abuse, and among the least protected by the systems meant to keep them safe. This project will give policymakers, courts and platforms the evidence they need to recognise this violence for what it is and to act on it,” said Heather Flowe, the University of Birmingham professor leading the global project.
TRACE introduces a new model for understanding technology-facilitated gender-based violence based on two measures. The first is a conflict–displacement–refuge continuum that traces digital harms across time and space, and the second is an online–offline continuum that captures how virtual and physical violence intersect. Jointly, the research team can use this model to create a much more accurate picture of the range of experiences and harms that vulnerable women and girls face.
Universities and support or advocacy organizations in the U.K., Turkey, Germany, Sweden, Ukraine, the Netherlands and Iraq are part of the international consortium.
The findings are expected to support implementation of the Istanbul Convention – a human rights treaty to prevent gender-based violence – and the EU Directive on combating violence against women and domestic violence, by producing early-warning typologies, survivor guidance and frameworks for institutional and platform reform.
TRACE Partners
- University of Birmingham (UK, coordinator)
- University of Sheffield (UK)
- University College London (UK)
- Başkent University (Türkiye)
- Support to Life Association (Hayata Destek) (Türkiye)
- International Nuremberg Principles Academy (Germany)
- University of Leipzig (Germany)
- Uppsala University (Sweden)
- National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (Ukraine)
- Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (Ukraine)
- Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice (Netherlands)
