Patchwork To Pathways: Learning to Support Iraqi Women Facing Digital Violence
With digital violence against women surging, an Iraqi organization worked with partners to build a durable response—intake, documentation, referrals, and outreach—so survivors can get the support they need.
When women in Iraq began coming to the Baghdad Women Association (BWA) seeking help with online blackmail, harassment and hacked accounts, staff recognized the harm immediately—but found themselves struggling to offer more than improvised support.
As Maryam, a BWA project manager, explains: “We wanted to help, but we weren’t sure how to frame digital abuse. It wasn’t part of our language yet.”
That uncertainty became a turning point.
In June 2024, BWA partnered with The SecDev Foundation through a regional initiative funded by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC). They soon realized the digital violence against women (DVAW) was not simply a new service area to absorb. Instead, this became a learning journey that reshaped how the organization understood harm, supported survivors, formed partnerships and strengthened its own digital safety.
Facing a new world of digital harm
For more than 20 years, BWA has helped women in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region to pursue dignity, agency, and access to justice. Its work includes legal aid, shelter referrals, psychosocial counselling, livelihoods support, and advocacy. Its strong feminist mandate has made BWA a trusted ally for survivors of gender-based violence—offline.
Increasingly, though, women have come to BWA with reports of online blackmail, impersonation, account hacking, harassment, and reputational harm. Many reached out in moments of crisis—facing immediate threats of exposure, shame, or escalation. But staff didn’t yet have the shared language, tools, or clear protocols to handle their cases.
Meanwhile, BWA found itself targeted online as a feminist voice. Starting in 2024, they faced coordinated attacks, including website defacement, doxxing of staff, and SIM-swap hijacking of official communication channels. During a meeting with the SecDev team, it became clear that BWA’s email systems had been compromised: a hacker had impersonated the Director to ask a donor to transfer funds to another bank account, and was intercepting incoming mail that could have alerted the team.
That’s when they turned to the Iraqi Network for Social Media (INSM)—another project partner and leading digital rights advocate. Together, and with SecDev support, they investigated the attacks, put urgent safety measures into place for staff, and began longer-term work to strengthen BWA’s digital security.
The experience made the challenge ahead unmistakable. And BWA needed to move forward on two fronts—fast. The team needed to build a process to handle digital violence cases, with clear procedures for intake, safe documentation, case management, and referral. And they needed to do this even as they were learning how to address their own deep vulnerabilities in the digital world.
Building systems for survivor-centred support
“Our collaboration with the SecDev Foundation directly strengthened BWA’s technical foundations. It contributed to adopting digital violence as a sustainable area of work within the organization, integrating it into documentation systems, case management, and staff capacity-building, rather than treating it as a temporary response.
This significantly enhanced our readiness to address growing digital threats and improved the quality and sustainability of our interventions to protect women and girls.”
Liza Nissan Hido, BWA Director
Any women coming forward needed to know whether it was safe to speak up—and whether anyone could help once they did. So for BWA, the goal was to make disclosure safer and support more reliable, so women weren’t left facing the harm alone. That meant moving beyond improvised fixes and building systems that could hold up under pressure.
BWA and SecDev focused on strengthening BWA’s internal systems, not creating parallel activities. That included recruiting a dedicated Psychosocial Support (PSS) Officer. BWA also adapted DVAW frameworks from SecDev’s Salam@ team into tools staff could use in their work, including a customized PSS manual and a digital clinic playbook.
Then BWA brought these tools into routine practice. Clear procedures and case management helped staff respond with consistency and care—documenting cases more safely and connecting women to technical, psychosocial, and legal support. Digital violence no longer sat outside the organization’s mandate; it became part of its core. And survivors learned that they could trust staff to recognize the digital harm they experienced, understand how it worked, and guide them through a safe path to support.
At the same time, BWA worked on its own digital safety. After INSM’s security audit, the organization developed new policies, adopted secure tools, and appointed a trained IT Officer. Staff received digital-safety training and hands-on support, making the organization more secure and better equipped to support survivors. In short, digital safety was no longer a weakness; it became core to BWA’s identity and functioning.
Fostering wider ecosystems of support
“After INSM partnered with BWA, we became more confident in taking psychosocial and legal support cases—not only technical ones. The number of cases referred by BWA increased, especially with survivors who speak other languages, such as Yazidi. Our support for BWA strengthened trust between our organizations and led to continuous, direct coordination toward digital violence.”
Asia Anwer, INSM Projects Coordinator
One of the hallmarks of this IDRC-funded initiative was to help local partners foster “ecosystems” of support for women that endure beyond a single project. So with stronger systems in place, BWA began reaching out beyond its walls.
One big step was to run digital clinics for students in partnership with the University of Duhok, Nawroz University, and Zakho University. These awareness-raising sessions doubled as opportunities for early disclosure and survivor-centred support. For some women, that meant being able to seek help before fear, shame, or threats pushed them into silence.
BWA also reached into displacement-affected communities. It held awareness-raising sessions in Sheladze, Kabarto Camp, and Khanke Camp, and distributed Arabic-language materials through women-led organizations and shelters. Importantly, these sessions and clinics continued to bring women to BWA for support even after the formal project period ended—reflecting both unmet need and growing trust in BWA.
In November 2024, BWA co-facilitated a leadership workshop in Baghdad with eight other women-led organizations from several governorates. This event introduced survivor-centred digital safety tools and referral practices. BWA also deepened its academic partnerships, working with the University of Duhok’s Centre for Peace Studies and Gender Equality Centre to run digital clinics for students and the public.
A defining moment came when BWA noticed a surge of online blackmail and shaming affecting many women, including a teenage girl from the Yazidi community. A cross-organizational investigation linked several cases to a single offender across several platforms. Working with INSM, BWA connected survivors with psychosocial, legal and technical support—and worked with platforms to shut down the aggressor. It showed how survivor-centred collaboration can disrupt digital violence, even when legal remedies are thin. And INSM used this case to support its advocacy with TikTok for stronger responses to harmful content and digital violence across Iraq.
Shifting how institutions respond
For survivors, what happens after disclosure often depends on the very first response—whether they feel believed, protected, and safely referred. As BWA’s work gained visibility, the team began engaging with institutions that shape those frontline responses.
Law enforcement officers from the General Police Directorate, Cybercrime Unit, and Family Protection Directorate joined workshops that reframed DVAW as a systemic issue—not a private or “reputation” problem. BWA also engaged with local media, recognizing that public narratives shape how survivors are treated and whether perpetrators are held accountable.
As BWA’s Maryam observed:
BWA’s integrated approach led to real consequences for survivors and perpetrators. In one documented case, sustained psychosocial support and institutional referral contributed to the dismissal of a government employee involved in digital abuse. At the same time, changes in intake and referral practices improved how women were received at first contact—especially in schools, camps and partner organizations. For survivors, those shifts can change everything: whether they are met with support and options—or with suspicion, victim-blaming and delay.
BWA’s PSS Officer, Dawla, reflected on the organization’s internal transformation:
What changed—and what endures
By December 2025, BWA had made DVAW part of its core work—not a side issue handled case by case. The organization had expanded staff roles, introduced internal policies, and built partnerships across civil society, academia, and public institutions that continue to drive collaboration and new requests for support.
The biggest shift was strategic: BWA moved from improvised support to durable systems that staff could use day to day. These continue to help staff respond more consistently, manage cases more safely, and connect women to the right technical, psychosocial, and legal pathways. They also help BWA sustain survivor-centred support beyond the life of a single project, so women can continue accessing support as needs and risks evolve.
BWA’s journey shows what’s possible when a feminist organization has the support to learn, test, and build—with safety. By strengthening digital security and embedding clear pathways to psychosocial, technical, and legal support, BWA can meet women where harm happens now: online and offline. Because in the end, digital justice isn’t a separate agenda. It is gender justice, updated for a networked world.
