On the 30th of October, the Women's Media center published Danielle Fernandes' opinion piece.
“Protect children” “Stop sexual abuse” Who would argue against that?
Nobody. And that is exactly what makes the language of protection so politically powerful.
This summer, the European Union reinstated temporary rules allowing online platforms to detect and report child sexual abuse material, while negotiations continue over a permanent framework widely known as “Chat Control.” The proposed legislation seeks to tackle the distribution of sexual abuse material which can circulate online for years, subjecting survivors to repeated violations. Digital platforms make it easier to reproduce and share this material across borders, while investigators struggle to identify victims and remove content. Addressing this abuse clearly requires intervention. The question is what forms of technological intervention are justified and how much surveillance power governments and technology companies should acquire in the process.
One of the most controversial aspects of Chat Control is the proposal that online platforms should use automated tools to scan private communications. While supporters argue that stronger detection is essential to stop the circulation of abusive material, privacy advocates and digital rights experts warn that such measures could undermine encryption and normalize the monitoring of private communications. End-to-end encryption is designed so that only the sender and recipient can read a message; scanning content before it is encrypted would circumvent that privacy protection. However, the furor around Chat Control is not simply a dispute about privacy. It is part of a broader pattern in which protecting women and children from abuse is used to provide a moral foundation for governments and corporations to build systems of digital surveillance.
For decades, feminists across the world have argued that sexual violence is political, enabled by social hierarchies, economic dependence, and institutions that allow perpetrators to act with impunity. Their efforts have helped establish sexual and gender-based violence as an issue of public concern requiring collective and institutional action. But this hard-won recognition has also given the language of women’s and children’s safety a moral authority — an authority that governments and corporations can now borrow.
As a researcher studying sexual violence prevention, I have seen how readily calls to protect women and children can be mobilized for political ends. Following the 2015 New Year’s Eve sexual assaults in Germany, the issue of women’s safety became entangled with demands for stricter migration controls. Similarly in the United States, violence against Afghan women was invoked by the Bush administration to justify its military operations in Afghanistan. In both cases, genuine concerns about gendered violence were used to legitimize political agendas extending far beyond women’s rights. Now I see this same pattern emerging in advocacy for digital surveillance.
Consider the lobbying around Chat Control. Thorn, the child-safety organization co-founded by actor Ashton Kutcher, emerged as a prominent advocate for the controversial proposal. Thorn also develops AI-driven tools that help platforms identify child sexual abuse material. This places it in a powerful dual role: lobbying for regulatory measures while promoting technologies positioned as part of the solution. This reveals a troubling pattern in which organizations calling for technological solutions to sexual violence may also gain greater influence as those solutions become embedded in policy.
We have good reason to be skeptical when technology companies present their products as solutions to sexual violence. The same industry that is asking to be trusted with ever greater powers to monitor communications has often treated safety as an afterthought in product design. Meta released camera-equipped smart glasses that resemble ordinary eyewear, despite the foreseeable risks of covert recording and harassment. That risk materialized in Brussels when multiple women reported being recorded without their consent for social media content by online “seduction” coaches. Apple had to strengthen protections after its AirTags were misused for stalking, while smart-home systems designed around a central administrator account have enabled abusive partners to control cameras, locks, lights, and thermostats in the household. This recurring inattention to gendered abuse should make us cautious about granting technology companies access to our communications as a path to women’s and children’s safety.
We can look to India for a stark warning about what happens after surveillance infrastructure has been built. After the 2012 Delhi gang rape, amid public grief and fury over the state’s failure to protect women, the Nirbhaya Fund was created. Under its Safe City program, the fund supported extensive surveillance infrastructure, including video monitoring, facial-recognition analytics, automatic license-plate recognition, and patrol vehicles capable of accessing and sharing live camera feeds. In July 2026, Delhi Police deployed an AI-enabled mobile surveillance van during a major student protest. Its cameras produced facial-match measurements, helped identify protesters with criminal histories, and count demonstrators. This is a grim lesson that once surveillance capacities exist, they rarely remain confined to the purpose for which they were introduced.
Surveillance can be an appealing response because it offers visible and immediate actions, in ways that structural reform often does not. Governments can announce cameras, databases, and AI systems, while companies can launch new safety tools. Structural change is slower and less tangible. It requires transforming institutional cultures, challenging misogyny, properly funding survivor services, and addressing the economic conditions that can constrain people’s ability to leave abusive situations. The danger is that sexual violence becomes reframed as a problem of insufficient detection rather than unequal power.
Of course, technology has a role in preventing violence, especially as technology-facilitated abuse grows. But targeted interventions are not the same as granting governments and corporations carte blanche to construct permanent surveillance infrastructures. Child-protection specialists and digital experts have proposed alternatives to mass surveillance. Technology companies can incorporate safety-by-design principles into their platforms from the outset to prevent cybergrooming and distribution of abusive material, rather than adding safeguards only after harm has occurred. This can mean restricting unsolicited contact between adults and children, making it harder to download or redistribute intimate images, and providing accessible mechanisms to report grooming or abuse. Platforms can also strengthen systems for removing known illegal material and limiting its continued circulation. Law enforcement officials have warned that mass surveillance can overwhelm investigative resources and have instead called for properly funded specialist teams, stronger reporting systems, and clearer rules for securely storing and accessing evidence.
Finally, survivor-support organizations, such as the Safety Net Project, a U.S.-based initiative focusing on technology and abuse, have highlighted the importance of confidential communication for survivors. Those seeking help, documenting abuse, or planning an escape may depend on confidential communication, as may queer people in hostile households, journalists protecting sources, and activists challenging powerful institutions. Violating privacy in the name of protection can undermine the very conditions they need to remain safe.
We have fought to make sexual violence visible. We should be equally vigilant when that hard-won recognition is used to provide moral justification for expanding surveillance powers. Women’s and children’s safety should not become the foundation on which an architecture of surveillance is built.