Creating a safer life online for women and girls

Online safety Illegal and harmful content Online abuse Protecting children Information for industry
Published: 25 November 2025
Last updated: 9 September 2026

Women and girls’ online safety is a priority for Ofcom. This page provides a summary of the work we are undertaking in this space. 

The Call for Evidence is now open

We want to hear from stakeholders about how women and girls' online experiences may have changed since we published our guidance in November 2025.

The Call for Evidence closes at 5pm on 4 November 2026.

Read the Call for Evidence here and submit a response.

For questions, email: womenandgirlscfe@ofcom.org.uk. 

Update published on 9 September 2026

Women and girls’ online safety is a top priority for Ofcom

Women and girls are disproportionately affected by many kinds of online harms. These include misogynistic abuse and sexual violence, coordinated harassment, stalking and coercive control, and image-based sexual abuse. Evidence also shows that men and boys are often pushed towards content that normalises, glorifies, and encourages misogynistic abuse and sexual violence.

Our goal is to ensure firms take responsibility for online safety so women and girls can participate online safely and confidently. This includes safety-by-design, where sites and apps embed safety into the design and operation of their services from the outset. 

We will use our powers under the Online Safety Act to drive meaningful improvements while remaining responsive to emerging threats and evolving harms. As the online safety regulator, we are uniquely placed to help improve women and girls’ online experiences and stop them facing horrific harm and abuse online. Our role is to hold platforms to account and ensure they comply with the law, using our robust enforcement powers where necessary. We also monitor closely developments in online harms and emerging threats.

What online services need to do 

The Online Safety Act 2023 makes tech platforms – including social media sites, gaming services, dating apps, discussion forums and search services – legally responsible for protecting people in the UK from illegal content and protecting children from harmful content. This includes the online harms that disproportionately affect women and girls. 

Ofcom has published codes and risk assessment guidance on how we expect tech platforms to tackle illegal content and content harmful to children – including harms that disproportionately impact women and girls. This includes updates from earlier in 2026 to include the priority offence of cyberflashing and confirming new codes measures to detect and reduce the spread of intimate image abuse via ‘hash matching’ technology. We have also published guidance setting out how platforms can voluntarily go further to improve women and girls’ online safety.

What Ofcom is doing to create a safer life online for women and girls

Raising the bar with industry

Published in November 2025, our guidance sets out a wide range of practical safety measures for tech platforms to improve women and girls’ online safety – including over 60 examples of good practice steps. These recommendations go beyond what is needed for services to comply with their legal duties under the Online Safety Act. Our focus is now on understanding how industry has responded to this guidance, identifying where good practice is being adopted, and driving wider uptake across the sector. Building on our existing work to ensure compliance with the Online Safety Act, we are focusing our engagement with a range of services to understand what changes they have made, pursuing targeted action. We chose the services based on their UK user reach and the risks they present to women and girls facing harm. 

In parallel with our engagement with tech firms, we are launching a Call for Evidence to gather input from stakeholders, including civil society groups, on what changes women and girls are experiencing online. We’ll publish our findings in a report next summer, which will shine a light on the progress made towards reducing online gender-based harms with a view to directing future action.

Enforcing the rules on intimate image abuse

Where we see significant harm or compliance failures that impact women and girls’ online safety, we will take action to ensure services meet their obligations under the Online Safety Act. Through our work to drive compliance, we will continue to hold platforms accountable and drive improvements where needed, including taking enforcement action where necessary. 

We know that intimate image abuse disproportionately affects women and girls, and we are acting on the urgent need to tackle this issue.  Earlier this year, we recommended platforms use ‘hash-matching’ technology to prevent the upload and further sharing of known non-consensual intimate images. Today we formally issue our amended codes to give effect to these measures, and they will come into effect on 30 September. Any formal enforcement action will be launched after 30 September.

To support the implementation of these measures, we have today launched an enforcement programme into how relevant services are adopting ‘hash matching’ technology. We are working closely with the provider of the leading third-party hash-matching database, StopNCII.org, to understand how this technology is being adopted by services to stop this serious harm. Ofcom and StopNCII.org have signed a joint memorandum of understanding to facilitate effective information-sharing and ways of working.  

Our recent blog sets out more information on steps we might take to drive improvements. 

As set out in Ofcom’s online safety priorities, we will continue to build on investigations we have opened into sexualised imagery and image-based sexual abuse, as well as enforcement action taken against a nudification site. 

Developing new policy aimed to further protect women and girls

The online safety landscape continues to evolve, and we will move quickly to implement new priority offences and strengthen protections where needed. The Crime and Policing Act 2026, which received Royal Assent at the end of April 2026, introduces further duties on services and will require updates to Ofcom’s codes and guidance.

This includes duties on services to take down non-consensual intimate images within 48 hours of being reported, and new offences that make certain types of pornography content illegal. We will provide an update to our policy roadmap by the end of the year. However, work is already under way, and we will consult on the 48-hour takedown duty for non-consensual intimate images by the end of 2026. 

Working with stakeholders

As we develop our work programme, we will continue to work closely with victims and survivors, civil society organisations (including those that work with men and boys), researchers and industry to ensure our interventions are informed by evidence, expertise and lived experience. We also continue to work closely with our law enforcement partners.

Stakeholders want greater visibility of the action being taken under the Online Safety Act. We are committed to being as transparent as possible about our work and the progress being made to tackle harms disproportionately affecting women and girls online. We will update this webpage with information about the action we are taking, the progress being made by industry, and the impact of the Online Safety Act in tackling harms that disproportionately affect women and girls.

Find out more about our work

Ofcom’s Guidance: A Safer Life Online for Women and Girls

Other publications

Resources for service providers

Ofcom’s research

Further information and support

If you, or someone you know, have been affected by these harms you can find further information, support or advice from any of these organisations.