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Ofcom Draft Guidance: A Safer Life Online for Women and Girls

7 March 20253 min read
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Ofcom Draft Guidance: A Safer Life Online for Women and Girls

As part of their ongoing implementation of the Online Safety Act 2023, Ofcom have published their draft guidance for providers setting out how they can take action against harmful content and activity that disproportionately affects women and girls.  

The regulator is currently consulting on the draft guidance, with submissions open until 5pm on 23 May 2025. 

The guidance has identified four harms which tech firms should focus on: 

  1. Online misogyny: This includes content that promotes misogynistic ideas or behaviour, sexually explicit content that encourages harmful sexual behaviour, and content normalising gendered or sexual violence.  

  1. Pile-ons and online harassment: Pile-ons refer to coordinated groups of individuals targeting a specific woman or girl, or groups of women and girls. These often consist of misogynistic content, threats, image-based sexual abuse and other harassing content. This behaviour is often targeted at female public figures.  

  1. Online domestic abuse: This denotes using technology for coercive and controlling behaviour within a relationship. Examples include monitoring or controlling online accounts, harassment, demeaning language, or using information for stalking.  

  1. Image-based sexual abuse: This refers to intimate image abuse, the non-consensual sharing of intimate images, and cyberflashing, sending explicit images to someone without their consent.  

The guidance makes nine key recommendations for promoting women and girls’ online safety, which are divided by three overarching responsibilities: taking responsibility, preventing harm, and supporting women and girls. These recommendations are: 


Taking Responsibility 




Ensure governance and accountability processes address online gender-based harm, for instance through consulting relevant experts and implementing policies that prohibit these harms. 





Conduct risk assessments focused on harms to women and girls. 





Be transparent about women and girls’ online safety, for example through sharing information on the prevalence of harms and the effectiveness of safety measures. 



Preventing Harm 




Conduct abusability evaluations and product testing, to identify how a service or feature could be exploited. 





Set safer default account settings, for example more authentication steps would make it more difficult for perpetrators to monitor accounts. 





Reduce the circulation of online gender-based harm through identifying and removing non-consensual images.  



Supporting Women and Girls 




Provide users with more control, such as making it easier to block multiple accounts at once to support women experiencing pile-ons. 





Allow users who experience online gender-based harms to make reports, through reporting tools that are accessible and provide appropriate support.  





Take appropriate action when online gender-based harm takes place. This could be supported by training moderation teams to deal with online domestic abuse or building on recommendations set out in user surveys which indicate people’s preferences and how best to support them.  


 

Other suggestions for best practice include prompts to users to reconsider before posting harmful material, improved visibility settings that allow users to retroactively privatise content and removing geolocation by default.  

Submissions to the consultation can be made via the consultation response form, emailing OS-Section54@ofcom.org.uk. 

The deadline for submissions is 5pm on 23 May 2025.  

Once Ofcom has examined the responses to the consultation, they will publish a statement of their decisions alongside their final guidance, later this year. Approximately 18 months after this final guidance is published, the regulator will report on how well platforms have tackled harms to women and girls. 

Call for input: 

If you have any feedback, questions or contributions to inform techUK’s consultation response, please contact Samiah Anderson (Samiah.anderson@techuk.org) or Daniella Bennett Remington (daniella.bennettremington@techuk.org).