Tackling extreme and violent pornography

CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY

Dear Minister O'Callaghan, dear colleagues,

The Fundamental Rights Agency has worked for several years on the topic of violence against women, including the topic of online violence. Therefore, we commend the Irish Presidency for its choice of topic today. We share fully the concerns set out in the discussion paper.

FRA undertook the first EU-wide survey on violence against women over a decade ago, which included data on cyberviolence. Our more recent survey on violence against women - which we conducted in cooperation with Eurostat and EIGE - demonstrated a stark reality:

• 30.7% of women in the EU experience violence

In the 8 Member States where additional questions were asked about cyber or online violence against women, we found that:

• 11.7% of women experienced cyber-harassment and 8.5% cyberstalking;
• Just over 1% experienced abusive behaviour involving intimate images or videos. This may sound relatively small; however, this equates to just over 1 woman in every 100.

FRA has also carried out research to understand the extent of online hate against women, by analysing in detail 1,500 social media posts - using keywords that may indicate hate. The analysis confirmed the very high volume of online hate - often sexualised and violent - that is targeted at women, which exceeds the volume of hate experienced by other groups in the research.

This same research highlighted that there is no shared understanding of what constitutes online hate, making it difficult to detect and report. FRA calls for the development of training on legal thresholds for identifying online hate for police, content moderators and trusted flaggers under the Digital Services Act. FRA also calls for performance indicators, so that platforms can record the volume of online misogyny that still remains after content moderation filters have been applied.

FRA stands ready to support Member States and the EU in further efforts to regulate and address violent pornography. To this end, in 2027, FRA will release new survey data on the extent to which people across the EU encounter harmful deep fake technology, including instances of sexualised deep fakes. This will provide baseline data for the EU. Also in 2027, FRA will publish a report on child safety online, based on interviews with Digital Services Coordinators, civil society and online platforms. The focus is on the implementation of the DSA with respect to different types of harmful and illegal content against children online, including sexualised content.

The current EU legal framework is fragmented and the effective implementation of existing EU law needs to be vigorously monitored. FRA's work - which ranges from the Digital Services Act through to the newly revised Victims' Rights Directive - can serve to underpin the work of the EU institutions and Member States in their efforts to address what is, essentially, a phenomenon that undermines human dignity and other core fundamental rights.