How Pakistani Women Are Taking the Internet Back

Pakistani lawyer and Digital Rights Foundation founder Nighat Dad begins from a basic claim: access to the internet is access to knowledge, work, association, and public voice. When women are driven offline through stalking, threats, impersonation, or family punishment, the harm is not merely unpleasant speech. It restricts citizenship and redistributes the benefits of technology toward those already safer in public.

Dad describes building Pakistan’s cyber-harassment helpline to combine legal guidance, digital security, psychological support, and documentation. This matters because advice to ‘log off’ transfers responsibility to the target and treats withdrawal as safety. A helpline instead recognizes that incidents cross platforms and institutions: technical abuse may require legal response, while formal reporting can expose survivors to disbelief or further surveillance.

The talk is brief and predates many current forms of synthetic-image abuse and platform governance, so it should be paired with newer research. Its framework remains powerful: digital rights are human rights only when people can exercise them without absorbing unlimited private risk. Feminist technology policy must therefore fund support systems, constrain abusive power, and preserve women’s ability to speak rather than making silence the price of protection.