Emma Pickering, Head of the Tech-Facilitated Abuse and Economic Empowerment Team at Refuge, said:
“The horrific reports of a vast global online community made up of group chats where men encourage and advise each other to drug and assault their wives and partners lays bare not just the devastating prevalence of violence against women and girls (VAWG), but also its alarming glorification.
Just two years ago, drug-facilitated intimate partner abuse made headlines worldwide during the mass trial of Dominique Pelicot and 50 other men for the rape and abuse of Gisèle Pelicot in France. At Refuge, we know firsthand that most cases of domestic abuse and sexual assault are perpetrated by partners and the recent investigation into an “online rape academy” makes starkly clear that Gisèle’s case is far from isolated.
It is horrendous that there are online spaces dedicated to actively encouraging this abuse, with men engaging in discussions framed as “lessons” on how to become a rapist or sexual predator, often behind a veil of anonymity.
This behaviour is inherently linked with the wider issue of technology-facilitated abuse, including the rising use of hidden cameras placed in bedrooms to record survivors without their consent, violating spaces that should be safe – with footage often used to enable blackmail and further exploitation.
The scale of the problem is darkly underscored by online pornography. One site hosting more than 20,000 videos of so-called “sleep” content recorded around 62 million views in February alone, rising to 81 million in March. This is the culmination of entrenched misogyny within mainstream pornography, which normalises and eroticises violence against women, while algorithms that prioritise extreme content actively push exploitative material into wider circulation.
This vile voyeuristic material has devastating consequences for offline behaviour. In England and Wales alone, 43% of recorded sexual assaults involved a partner or ex-partner, according to March 2025 data, while the proportion of victims recorded as having been assaulted while unconscious or asleep has risen from 21% to 23% over the last decade.
These harms are inherently borderless, but tech platforms must take urgent and proactive action to identify, cease, and prevent this activity, as perpetrators often network in groups, frequently first connecting on platforms such as Telegram before directing others towards these sites and communities.
To effectively address the problem of UK users being exposed to abusive content hosted overseas, it is imperative that Ofcom and other regulators take a coordinated approach to online violence against women and girls, rather than a fragmented response that simply cannot match the scale of abuse.”
