From technology-facilitated gender-based violence to harms enabled by artificial intelligence, the digital landscape is evolving quickly - but are the systems we use to measure and understand that violence keeping pace?
In this episode, we explore what it means to measure violence in the digital world, and what can be missed when some forms of harm are easier to detect and quantify than others. We discuss the challenges of capturing context and language in digital spaces, the limitations of existing approaches to measuring technology-facilitated gender-based violence, and how artificial intelligence is creating new challenges for detecting, understanding and governing online harms.
Your host is: Ayesha Mago, Global Advocacy Director, Sexual Violence Research Initiative (SVRI)
This episode’s guests are:
Tarunima Prabhakar, Research and Project Lead at Tattle
Selamawit Engida Abdella, Researcher at the Global Center on AI Governance
🎧 Listen to learn:
➡︎ What we should measure when it comes to digital violence
➡︎ Why some forms of digital violence are easier to measure
➡︎ How language and context affect how digital harms are detected
➡︎ How AI is changing digital violence
➡︎ New challenges for measuring and governing digital harms
🌍Learn more about the SVRI Forum 2026 here!
⚡Follow SVRI on Instagram.
🌐Check out the SVRI website.
🎥 Watch our film on YouTube.
💬 Connect with the SVRI svri@svri.org and our host, Elizabeth Dartnall
🎙️ An OG Podcasts Ltd production
Resources:
Chayn Research - https://reports.chayn.co/
Global Index on Responsible AI (GIRAI) - https://www.global-index.ai/
- Browne, Jude, and others (eds), Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Algorithms, Data, and Intelligent Machines (Oxford, 2023; online edn, Oxford Academic, 23 Nov. 2023), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192889898.001.0001, accessed 23 Sept. 2026.
- Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence in Ethiopia, CIR: https://www.info-res.org/tfgbv-in-ethiopia/
- Data Workers' Inquiry: https://data-workers.org/
- African Hub on AI Safety, Peace and Security: https://ai.uct.ac.za/african-hub-ai-safety-peace-security