Challenging Digital Stalking: Recognising Intimate, Political and Cultural Violence

For many of us, the digital space is not a synonym for freedom. It is a territory where control, harassment, and patriarchal violence are reproduced with new codes, but with the same logic of discipline. Cyberstalking persists under patriarchal viewpoints which involve not only individual actions but political practices that seek to silence our bodies, voices, and emotions.

I have approached stalking from different perspectives: I have studied it as an academic subject, I have discussed it in community spaces, I have seen it affect colleagues I admire deeply, and I have also experienced it directly in my own life. I know the imprint it makes on our bodies, and I am certain that it is not merely an individual experience but a form of violence that needs to be named, thought about, and faced collectively.

In turn, this experience has inspired the series, “Narratives of Power: Unmasking Digital Stalkers,” an attempt to document and archive these issues. Of a hundred proposals received, we had to choose just nine, seeking to offer a safe space to talk about situations, practices, and technologies that facilitate stalking, but also share our strategies and visions on healing.

Private life under surveillance

Every day, increasingly subtle and sophisticated technologies try to persuade us, in the name of “romantic love”, to surveil those close to us. Their use spreads through social media, where tutorials to secretly track one’s partner[1] and/or access the details of their private life go viral with alarming rapidity. This phenomenon is linked directly to the prevailing conservative influence seen in major tech companies, which have abandoned pink and rainbow-washing and their pseudo-inclusive policies[2] in response to the growing legitimation of reactionary and antidemocratic discourses in different parts of the world.

Today, algorithms bombard us with a conservative aesthetic (have we lost colour to the point where now everything is neutral or beige?), the boom of tradwives,[3] and hours of content that legitimises jealousy and control, [creating] spaces where stalking is normalised as a mechanism of domination. The fact is, inhabiting the internet makes us part of a social fabric where we carry a suitcase holding our personal preferences, knowledge, friendships, identities, and surroundings, and that information and links can be sabotaged, used against us, or manipulated by other persons, organisations, or movements, even by someone we love.[4]

In this series, writers from across the Global Majority explore various questions and raise important points around how cyber stalking defines and dictates various aspects of one’s experiences of online and offline interactions.

Inhabiting the internet makes us part of a social fabric where we carry a suitcase holding our personal preferences, knowledge, friendships, identities, and surroundings, and that information and links can be sabotaged, used against us, or manipulated by other persons, organisations, or movements, even by someone we love.

Of which the question of, how to identify cyberstalking when the perpetrator is someone in our inner circle, comes up. Sofia Celi reflects on this question in her short story Rememorar (Re-memory) for the series, in which she explores how control and emotional harm can intertwine, and how such attacks succeed in dismantling our ideas and beliefs. In her narrative, she raises a crucial question: If we are raised in a culture that systematically hurts us from an early age, will we be able to recognise the danger in time?

In their article, the collective FEMBLOC that works to counter digital gender based violence, has conducted extensive research on the impact of digital violence in intimate relationships and other emotional bonds. Through their work with feminist helplines and collective training processes in support centers, they have mapped the different forms these attacks take, primarily targeting women and LGBTQIANB+ persons in the digital space. Their article Desconectar de tu ex (Disconnect from your ex) systematises these experiences, showing how stalking permeates day-to-day life, reinforcing dynamics of control and violence.

But the mainstreaming of stalking also operates at a structural level. Technologies not only reinforce control in personal attachments; they are often designed without a gender perspective, which in turn impacts our lives. In South Africa, the journalist Winile Ximba describes in her article “You look cute” how some supermarket cash registers print cashiers’ personal data on receipts, and certain people then use that information to harass and stalk them online, in a country where the mere presumption of adultery can cost a woman her life.

Stalking as a tool of political discipline

The private dimensions of stalking may intersect the ways we form relationships and build trust. But what happens when your stalker is the government? In Indonesia, as Juliana Harsianti describes in her article “The rise of cybertroops and digital stalker,” organised groups acted during elections to harass activists, civil society organisations, and women who took part in political protests.

Something similar occurs in Zimbabwe, where Nyasha Bhobo documents the operations of Varakashi, a digital brigade that primarily persecutes women through campaigns of harassment, sexualisation, and public exposure. Such violence also reaches those who have emigrated: several women in the diaspora, in countries like Canada, continue to be stalked by these actors, dealing with authorities that fail to understand how to prosecute or name this kind of attacks or what kind of orientation to offer victims.

For those who embody non-normative identities, online life involves a constant negotiation between visibility, resistance, and self-care. In India, in their article “Under digital siege: How marginalized genders survive online stalking in India,” Anjani Chadha and Niv documented, in visual and written form, how cyberstalking operates as a tool of censorship, especially against marginalised genders. From harassing a young person for expressing their political views to transphobic harassment, the digital space has augmented the hierarchies and forms of violence that already exist at the social level. In these settings, maintaining a digital presence and building community, in itself, is an act of bravery.

Anti-rights groups act in a coordinated fashion worldwide. Michel Riquelme, a non-binary transfeminist activist, in their article, Cuando los oprimidos usan las herramientas del amo para oprimir (When the oppressed use the master’s tools to oppress), explores how certain detransitionist groups have partnered with ultra-right-wing organisations to discredit the trans community in Chile. The aggression is constant: anyone who decides to talk about their existence online is a target for campaigns of harassment, both online and in person, through flyers, leaflets, and reports that identify them directly. Digital platforms allow such attacks to continue: automated reporting systems fail to identify this specific form of violence, which facilitates the circulation of hate speech that denies the very lives of LGBTQIANB+ persons.

Technologies not only reinforce control in personal attachments; they are often designed without a gender perspective, which in turn impacts our lives.

Harm through emotional branding

In 2023, thanks to a fellowship from the Association for Civil Rights (Asociación por los Derechos Civiles (ADC)), I published the report Political, sexual, and digital violence in Chile, where I documented cyberattacks suffered by progressive cis and trans women in recent years. Many of these acts of violence started on platforms like Tinder or Bumble, where aggressors posing as progressive allies maintained virtual contact with them, to then expose them publicly and incite their followers to harass them both physically and virtually.

All the victims had something in common: they spoke out publicly on their social media in favour of abortion or political parity. The fact is that online stalkers do not seek to harm an individual, but rather to morally mark their victims and send a signal to those who surround them: their aim is to write on their bodies and identities an exemplary punishment that acts as a warning for the entire community that sees them, and out of fear of them, decides to curtail their online activities.

This logic of teaching and disciplining feminised bodies aligns with the critique offered by Argentine theorist Rita Segato, who understands femicide and other forms of violence against women and non-heteronormative bodies as forms of expressive violence, since the aim is not merely to eliminate, but to exercise total control by one will over another. In her words, the aggression closest to sexual violence is physical or psychological torture: “To express that one holds the will of the other in their hands is the telos or end of expressive violence.”[5]

Understanding that what takes place in the digital space leaves an imprint on our bodies is part of what is known as tecnoafecciones,[6] a concept proposed by Jess Ciacci and Paola Ricaurte (2024), who define it as a way of understanding that technology is intersected by a web of feelings and interactions. Therefore, digital attacks are also felt at a physical level. In NGO Amaranta, through the report Chile y la violencia de género en internet: experiencias de personas cis, trans y personas no binaries (Chile and online gender violence: experiences of cis, trans, and non-binary persons), we identified multiple bodily disorders linked to online harassment and violence: headaches, dizziness, stomach pain, bruxism, and other manifestations that confirm the material nature of these experiences, where the impact remains in fear, shame, and the feeling of being under constant surveillance.

Without a support network, suffering cyberstalking may mean disappearing or dissolving. The Taiwanese comedian Vickie Wang reflects on this in her article I Keep Receipts, for this series, a text where she asks herself who thinks of all the women who withdraw from public life after experiencing online violence, and how society also contributes to their cancellation by denying them safe spaces and the chance to share their experiences.

Without a support network, suffering cyberstalking may mean disappearing or dissolving.

The path to healing

This is why it is urgent to speak not only of strategies to protect ourselves, but also of how we create practices for healing that help sustain us and allow us to continue to inhabit the online space. How am I to handle the emotions left from being stalked by someone to whom I expressed my affection? Is it possible to go back to being a person with a public life on the street and online?

In ¿Hay vida después del stalking? (Is there life after stalking?), Constanza Figueroa, from https://amigashacker.club/, proposes a series of strategies to take back our online space (and our lives) after stalking. Through a playful exercise, she draws a path that acknowledges our vulnerabilities, and encourages us to treat our wounds with sweetness. It offers a roadmap to rebuild ourselves from a place of tenderness and compassion.

We cannot face these attacks alone. Through these texts, we want to tell stalkers that we too are watching, documenting, and sharing what they are doing to ensure that such violence is not repeated. Day by day we build networks, form cross-border alliances, and we know that in every territory there is someone willing to construct transfeminist memory. Technology is not neutral, and that is why we are analysing it from a situated and gender sensitive critique. We will not be silenced again; together we will lift ourselves up as many times as necessary. Thank you for coming this far!