Call for Abstracts: Women and Girl's Online Safety Conference 2025

Important dates

• Abstract submission deadline: 9 June 2025
• Abstract notification: 30 June 2025
• Conference dates: 10-11 September 2025

All submission deadlines are 11:59pm Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time zone.

Overview and Topics of Interest

The Centre for Protecting Women Online is pleased to announce the inaugural Women’s Online Safety Conference 2025. This conference aims to bring together researchers, practitioners, and policymakers from across all sectors—academia, technology, law enforcement, government, civil society, and beyond—to explore and address the pressing challenges to women’s safety in digital spaces. Recognising that online harms against women and girls are complex and multifaceted, we welcome contributions from a wide range of disciplines, including but not limited to technology, law, policing, social sciences, psychology, education, and public policy. We particularly encourage interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral work that seeks to understand and tackle the systemic, technical, legal, and societal dimensions of violence against women and girls online.

We invite submissions that explore, but are not limited to, the following areas:

• Legal and Policy Frameworks:
  • Analysis of existing laws and policies addressing online violence against women and girls.
  • Comparative and international perspectives on legal responses to online harms affecting women and girls.
  • Regulatory approaches to platform accountability and online harm mitigation.
  • Legal frameworks for TFVAWG such as deepfake abuse, doxxing, non-consensual image distribution, text-based abuse and cyberstalking amongst others.
  • Evaluating the effectiveness of content moderation laws and digital safety regulations.
  • Rights-based approaches to protecting freedom of expression while ensuring women’s safety and privacy.
  • Challenges faced by victim-survivors to obtain justice when prosecuting online violence and digital abuse across jurisdictions.
  • Negative stereotypes in cases addressing TFGBV, including the judicial misunderstanding of these issues.

• Responsible Technology and AI Interventions:
  • Responsible AI approaches for women's online safety.
  • Safety by design approaches for women's online safety.
  • Detection and prevention of gender-based online violence (e.g., harassment, stalking, cyberbullying).
  • Sentiment and emotion analysis in abusive or harmful online interactions towards women.
  • Gender bias identification and mitigation in AI.
  • Human-computer interaction approaches for women’s online safety.
  • Innovations in software tools, methods, or processes that enhance women’s online safety.
  • Analysis of surveillance tools such as tracking devices, personal safety apps, and hidden cameras misused against women.
  • Responsible software engineering and responsible design for women’s online safety.
  • Human Behaviour, Psychology and Sociological Perspectives: Experiences of online violence.
  • Bystander experiences, behaviour and interventions.
  • Perpetrator behaviour and practices.
  • Resistance and power in digital spaces.
  • Interaction of online and offline behaviour.
  • Role of social media platforms in facilitating or hindering online harms (affordances).
  • Community and online safety.

• Policing and Enforcement:
  • Law enforcement strategies for addressing online crimes towards women.
  • Challenges in investigating and prosecuting digital offences.
  • Training police forces and judicial systems in understanding digital violence.
  • Collaboration between tech companies, law enforcement, and civil society in tackling online gender-based violence.
  • New methodologies and digital forensic techniques for tracking and preventing digital crimes.
  • Intersectionality in digital policing – Addressing the unique vulnerabilities of marginalised groups in online abuse cases.
  • Policing in the Metaverse – Investigating crimes against women in virtual environments and immersive digital spaces.
  • Ethical considerations in digital law enforcement – Balancing privacy rights with proactive policing measures to prevent online violence.

We strongly encourage submissions that adopt interdisciplinary approaches and consider intersectional factors that influence women's experiences online.

Submission Guidelines

We welcome both new and recent research. Accepted formats include:

• Research/Work abstracts: Summarising ongoing or completed work (up to 300 words).
• Position or idea abstracts: Outlining emerging problems, theoretical discussions, or new perspectives (up to 300 words).

Abstracts can be academic, professional, or from other sectors (e.g., organisations).

Please submit your contributions electronically via

• Submit your Abstract
• Submit your Poster

Publication Opportunities

Selected papers will be invited to contribute to a planned special issue on the topic. Further details, including the journal venue, will be shared following acceptance notifications.

Contact Information

For inquiries, please contact the conference organising committee at protecting-women-online@open.ac.uk.

We look forward to your contributions to this vital discourse on enhancing women's and girls safety in digital spaces!