Digital violence often precedes a femicide. Digital control threatens those affected even without physical proximity to the perpetrators. Yet neither current law nor statistics capture this connection accurately. That has to change.
In 2023, 360 women in Germany were killed by a current or former partner, and over 900 attempted or completed killings were recorded across all categories. These numbers point to a legal vacuum: Feminicide has no legal standing in German law, and no consistent infrastructure for recording data on what drives gender-related killing. As Catherine D’Ignazio argues in Counting Feminicide (2024), this kind of gap is not neutral: what gets counted shapes what gets addressed, and what is left uncounted disappears entirely from prevention efforts.
This silence is compounded by what the data also fails to register: online violence that precedes, accompanies, and follows the killing through tracking apps, account surveillance, constant monitoring of location, creation of deepfakes, and non-consensual sharing of images. Emerging research confirms that these forms of Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence (TFGBV), are embedded in the continuum of violence and increasingly can be connected to gender-related killings. This violence does not occur in an ideological vacuum: antifeminist movements and the Manosphere actively assert and reproduce patriarchal power under which surveillance and coercive control are normalized and even romanticized.
We are Natalia, Michaela and Grit, three researchers and civil society activists that met through the Data Against Feminicide course and we advocate for reforms on two levels: first, legal recognition of the full scope of violence that precedes feminicide for data collection in compliance with the Istanbul Convention; second, curriculum-based interventions across schools, law enforcement and judicial training, that address the ideological conditions enabling TFGBV and feminicide.
The Data Blindspot
TFGBV is defined as any act “committed, assisted, aggravated or amplified by the use of information and communications technology” that causes physical, sexual, psychological, social, or economic harm. Within intimate partner relationships, this takes the form of digital coercive control, or the deliberate use of digital tools to extend and intensify patterns of domination already being exercised offline, disproportionately affecting women and girls, particularly those facing intersecting forms of discrimination. Tools of online harm such as GPS tracking, account surveillance, the threat or distribution of intimate images, or the remote monitoring of texts, location history, and social media, are not incidental to abusive relationships, but rather, a mechanism through which control is maintained and, as emerging research shows, escalated toward lethal violence.
What makes digital coercive control particularly dangerous is what Harris and Woodlock (2019) call its spacelessness. Unlike physical violence, which is bounded by geography, digital control creates a condition of perpetual surveillance. A perpetrator does not need to be in the room to monitor, isolate, or intimidate, completely dismantling a victim’s sense of safety. This matters profoundly for how feminicide is understood and prevented, as TFGBV constitutes a significant pathway through which coercive control is enacted. The ideological infrastructure that teaches men to regard the harassment, stalking, and dominance of their partner as legitimate in relationships is largely constructed through the networked misogyny of the manosphere. Understanding how TFGBV functions as a precursor to femicide therefore requires understanding how misogyny itself is produced and promoted online.
Manufacturing Misogyny Online
Digital coercive control does not emerge from nowhere. The attitudes that make surveillance of a partner feel normal, or even romantic, are produced and circulated at scale online. Platform architecture accelerates this dynamic by rewarding engagement and progressively amplifying polarizing material. Algorithms move misogynist narratives from niche subcultures into mainstream digital environments. Research shows that after only a few days of engagement with TikTok’s recommendation algorithm, users’ feeds significantly increased in misogynistic content. Adolescent women in particular are socialized within digital environments to interpret constant contact, location monitoring, and account access as signs of care in intimate relationships, not as warning signs.
The manosphere produces the ideological infrastructure for this: forums, channels, and communities that systematically frame male dominance over women as legitimate and feminist opposition to it as a social threat. This is the context in which coercive control becomes thinkable before any specific relationship begins. Understanding TFGBV as a feminicide precursor requires attending to how misogyny is manufactured and made to seem natural at scale.
A 2026 survey by the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London found that 31% of Gen Z men agree that a wife should always obey her husband, twice the rate of Baby Boomer men. The generational shift in these attitudes matters for violence prevention, and it points toward digital environments as the primary site of formation.
Germany’s Data Landscape
Germany’s primary official source, the PKS, has been collecting gender-disaggregated data on violent crimes and publishing annual reports since 2015, but the underlying datasets are not publicly available. Independent initiatives such as the Femicide Observation Center Germany (FOCG), which compiles cases from media and court proceedings, fill some of this gap, but also do not disclose their data for research.
The result is a landscape that is comparatively underdeveloped and poorly equipped for the kind of prevention-oriented analysis that feminicide research demands. The European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) has developed an operational framework for feminicide data collection, and Germany is attempting to align with it. But the key variables remain absent: history of prior violence, patterns of coercive control, perpetrator motivations, and any record of digital abuse.
Without these variables, risk factors cannot be identified and interventions cannot be targeted. Germany’s legal framework reflects the same gap. The Protection Against Violence Act (GewSchG, 2001) allows courts to issue restraining orders and remove violent individuals from shared residences, but these mechanisms are built around physical presence. They do not engage digital contact, and they were not designed to address the spaceless reach of a perpetrator operating through devices.
The recently enacted Act on Assistance Against Violence (GewHG, 2025) establishes a legal right to free counseling and protection for women affected by violence, regardless of residency status or language, a genuine structural improvement. What it does not do is bring digital coercive control into the analytical frame; the legal system still has no category for it.
What Needs to Change
The dynamics mapped throughout this piece, including the legal blindspot around feminicide, digital coercive control as a gateway to lethal violence, and the online machinery producing misogyny at scale, point clearly toward two places where meaningful change can happen. Here’s where we think Germany needs to act:
1. Name it, count it, fix it: legal and data reform
Incorporating TFGBV into feminicide data is not primarily a technical problem, but a decision about what counts as a risk factor, and whose experience of violence gets systematic documentation. Right now, Germany does not legally recognize feminicide as a distinct category. Crimes are prosecuted under the general criminal code and recorded by the PKS, but neither the PKS nor the independent Femicide Observation Center Germany(FOCG) makes its underlying datasets publicly available. Researchers have to work from published summaries, which makes independent analysis and genuine prevention work extremely difficult. Compare that to countries withpublic databases, interactive maps, and contextual case data, and the gap becomes glaring.
The problem isn’t merely access to data, but what does not get counted. History of prior violence, patterns of digital coercive control, perpetrator motivations: none of these are systematically recorded. Germany is working to align with the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) framework, but is missing key prevention-oriented indicators. And that absence has real consequences: if Germany’s data systems captured digital coercive control as a variable, the picture of high-risk cases would change entirely. It would become possible to identify escalation patterns earlier and to extend protective frameworks beyond physical proximity.
The violence doesn’t start at the murder. It begins long before: in the trackers installed on phones, in the demand for location access, in the image threats, in the management of who a woman can contact and when. And it can continue after, on the online platforms where images of abuse or the killing itself are shared. Germany’s data does not yet have a category for any of that. Until it does, the prevention system will continue failing to capture these behaviors. What is required is a structural change: legal recognition of feminicide as a category, and data infrastructure designed to capture what comes before the killing for effective prevention.
2. Early prevention through education
By the time misogyny shows up in an abusive relationship, it has usually been years in the making. Boys and young men are being radicalized onlinelong before they enter their first relationship, through social media, gaming platforms, or YouTube comments. These attitudes get normalized inside peer cultures, and are not seen as red flags or precursors to violent behavior.
That’s exactly why secondary school is such a critical intervention point. Adolescence is when gender norms, expectations about relationships, and ideas about dominance and control are most actively being formed. Schools are one of the few spaces where you can actually reach young people before those patterns harden.
Twenty-five years of evidence from school-based GBV prevention programsis consistent on one thing: programs that address underlying gender norms work better than those focused only on behavioral risk. In Germany specifically, the evidence base for evaluated secondary school programs is thin, and most existing frameworks focus on primary settings, leaving adolescence, precisely the window where it matters most, largely unaddressed.
Prevention at this level has to be sustained and embedded in the curriculum, not delivered as a one-off session. And it has to engage directly with how digital tools function in intimate relationships, because for young people today, that’s where coercive control is already beginning.
If you want to read more:
Dragiewicz, M., Burgess, J., Matamoros-Fernández, A., Salter, M., Suzor, N. P., Woodlock, D., & Harris, B. (2018). Technologies of coercive control: Digital domestic violence and the competing roles of social media platforms. Feminist Media Studies, 18(4), 609–625.
Habib, H., Srinivasan, P., & Nithyanand, R. (2022). Making a radical misogynist: How online social engagement contributes to manosphere radicalization.
McLachlan, F., & Harris, B. (2022). Intimate risks: examining online and offline abuse, homicide flags, and femicide. Victims & Offenders, 17(5), 623–646.
Rothermel, A.-K. (2023). The role of evidence-based misogyny in antifeminist online communities of the “manosphere”. Big Data & Society, 10(1).https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517221145671