During the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence this year, I found myself returning again and again to conversations with colleagues, friends, and family. Not only in formal spaces, but in WhatsApp voice notes, calls, and quiet moments of shared exhaustion. What stood out was not just what we were naming as violence, but where we were locating it. For many of us, this year’s conversations felt like a turning point.

For a long time, our work on GBV rightly focused on the home, the workplace, and public spaces largely offline sites where violence was visible, physical, and often easier to name. These remain critical battlegrounds. But 2025 made something unavoidable clear for me: gender-based violence has expanded far beyond these traditional sites. It has become more invasive, more diffuse, and harder to escape.

Recognising digital and text-based spaces as sites of GBV is a necessary evolution to the discourse

When Violence Follows You Home

Several colleagues shared something that struck me deeply: in 2026, they prefer to return to working from the office, not because offices are perfect or safe, but because home is no longer a refuge. For some, working from home has come to mean blurred boundaries, constant availability, and a quiet intensification of stress, surveillance, and vulnerability.

These reflections sort of resonated.

COVID-19 did not simply shift where we work; it collapsed the boundaries between work, care, rest, and private life. Homes became offices. Living rooms our meeting rooms. Care work ran alongside paid labour, with no clear end to the working day. For women, especially those of us in civil society, this shift was not neutral.

Capitalism became more intimate!

It entered our homes through screens, deadlines, emails, and expectations of constant responsiveness. The promise of flexibility masked a deeper intrusion into time, into care, into the body itself. And in this context, gender-based violence did not disappear; it adapted.

Digital Spaces as Sites of Discipline

Much of the GBV we reflected on during the 16 Days lives in what I call text spaces: emails, messages, comments, social media platforms, and digital forums where women’s voices are amplified and punished.

Speaking publicly, writing critically, organising politically these acts often invite a particular kind of violence. Online harassment, silencing, ridicule, and coordinated attacks are not random. They are deeply political. They function as tools of discipline, reminding women that visibility comes at a cost and they must stay in their place.

This invasion and expansive reach of violence is also strategic in another way: it is designed to exhaust. When boundaries collapse between work and home, public and private, online and offline women are left in a state of permanent urgency and permanent fatigue. Over time, that exhaustion dulls agency itself, drains the energy required to resist, and slowly de-amplifies both voice and cause. Silence is not always enforced; sometimes it is engineered through burnout.

The message is subtle but persistent: speak, but not too loudly; lead, but do not disrupt; exist, but do not challenge power.

This form of GBV is often minimised and dismissed as “just online,” something we should learn to ignore or manage individually. But these narratives are part of the problem. They shift responsibility away from systems and onto women, reproducing the same patriarchal logic we have always fought against.

Patriarchy, Capitalism, and the Expansion of Violence

What became clear to me during this year’s 16 Days is that the expansion of GBV is not accidental. It is deeply tied to how capitalism and patriarchy continue to organise our lives.

As capitalism reshapes work; extending hours, collapsing boundaries, demanding productivity at all times it also creates new conditions for control, coercion, and violence. Digital platforms, far from being neutral, mirror and intensify existing power relations. Patriarchy has simply taken on new forms: algorithmic, anonymous, and relentless.

Violence now moves across spaces with ease:

• From workplaces into homes
• From public platforms into private messages
• From economic precarity into emotional and psychological harm

There is no clear line between “online” and “offline” anymore, it is all blurred. The violence is expansive, intrusive, and often invisible until it isn’t.

Care Justice as Resistance

From a care justice and feminist political economy perspective, this moment demands more than recognition. It demands political clarity.

Ending GBV in the 21st century requires us to ask harder questions:

• Who benefits from blurred boundaries between work and life?
• Whose labour paid and unpaid is being stretched and extracted?
• Why are women expected to absorb violence as the cost of participation?

Care justice reminds us that care, rest, safety, and dignity are not private luxuries they are political demands. If our homes are no longer safe from work, surveillance, or violence, then something fundamental has been broken.

Beyond the 16 Days

As the 16 Days of Activism 2025 come to a close, I am left with a strong conviction: the struggle against GBV must now confront the systems that have made violence so pervasive and adaptable.

This is not only about protection of woneb, it is about reclaiming space, time, voice, and autonomy. It is about refusing narratives that normalise intrusion and silence. And it is about insisting that women’s participation in public life should not come at the cost of our safety or wellbeing.

The sites of GBV have multiplied because power has become more invasive.

Our resistance, therefore, must be just as expansive and deeply rooted in care, justice, and collective refusal