Not Just Nudes: Defining Image-Based Abuse in Pakistan and the Diaspora
A research report by Chayn
60+ Voices · Chayn Research Team
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Visit BloomWhen we talk about image-based abuse, we usually think of a specific type of image. A "nude" image or one that contains "sexual" content. That assumption shapes our laws, our platform policies, how harm is documented, and the way we decide whose experiences count as harm.
Over the past two years Chayn has been speaking with more than 60 Pakistani women. From cities and villages across Pakistan and from the diaspora. They were students, mothers, teachers, activists, celebrities, sex workers, entrepreneurs. They spoke Urdu, Punjabi, Pashto, Siraiki, Balochi, and English.
What they described challenges how we define and understand image-based abuse.
Here are some of their stories.
01
Chapter
Not just nudes
Immediately after Mahnoor's wedding ceremony, her husband began psychologically and emotionally abusing her.
He removed her SIM card from her phone and inserted it into a second device that he controlled. He was able to get full access to her account including her messages and photos. He went through the pictures on her phone, cropping out her face and placing it next to male colleagues, friends, and students, presenting each image as evidence of some wrongdoing.
None of these images were sexual. None of these images contained nudity.
The most objectionable photograph on her phone, she said, was a selfie she had taken alone in her bedroom.
It was just me. I was alone, but I was just wearing a sleeveless tank top. That was not meant for anybody else. It was just on my phone. It was my picture.
As part of his control and harassment, her husband sent those pictures to her father, her uncles and her brother-in-law. These non-explicit images have ruined Mahnoor's relationship with her family, including her father and brothers. She reflected:
When her husband discovered she was about to start a new student position at a university, he sent an anonymous email to her chairman, her colleagues, and the Vice Chancellor, making a series of false allegations against her. Her financial compensation was frozen and an investigation was opened. She was eventually cleared, but the position she had worked toward was gone.
When Mahnoor went to file a complaint at the police station, her husband sent his brothers there first, carrying a phone full of her photographs. After viewing the photos, the police refused to file her complaint. When she later went to Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency cybercrime unit, she was again met with the same dismissive response.
They told her…
Unless there is something very openly sexual, we cannot do anything.
Mahnoor's case is not unusual. Rida, an NGO worker who has spent years supporting survivors of gender-based violence, including those who have experienced image-based abuse, estimated that around 80% of the cases she sees involve no explicit content at all.
Some images that are taken with your friends, in your classroom, restaurant, and you do not know about it. And eventually a text message comes to you on WhatsApp asking for sexual favours, saying 'I have your image, I can make it public, make a deepfake from it.' I'm telling you, 80% of cases are that. It's basically a simple image of her just doing her normal work. For them, this picture is quite harmful.
In these cases, she explained the problem is not what the image contains. It is who has control over it.
These are normal images, but the problem is that some man who is not her husband or…family member has those images, and that's where the problem comes from.
02
Chapter
Log kya kahein gay?
لوگ کیا کہیں گے؟
Log kya kahein gay?
What will people say?
There is a phrase that came up again and again in our conversations. "Log kya kahein gay", "What will people say".
A commonly used phrase for socially policing women in Pakistan, and India, rooted in generational and collective shame.
This expression describes the logic that shapes how image-based abuse works. Across the interviews, women described a cultural atmosphere in which being watched is a deeply embedded social expectation. An internalised "constant person in everybody's head", an imagined audience they consult before doing anything.
What matters is not what is in the photograph, but who might see it and what they might conclude.
There are many images in our country that your family does not want to see on social media.
The harm of those conclusions rarely stayed contained to one person.
Survivors spoke of consequences that spread outwards, to their families, tarnishing not just their reputation but that of parents, grandparents and wider family members. Blackmailers demanded money, and families scraped together what they could, hoping the payment would make the images disappear.
Families could find themselves both as victims of the abuse, and in some cases, a source of further harm. Some family members felt compelled to "punish" survivors of image-based abuse. The fear of honour killings was frequently mentioned, creating a backdrop of fear which many associated with the risk of death.
But as with everything we heard, the reality was more diverse and nuanced. Many women described their families as their most important source of support. One woman said, "the only person I should have reached out to in the initial stage was my dad", who helped her think clearly when she was in crisis. Someone else described her mother as someone who never blamed her, encouraged her to keep going, even as the community around them pushed back.
03
Chapter
It's about consent, not content
Jahan Ara was seventeen and studying for her school-leaving exams in Peshawar when a Facebook page appeared. She had no idea who had made it. The page contained photographs of 150 girls all described as girls from a local university, collected from other people's Facebook profiles. Jahan Ara wasn't a student at the university, but her picture was there.
The photo was of her at a friend's wedding, enjoying the company of her female friends. Someone at the wedding had taken photos without her knowledge and uploaded them to a shared album on Facebook.
The photos of Jahan Ara were just of women at a wedding.
All wore something very covered, normal clothes, not sleeveless. Something no one would consider.
Jahan Ara reported the page, and so did friends. Every day for weeks she would check the page to watch the accumulating comments. "Every morning, or ten times a day, I would check what was posted, wondering what people would say next about our girls."
Eventually Jahan Ara stopped checking the page. She never reported the abuse beyond Facebook's reporting mechanisms. As she said,
They would blame you. Why did you upload that picture?
Shirin shared a similar story. She had been at a gathering with female friends, getting ready together and taking photos. She had taken off her hijab, and specifically asked that the images not be shared.
Later that night, when I checked the phone, I saw that my photos had been shared in a group. My hair was visible in them, and I was clearly in the frame.
When Shirin turned to her friends and family for support, she was blamed for appearing in the photos.
What Shirin and Jahan Ara's experiences have in common is not the content of the image. It's the removal of consent. Jahan Ara did not give permission for her photograph to be uploaded. Shirin explicitly asked for hers not to be shared. In both cases, someone else made that decision for them, and once that picture was uploaded, that decision could not be undone.
Any picture even if a selfie from one's own mobile. When you go somewhere and someone captures something of you, even if you are an audience member, it can end up anywhere for example on their public page. It is your private picture. Nowadays the level of privacy and consent is gone; you can be everywhere…
04
Chapter
The experience of many
For the survivors we interviewed, a nude can be just as intimate as a photo of you smoking, or dancing, or sitting at home. What makes that image intimate depends entirely on who you are, where you live, and who might see it. The moment your choice to share that image is taken away from you, real harm follows whatever the image contains.
Select a profile to listen to their full stories.
05
Chapter
Reporting abuse shouldn't be this hard
For most survivors, the tech platform where the content is uploaded is the first place they turn. It is often the only place.
What they found when they reported to these platforms was a system that had not been built with them in mind. Reporting categories didn't match the nature of what had happened. Moderation systems that caught harassment in English missed the same words written in Urdu. Survivors were repeatedly asked to explain why a post was harmful in terms the platform could recognise, terms that did not reflect the culturally shaped harm they had experienced.
Nabiha wrote what she described as a gazillion emails to Facebook, uploaded her ID card, and took a verification photo at a moment of extreme distress. She waited weeks for a response.
I wanted them to believe me, what happened, and take action quickly, not days and hours.
We heard stories like Nabiha's multiple times. In all cases, none of their efforts produced a clear outcome.
At a time of heightened distress, when survivors are panicked, sleep-deprived, sometimes even suicidal, they are being asked by platforms, time and time again, to manage complex digital escalation, to photograph themselves, to retell their experience in detail.
And at the end of that process, they are told the same thing: the content did not violate the platform's policy. It wasn't sexually explicit. It doesn't meet the definition.
Before even blaming the culprit, they blame the woman.
The same wall appeared when women turned to formal institutions.
The questions came before the investigations.
In some cases, women were told by the police they were at fault for living "in a Western way".
Before even blaming the culprit, they blame the woman.
In Pakistan, I've seen that whenever such cases happen, the first question the police ask is always, 'Why did the girl do it? Why did she take that photo or video?' It is her fault. Before even blaming the culprit, they blame the woman.
For many women, trying to report the abuse to the police deepened the harm. They were met with victim-blaming, dismissal, and disinterest by police.
So, some survivors turned to Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency. Here too, they were routinely told nothing could be done if the images weren't sexually explicit. Women whose images had been stolen or shared without consent were, again, left without a path forward.
Through all these stories, we began to see a justice system where just outcomes for survivors were shockingly rare.
Why good laws matter
Nabiha's many emails to platforms went unanswered. Jahan Ara's requests didn't get her image removed. Each of them reached the same wall.
A system that had no language for what had happened to them, because the law had no category for it either. They are not alone.
At present, 110 countries have no laws against intimate image-based abuse. 67 countries have what are considered "sufficient" laws – meaning they align with Article 16 of the UN Cybercrime Convention – while 18 have laws that fall short of this standard, including the United States, Japan, and Nepal. So far, Australia appears to be the only country that explicitly recognises images of a person without clothing of religious or cultural significance as intimate images.
In these instances, cases stall. Evidence is declared insufficient. The reporting process becomes too hostile to continue. For many survivors, the justice and reporting systems available are a lottery they are unlikely to win.
Sometimes though, survivors did win.
Sana, whose intimate photos were uploaded to pornography sites, described a long but ultimately effective process with Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency. The process was "kind of very hectic", requiring months of documentation, but she received the outcome she needed.
I'm very thankful… they really helped me… removing all the data from those sites.
Accessing help as Sana did is not a single easy decision, but a series of many. Each carries the risk of being blamed, judged, exposed, dismissed, or harmed. It takes immense courage and perseverance because, as we have seen, the systems aren't set up to support survivors.
What most often determines whether a survivor will access justice depends on who believes her, who stands with her, and what resources she has to fight back. That is its own kind of injustice. And it is precisely why the solution cannot rest on individual circumstances. It has to rest on systems.
Every time a woman refuses to carry a misplaced shame, it shifts the whole narrative
These women were failed by systems. Yet, they resisted, were defiant and somehow through it all, found hope.
We spoke to over 60 survivors from vastly different backgrounds. Different cities and villages, different generations, different languages and different relationships to class, faith and public life, from both Pakistan and the diaspora. What those conversations made clear is that these survivors refused to be reduced to their experiences.
For many survivors, the most fundamental act of resistance is often invisible: resisting the pull to blame yourself. In a context that ties women and their families' honour and reputation to their conduct, that is not a simple thing.
The messages arrive from everywhere all at once. An officer who victim-blames or a family member who shames. Refusing to accept what happened as your fault takes courage and strength.
"I realised that what has happened isn't my fault," said one survivor, who described the moment of recognition as a shift from emotional overwhelm into what she called "problem-solving mode".
Whether they were public figures, university students, or high school students, we heard from survivors who were blamed by everyone around them. And yet, they refused to place the blame anywhere but with their abuser.
Every time a woman refuses to carry a misplaced shame, it shifts the whole narrative.
Across all these diverse experiences, one simple recurring wish stands out: women want somewhere they can turn to without fear. They want a person who listens, an institution that protects, a platform that responds and a society that understands.
In many ways, the demands are modest. Survivors are asking to be heard, respected and taken seriously. They want systems that respond quickly rather than doubting them, laws that protect rather than criminalise or dismiss, and technologies that mitigate harm rather than amplify it. They want the ability to report without endangering themselves, to remove harmful images without needing to spell out their trauma in long and repeated descriptions, and to live without fear that a single photo could destroy their lives.
The change we want to see
Throughout our interviews, every survivor, regardless of what they considered intimate, agreed on one thing: an image should never be shared without the person's consent. What counts as intimate was personal, varied and culturally nuanced. What was universal was the right to decide where, how and with whom that picture was shared.
To realise that simple ask — to own the right to one's own image — Chayn has some concrete recommendations, informed by the 60+ women we spoke with during our research.
We call on governments to…
Reform legislative and institutional structures to protect survivors and hold abusers accountable.
- 1
A right to one's own image
Pass laws giving individuals the right to control how their image is shared, following frameworks already in place in France and Denmark. No image, sexual or not, should be posted without the consent of the person pictured. Where public interest, freedom of expression, or artistic freedom applies, the dignity of the person pictured must still be respected.
- 2
Recognise threats as abuse
The threat to share a private image should itself be criminalised as a standalone offence — regardless of whether the image is ever distributed. Threats are tools of coercive control. The harm they cause does not wait for the image to be shared.
- 3
Consent-based criminal standards
Broaden the legal definition of image-based abuse beyond nudity. Criminalise any non-consensual sharing — or threatened sharing — of images that cause harm to a person's dignity, privacy, safety, or wellbeing, regardless of whether the content is explicit.
- 4
Trained responders
Introduce mandatory and ongoing training for police, prosecutors, and judges on technology-facilitated gender-based violence. This must include digital evidence, trauma-informed approaches, gender sensitivity, and an understanding of how intersecting factors — religion, caste, sexuality, disability — shape a survivor's experience and risk.
- 5
Survivor-centred reporting
Create fast-track reporting mechanisms and multi-disciplinary responses designed around survivors' needs, not institutional convenience. Survivors dealing with urgent risks — ongoing image sharing, stalking, impersonation — should not be passed between departments. A single coordinated response is the standard to aim for.
- 6
Access to justice
Extend time limits for bringing cases, recognising that survivors often need time before they are ready or able to report. Ensure free or low-cost access to civil courts and remedies, including injunctions, takedown orders, and anonymity protections. Justice should not depend on a survivor's resources.
- 7
Platform accountability
Introduce legal duties requiring platforms to remove unlawful content within clear statutory timeframes, with proportionate penalties — including fines — for companies that fail to comply.
We call on companies to…
Reform product and policy procedures to make platforms safer and more accountable to survivors.
- 1
Culturally informed moderation
Ensure moderation teams receive training on how intersecting factors — religion, race, gender identity, caste, sexual orientation — shape what counts as harmful and how survivors experience risk. A percentage of platform profits should be invested in local and regional trust and safety teams who understand the communities they serve.
- 2
Third-party reporting
Allow trusted third parties — friends, family members, support organisations — to report abusive content on a survivor's behalf, including on WhatsApp and Instagram Stories to a Private List. Survivors often cannot see the images being used against them. Others frequently are.
- 3
Consent not content
Shift from defining image-based abuse as explicitly sexual or nude content to a consent-based standard. Removal requests based on lack of consent should be honoured. Introduce a prompt when users attempt to post images of others, asking them to confirm consent has been obtained. Suspend reported images during review to prevent further spread. Transparency reports should reflect this shift in approach.
- 4
Evidence preservation
Offer survivors the option — at their request — to have a certified record of content provided to law enforcement, even after that content has been removed. Survivors should not have to choose between getting harmful images taken down and pursuing justice.
- 5
Accessible, trauma-informed reporting
Offer survivors an active role in the reporting and feedback process and allow them to qualify their own experience. Design reporting mechanisms that do not require survivors to re-expose themselves to harmful content. Offer multiple formats — including captioned video — for users with lower literacy or limited digital confidence. Provide clear timelines so survivors know when to expect a response. Allow survivors to share their reporting journey with a trusted person who can keep a record and receive updates on their behalf.
- 6
Face blurring and consent tools
Offer an easily accessible face-blurring option and actively encourage its use before images are posted. Make it simple for users to protect the privacy of people who have not consented to appear in images shared publicly.
- 7
Cross-platform collaboration
Develop systems to identify and act on serial offenders who move between platforms when enforcement action is taken. Harmful actors should not be able to continue abuse simply by changing platform.
- 8
Compensation and redress
Invest in trusted partner channels — including organisations with expertise in trauma-informed support — with sufficient, stable funding. Direct survivors to specialist resources including legal advice, counselling, and crisis support. Harm that happens on a platform is a platform's responsibility too.
Read the full report, explore survivor stories and resources, or browse the taxonomy — click any bubble to begin.
With gratitude
Acknowledgements
Chayn would like to express its infinite gratitude to the many individuals and organisations that have contributed to this report. We would like to first acknowledge the work of our partner organisations in Pakistan, who work tirelessly to support survivors of tech-facilitated gender-based violence in Pakistan, the Digital Rights Foundation and Jugnu Project. Their expertise and knowledge have been our compass, as we conducted the research and working with them and benefitting from their understanding and support has been a privilege. In particular, we would like to thank the following individuals: Nighat Dad, Hyra Basit, Anam Baloch from the Digital Rights Foundation, and Zohra Ahmed from the Jugnu Project.
This report would not have happened without the incredible work and dedication of Chayn's members of staff. We are deeply grateful to the lead researcher Dr Abigail Bentley, who conducted the interviews and was the main author of the report. Her lived experience, as a woman with a South Asian heritage and professional expertise in the region have guided our work. Many others have worked to shape this report and allowed it to become the final product you are reading now. In particular, we would like to express our immense gratitude to our colleagues in Pakistan, Ramma Shahid Cheema and Amneh Shaikh-Farooqui, who have allowed us to reach voices we could not have reached without them. Additional thanks go to Ramma for all the parts she played in supporting the management and launch of this report.
Our heartfelt thanks also go to our editor Audrey Hingle, for her editing work and managing the launch of this research. We are also grateful to those who brought this report to life visually: Emil Hasnain for the illustrations, Jonny Rae-Evans for the PDF design, and Aibike Gaibli for the design of the interactive report. We also would like to pay tribute to our CEO Hera Hussain, who came up with the idea for this research and without whom this project would not exist, and all the members of staff who have contributed to shaping the content and direction of this report or supported its launch with their expertise: Eva Blum-Dumontet, Terri Harris, Manpreet Dhillon, Francesca Jarvis, Zeynep Guler-Tuck, Carolina Cal Angrisani, Ragini Jha, Eleanor Re'em, Janice Levenhagen, Charné Tromp, Kabir Patil, Marie Kochsiek, and Debbie Cunnington.
We are indebted to the Chayn volunteers who generously gave their time and energy to help make this report happen. Cecilia Vidotto Labastie, Abhinaya Murthy, and Hannah Anderton have played essential roles in helping ensure the report reaches decision makers and we would also like to acknowledge Mehak Ahmed, Malú González, Julia Mazina, Cordelia Moore, Mitchelle Simon, and Priyanka Pathak for their work reviewing and contributing to the report.
Our appreciation also goes to the many Pakistani and South Asian members of our community who contributed to various aspects of the research process – helping to spread the word, recording audio clips, suggesting interviewees, and supporting this work in countless other ways.
We also thank everyone, in the civil society, government, and tech sector, who joined and contributed to our co-learning sessions. Your expertise helped better this report and the recommendations we made.
Last but certainly not least, this report would not exist without the 64 women, gender minorities, and experts who generously shared their time, experiences and insights with us. Some of you can be named and therefore we would like to express our deepest gratitude to Maryam Gilgit-Baltistan, Ayesha Omar, Reem. Many more of you cannot be named for security reasons, and we are all the more indebted to you for your courage in speaking about painful experiences, and your trust in us to represent your voices accurately. You have been the foundation of this work.
This report is dedicated to you.