Women are being pushed out of public life, not by chance, but through coordinated gendered disinformation and harassment.
These campaigns increasingly combine traditional abuse with multimedia and synthetic content, amplifying harm and accelerating political exit. Have you ever heard of the “triangle of violence”? In this webinar, Marília Gehrke (University of Groningen) explains the concept by examining the relationship between content, victims, and audiences. This framework shows how gendered disinformation functions as a sustained system rather than isolated incidents, with cumulative effects that normalise abuse and push women out of public life.
Drawing on Forced to Quit, a crowdsourcing-oriented initiative documenting cases in which women in politics, journalism, and activism were compelled to leave the public sphere due to sustained disinformation and harassment, the webinar highlights quitting as a meaningful and measurable outcome of gendered political violence.
