On 25 November 2025, Ofcom published its statement and guidance: a safer life online for women and girls. This was followed on 18 December by publication of the government's strategy and action plan to tackle violence against women and girls (VAWG).
Ofcom guidance on online safety for women and girls
This sets out nine areas for tech firms to improve online safety for women and girls, with a focus on safety by design and user support. The guidance supplements Ofcom's final Codes and risk assessment guidance on how to tackle illegal content and content harmful to children and sets out how providers can take action against harmful content that disproportionately affects women and girls.
What is in the guidance?
Ofcom has published:
These cover relevant parts of the Codes and provide practical examples which focus on:
- 'abusability' testing to identify potential misuse of services
- working with experts on gender-based harms when designing policies and features
- greater transparency including on harms, user reports and outcomes
- prompts that ask users to reconsider before posting misogynistic abuse
- technology to detect and remove non-consensual intimate images
- stronger account security to protect user privacy
- allowing users to track and manage reports and tailor their reporting experience.
What kind of content does the guidance apply to?
The guidance applies to the following types of content (in relation to which definitions have been clarified):
- misogynistic abuse and sexual violence (replacing 'online misogyny')
- pile-ons and coordinated harassment (replacing 'pile-ons and online harassment')
- stalking and coercive control (replacing 'online domestic abuse')
- image-based sexual abuse (illegal content covered by intimate image abuse and cyberflashing and self-generated indecent images).
Where to start
The 'guidance at a glance' sets out a table of foundational steps and who should implement them with references to the relevant Codes. This is followed by a table of good practice steps recommended in the guidance. The guidance for tech companies then provides more detail around compliance steps with practical examples.
What are the nine actions?
Ofcom's safety by design approach focuses on nine actions:
Taking responsibility
- ensure governance and accountability processes address online gender-based harms
- conduct risk assessments that focus on harms to women and girls
- be transparent about women and girls' online safety.
Preventing harm
- conduct abusability evaluations and product testing
- set safer default settings
- reduce the circulating of content depicting, promoting or encouraging online gender-based harms.
Providing support
- give users better control over their experiences
- enable users who experience online gender-based harms to make reports
- respond appropriately when online gender-based harms occur.
These actions are supplemented by a range of good practice steps.
Government action plan
On 18 December 2025, the government published its Violence against women and girls (VAWG) strategy and action plan. The section of the action plan which covers online spaces commits the government to a variety of OSA-related actions (many of which had been previously announced) including:
- Building on the OSA and utilising the government Statement of Strategic Priorities (SSP) for online safety to embed safety into platform design with a specific focus on protecting women and girls. Ofcom is required to take the government's priorities into account as it exercises its regulatory functions.
- Introducing new criminal offences including criminalising strangulation pornography, cyberflashing, and sexually explicit deepfakes, and making at least two of these priority offences under the OSA.
- Banning nudification apps and similar tools.
- Exploring routes to ensure that intimate images that are taken, created or shared without consent are removed online.
- Introducing new legislation to ensure AI models cannot assist VAWG offending with a testing defence to allow AI developers and child protection agencies to carry out safe and secure testing of AI models.
- Assessing whether priority content that is harmful to children should be upgraded to primary priority content under the OSA.
What does this mean for you?
It was already clear that online safety of women and girls will be an enforcement priority for Ofcom under the OSA, acting on clear direction from the SSP and government policy and this has now been backed up by the announcement that Ofcom is investigating X's OSA compliance with relation to its AI image generate tool as we discuss here. What the government strategy suggests though is that this is arguably the area of the OSA most prone to revision, not only with the addition of new priority offences but also a potential extension of what constitutes primary priority content.
