Why do activists resort to violence?
Executive summary
Activists sometimes use or tolerate violence when they believe legal channels, public institutions, or digital spaces systematically deny them safety and political voice — a dynamic repeatedly tied to gendered digital abuse, shrinking funding, and impunity identified by UN agencies [1] [2]. UN reporting shows digital violence silences women in public life — journalists, politicians, human rights defenders — and can escalate into real-world harm including stalking, rape, or death [2] [3].
1. Violence as a response to silence and impunity
Studies and campaign coverage from UN bodies show many activists — especially women and marginalised groups — confront persistent threats online and off, and often find laws, platforms, and authorities fail to protect them; when institutional avenues appear closed, some activists or their supporters turn to direct, sometimes violent, action as the only way to be heard or to deter attackers [2] [3]. UN materials stress that digital abuse “doesn’t stay online” and that normalization of abuse in politics and media pushes survivors to take escalatory steps when remedy is absent [3].
2. Digital violence amplifies grievances into real-world danger
The UN’s 2025 UNiTE campaign and related reporting document how image-based abuse, deepfakes, coordinated harassment and disinformation escalate psychological harm, reputational damage, and physical risk for targeted activists; that escalation changes risk calculations and can trigger more confrontational tactics from activists seeking self-defence, visibility, or deterrence [2] [4]. UN sources explicitly link digital attacks to stalking, sexual violence and murder, underlining how online violence can lead to offline violence [2].
3. Funding cuts and weakened civil-society capacity raise the stakes
UN Women found that funding cuts reduced services and support for survivors — more than a third of survey respondents reported programme suspensions and 89% reported severe reductions in access to support — shrinking safe, legal alternatives and increasing the likelihood that activists will feel compelled to take direct action, including forceful tactics, when state protection and service responses falter [1].
4. Political marginalisation and “rules of the game” in public life
Regional reporting shows digital violence has become normalized as part of political life and journalism; women in public roles report threats as routine, which both sidelines them and incentivizes hardline responses from movements that feel excluded from normal political contestation [3]. When conventional political channels reproduce exclusion, some activists justify disruptive or violent tactics as corrective measures to change entrenched power imbalances [3].
5. Different activists, different logics — the spectrum of motivations
Available sources focus heavily on gendered digital violence and its effects on women in public life [2] [3]. They show activists may resort to violence out of self-defence, deterrence, retribution, to force visibility for ignored grievances, or because they see nonviolent channels as ineffective; sources also imply variation by context and actor, but do not comprehensively list every motive across movements [1] [2].
6. Institutional and technological drivers that enable escalation
UN reporting links platform design, anonymity, AI-enabled deepfakes, and cross-border impunity to the growth of digital violence — factors that make targeting easier and redress harder, thereby increasing frustration and the risk of escalation into violent responses by those targeted or their allies [2] [4]. The UN calls for legal reform, safer platforms, and donor support as remedies meant to reduce the conditions that push activists toward violent tactics [5] [6].
7. What proponents and critics say about using force
UN sources emphasise that strong, independent feminist movements drive policy change and that many activists are using legal reform, data activism and community organising rather than violence — indicating broad institutional preference for nonviolent avenues when possible [1] [3]. At the same time, they document why some actors feel forced into escalation: lack of protection, normalization of abuse, and funding cuts [1] [2]. Available sources do not provide a systematic defence of violent tactics from activist leaders; they instead focus on causes of escalation and nonviolent remedies [1] [3].
8. Policy levers to reduce violent escalation
UN campaigns and partner reporting recommend stronger laws, better platform safety, restored donor funding for feminist organisations, and survivor‑centred services as the main strategies to reduce the pressures that lead activists to violence [5] [6] [1]. These prescriptions are framed both as protection for individuals and as prevention of escalation from online abuse to offline confrontation [4] [2].
Limitations and caveats: the provided reporting is centred on gender-based and digital violence and the consequences for women in public life; it does not exhaustively cover every movement or ideological context in which activists may use violence, nor does it present detailed quantitative data on how often violence results directly from digital abuse — available sources do not mention those gaps [1] [2].