Ramifications of VAWP
Zimbabwe Peace Project
HOLDING PERPETRATORS ACCOUNTABLE
Not many women politicians and activists who are victims of VAWP have brought their cases
before the law. Those that did so indicated that they were not able to get remedies. One key
informant who was a victim of online VAWP indicated that she tried to report the perpetrators
to official social media companies. The response she got was that the attacks against her were
made in vernacular language and that the company would in future employ official translators
to deal with abuse in vernacular. Even when these companies decide to take action, there is not
much they can do besides suspending or blocking the account perpetrating the attacks.
Perpetrators simply open another account and continue the trolling. Women victims also
pointed out that social media platforms like X and Facebook take too long to take action on
the reports made by women politicians and candidates. As shown on Figure 10 below, the
majority of the women who participated in this research indicated that their political parties
do not have mechanisms to address VAWP. Another sizable number indicated that they are
not aware if there are mechanisms to address VAWP in their9 political parties. Similarly, the
majority of women think that there are no adequate remedies to combat VAWP at national
level in Zimbabwe as shown on Table 2 and Figure 11.
Figure 10: Mechanisms to address VAWP in political parties
Table 3: Perceptions of women on the availability of remedies to combat VAWP in Zimbabwe
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