If someone shares another’s intimate images without their consent, publicly humiliates a woman, or threatens and stalks her online, can we really call it just “virtual abuse”? Digital violence has tangible effects: it destroys lives and reputations. And yet, we still struggle to recognize it as real violence. Why?
A man who threatens a woman in the street is considered an aggressor. If he does so online, is he merely a “troll”? Why is digital violence so often perceived as less serious than physical violence? This dichotomy remains deeply rooted in our culture.
Two overlapping assumptions help explain this view. On the one hand, violence is still commonly associated with physical contact—with visible wounds and bodily confrontation. On the other, we are shaped by an often-unexamined prejudice: the idea that the virtual is somehow less real, a shadowy simulation at best.
In my academic work, and more recently in my book Violenza virtuale. Vita digitale e dolore reale (Il Saggiatore, 2024), I explore how this second assumption reinforces the first. We continue to behave in digital spaces as though we were moving through a world causally detached from the one we inhabit offline. But what happens through screens and platforms produces harm that is measurable, lasting, and often traumatic.
Digital violence goes well beyond offensive language: it includes cyberstalking, doxxing, image-based abuse, and simulated sexual assault. The real challenge is naming these acts for what they are: concrete threats to dignity, autonomy, and safety, masked by their perceived intangibility.
A Philosophical Mistake
Despite years of digital entanglement, the distinction between “real life” and “virtual life” still shapes how we interpret our actions online. In common perception, the digital remains a separate place—a parallel realm with its own internal logic. Alessandro De Cesaris has called this the “two-worlds model”: the idea that digitally mediated interactions belong to a different, somehow lesser order of reality.
This conceptual split has far-reaching consequences, especially in how we respond to violence. If the online world is seen as fictional or derivative, what happens there is easier to dismiss. Yet victims of digital harassment, cyberstalking, and image-based abuse report effects sometimes indistinguishable from those of in-person trauma: anxiety, depression, reputational damage, and, in severe cases, suicide.
What is striking is how disorienting these events still feel, even as they become more frequent. The shock we feel when violence unfolds on platforms—once imagined as free and playful—shows how poorly equipped we are conceptually and culturally to confront harm in these settings. We continue to treat digital environments as if they were ethically exceptional.
This is the point from which my philosophical inquiry began: not with a theory, but with disorientation. A growing awareness that our conceptual tools no longer match our lived realities, that we are navigating new terrain with outdated maps. If violence now passes as readily through servers as through hands, we need better ways of understanding where we are and what is happening to us.
Beyond Physical Harm
Saying that violence today passes through servers does not mean that it somehow spills over into the real world. That would be to reaffirm the two-worlds model by adding a channel of leakage between them. The point is more radical: what happens online does not cross into the real; it already belongs to it. The distinction between virtual and real collapses not because one intrudes on the other, but because they are coextensive. They describe different modes of access to the same world.
Still, we continue to treat physical harm as the primary, or even exclusive, marker of violence. This is a limited and ultimately distorting view. Violence operates across a spectrum: it can damage not just the body but also the self. It can isolate, humiliate, destabilize. A striking illustration of this is the 1993 Bungle Affair, which unfolded in the text-based online community LambdaMOO. There, a user programmed a digital object to simulate sexual assaults on other avatars. The interactions were purely textual. And yet the emotional and psychological impact on those involved was so severe that it sparked a community-wide debate on responsibility, consent, and harm.
What emerged from that debate remains crucial today: violence does not require physical contact to be real. It can manifest through code, through language, through presence. It can target subjectivity, erode autonomy, and destabilize one’s sense of self. The fact that this can happen in digital space should not surprise us.
Why Is Digital Violence Still Downplayed?
If violence is defined by its effects, not by the medium through which it occurs, why do we continue to see digital forms of violence as somehow less serious?
One reason lies in how disembodied that violence appears. When aggression takes the form of text or images, we lack the sensory cues that typically signal threat: a body, a hostile tone, or a physical gesture. This absence creates a perceptual gap—one that makes it easier to dismiss such acts as “just words,” as though violence required physical contact to count.
And yet, as speech act theory reminds us, language is never inert: words can humiliate, intimidate, and exclude. When they strike at a person’s dignity, identity, or sense of self, they cause harm. Verbal aggression—even in its most mediated, asynchronous forms—can be a form of violence.
The tendency to downplay digital harm has long been attributed to anonymity. But, while anonymity still plays a role, it no longer suffices as an explanation. In an age of hyper-visible digital selves, where users often act under their real name and face, the persistence of abuse points to something more structural. What sustains it is a deeper moral distancing: the screen not only separates us from others but also disrupts the ethical feedback loops of responsibility, empathy, and response that normally shape human interaction.
Even when we reject the idea that the online and offline are separate worlds, digital space often feels detached from consequence. That, ultimately, is the power of what I call the “virtuality bias”: the belief that only what leaves visible, physical scars can count as violence. But digital violence wounds too, even if we have not yet learned how to see those wounds clearly.
Beyond the Law, a Cultural Challenge
If digital violence produces “real” harm, then those who perpetrate it must be held to “real” standards of accountability. What happens online is not a harmless simulation; it is a mode of interaction shaped by its own material conditions as well as by its own enabling and amplifying technological structures.
This is why moderation is necessary but never sufficient. We also need to rethink the cultural frameworks that have normalized violence in digital spaces, beginning with the idea that accountability is somehow suspended the moment we log in.
Law, too, must catch up. In many jurisdictions, such as the United States, the nonconsensual distribution of intimate images is still treated primarily as a privacy violation. In Italy legislation has taken a more serious stance, recognizing elements of threat. But even this may not be enough. What we need is a dedicated legal category for digital sexual violence—one that reflects not only the gravity of these acts but also their distinctive technology-driven dynamics.
Still, legal reform alone cannot dismantle the production of violence. That requires cultural work: confronting the patriarchal norms that continue to excuse or trivialize gender-based harm; questioning the economic logics that make platforms complicit; and building a civic media culture that fosters not just literacy but also responsibility, relationality, and care.
Only by addressing technology, law, and culture together can we hope to reduce the harm and challenge the power asymmetries at the heart of digital violence.
Conceptual Clarity
Recognizing digital sexual violence as real is just the beginning. And, while coordinated responses across the three dimensions mentioned above are needed, addressing it also demands conceptual clarity.
Digital abuse unsettles inherited assumptions about what violence is, how it works, and where it happens. In a world where interactions are increasingly mediated, we need new ways of thinking about action, harm, and responsibility.
This is where philosophy matters: not to retreat into abstraction but to create the tools we need to confront disorienting realities. Without the concepts to name what harms us, we remain defenceless. Naming, here, is not an academic exercise; it is the first gesture of resistance.
Francesco Striano is philosopher and fixed term researcher at the University of Turin. He was a Digital Humanism Junior Fellow at the IWM in 2024-2025.
