eSafety Commissioner’s Sex-Biased Grants on Online Abuse

On February 9, 2026, the Australian Communications and Media Authority – an agency within the country’s federal government – announced that it will be awarding several million dollars in grants for its latest taxpayer-funded adventure, the eSafety Commissioner’s Preventing Tech-based Abuse of Women Grants Program.

The stated aim of the program is to “improve the safety of Australian women and their children through the prevention of technology-facilitated gender-based violence.” The program’s guidelines, which I have uploaded below, specify that grants will be awarded for prevention initiatives that do one of the following:

1. “address one or more of the drivers of tech-based abuse against women and their children, and/or;

2. aim to challenge and shift the prevailing social norms that contribute to tech-based abuse against women and their children, and/or;

3. promote positive and respectful behaviour and accountability in men and boys that perpetrate or may perpetrate tech-based abuse against women and their children.”

Groups who apply for these grants can ask for as much as $400,000, and projects that focus on First Nations women will be given priority.

However, just like other grant programs, annual funding allotments, and federal budgets in Australia, the eSafety Commissioner’s program is sex-biased. Earlier this week, I summarized survey data that rebut the common misconception that online abuse and harassment predominantly impact girls and women.

Four population-level surveys on online abuse and harassment have been carried out in Australia, and none of them have found that women are more likely than men to experience online abuse or harassment. Two of the surveys found identical rates of online abuse and harassment victimization between Australian men and women, while the other two surveys found victimization rates that were 3-4 percentage points higher in men than women. These surveys were conducted by different types of organizations, including universities, independent research firms, and the Australian Institute of Criminology.

Not included in my previous summary was the eSafety Commissioner’s 2022 national survey on Australians’ negative experiences online. The reason that I did not include this survey was because the eSafety Commissioner’s Office suspiciously decided not to present the results in a sex-segregated manner. Therefore, the sex-specific rates of online abuse and harassment identified in that survey remain unknown.

The Office’s decision to not present these results in a sex-segregated way is suspicious for at least three reasons. First, women’s health advocates are some of the strongest advocates for sex-segregated data. This advocacy stems from their misguided belief that women have been historically ignored as participants in research studies. Second, if the results from the Office’s survey were to have shown greater female than male victimization, the Office would surely have used those results to communicate an evidence-based need for more attention to girls and women. Third, on the Office’s website for “gendered violence,” data on online abuse and harassment are presented in a sex-segregated way. However, those data come from the 2022 survey published by Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women (ANROWS). The survey by ANROWS found identical rates of ever experiencing online abuse or harassment in men and women, but the eSafety Commissioner’s Office misleads readers on their website by ignoring this inconvenient finding. Instead, the Office focuses only a specific subset of findings in which women reported greater victimization than men.

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner’s Office is not alone in shady handling and reporting of data on online abuse and harassment. The United Nations (UN) also regularly engages in these tactics. For example, in 2025, UN Women published a report titled, Tipping Point: The Chilling Escalation of Online Violence Against Women in the Public Sphere. The report st