Inside the fight: how women across Asia are challenging barriers to justice—from forced marriage to online abuse

Equal Justice has directly supported almost 3,000 people since its founding in July 2020, including a disproportionate number of women and children—such cases make up 75 per cent of Equal Justice’s work. The UN has found that women and children face unique social and institutional barriers to accessing justice.

“I firmly believe that access to free legal resources is in everyone’s best interest. It lowers the threshold for seeking help—and for seeking it early. It stops one legal problem from festering and spawning others. It brings clarity to confusion and, ultimately, restores dignity,” says McArdle. She has seen how transformative that moment can be for women who are not lacking in strength or resilience, but who have been forced to confront complex legal problems from positions of extreme vulnerability.

Even when legal protections exist, justice can fail women.

The Zubin Foundation aims to improve the lives of Hong Kong’s marginalised ethnically diverse community—one in three of whom live in poverty—by reducing suffering and providing opportunities. The 2026 IWD theme speaks strongly to its mission. This year, the foundation’s focus for the women in its community is on forced marriage, an issue that many are surprised exists in Hong Kong.

“It’s a highly sensitive issue, and most young women are ashamed to talk about it,” says Shalini Mahtani, the charity’s founder and CEO. Distinct from arranged marriage, forced marriage occurs when a young woman has no choice over who to marry. Most often the marriage is to a relative—often a cousin and sometimes an uncle. “Agreement” is usually the result of coercion, generally from a father, which can take the shape of emotional and psychological pressure, physical abuse, confinement and threats against siblings or their mother.

While official numbers of forced marriages are not recorded in Hong Kong, The Zubin Foundation produced a report in 2024 on the issue, interviewing 11 of 17 girls they knew to have been forced into marriage. The organisation provides a range of resources to support victims, but it is building awareness that is key—the report was titled Time to Unmute. Mahtani and her organisation have been focused on bringing the message to schools, where teachers are likely to be the first to notice issues yet may ignore signs because they think forced marriage is a cultural issue and they don’t want to get involved. “Forced marriage is unlawful and teachers need to know that there is one law for all, regardless of cultural background,” stresses Mahtani.

While organisations like Equal Justice and The Zubin Foundation fight for safety within the physical structures of the law, a new, lawless frontier has emerged. The same patterns of coercion and silencing that fuel forced marriage, workplace discrimination and domestic abuse, among other issues, are now being amplified by technology and carried out digitally.

“The big scourge facing the world today is harm that occurs online,” says Stefanie Yuen Thio, who this year wants to see “the community, Singapore and countries all over the world coming together to take action and uphold rights and justice for victims of such attacks”. 

Yuen Thio, joint managing partner of TSMP Law Corporation, is chairperson of SHE (SG Her Empowerment), a Singapore-based non-profit focused on empowering women in a variety of areas, from supporting them in the home and the workplace—causes close to Yuen Thio’s heart and which she supports personally—to tackling online harm. In 2023, SHE also launched SheCares, Singapore’s first support centre to provide resources and a safe space for targets of online abuse.

Revenge porn, deepfakes and online love scams can happen to either sex, but women and girls are disproportionately targeted, says Yuen Thio, who in a twist of irony, last year added to the statistics when public photographs of her were turned into “racy videos”. As she wrote in a vulnerable LinkedIn post shared shortly after the event, she acknowledges that having set up SHE, she knew what steps to take, yet she still experienced a rollercoaster of emotions, from dread to violation.

“There’s also the quiet thought: ‘It’s your own fault for being high profile.’ It’s not. That self-blame has no place in your head”, she wrote. She added that a new Online Safety Bill for Singapore, which was passed in November 2025, would help her to take actual legal action against the wrongdoer. The bill aims to protect users from online harms such as cyberbullying, deepfakes and non-consensual image sharing, and establishes a new Online Safety Commission to enable faster content removal, platform accountability and victim relief. “It’s time we took back agency on the internet,” she concluded in her post.

Tehmina Kaoosji is a Malaysia-based independent broadcast journalist, partner and communications director at The Big Picture Communications, and gender equity activist, whose work includes connecting gender justice to political representation. She tells Tatler, “AI-enabled harassment such as deepfake sexual abuse, sexual exploitation and coordinated smear campaigns disproportionately target women, especially those of us in public life—politicians, celebrities, influencers and journalists.” A 2025 global survey released by UN Women revealed that 70 per cent of women in public life have experienced online violence in the course of their work, while the position of Technology Facilitated Gender-based Violence as an ever- pressing issue was reflected in the 2025 UN Women theme for the 16 Days of Activism campaign, which centred on online abuse and rallying for a world where technology is a force for equality, not harm.

Kaoosji advocates for a world where women are equally present as policymakers, regulators and agenda-setters, which she believes is only increasing in urgency as digital technologies and social media further accelerate online abuse. In reference to this year’s IWD theme, she says, “Action, for me, means moving beyond awareness campaigns into structural reform: for all women and girls to have equity, we must address the power and gender imbalances in our political and technological sectors, because this determines how our systems respond to harm, and whether women—particularly rural, Indigenous and economically marginalised women—have agency and are able to shape laws, and social and digital governance which impact us most.”

AI has made it easier than ever to sexually humiliate women. Take Grok, the generative AI chatbot from Elon Musk’s xAI, which earlier this year was being used to digitally undress photos of women and children, and in Malaysia to also digitally remove the tudung, or Islamic head covering, creating sexualised images without consent. The 2025 UN Women research revealed that 90 to 95 per cent of all online deepfakes are non- consensual pornographic images, 90 per cent of which depict women.

Social media is also playing a role in amplifying regressive gender narratives. Kaoosji points to “tradwife” aesthetics and influencer cultures that frame withdrawal from public life or subservient gender roles as female empowerment. These narratives, she argues, are powerful precisely because they appear apolitical, while reinforcing deeply political outcomes: reduced agency, reduced participation, reduced power. “You cannot regulate AI harms, protect girls online, or counter regressive gender norms in society effectively without women at the table writing the rules,” she says. And this goes further than the online world, impacting issues from childcare and unpaid care work to reproductive health, perimenopause and menopause well-being, digital safety, labour precarity, elderly poverty and rural development. “When women are absent from policymaking, issues affecting us are perennially treated as secondary.”

There is hope in the next generation. “ Young women in Malaysia today understand that power operates through platforms, policies and perception,” says Kaoosji. They are more questioning and critical, and also more vocal, asking in particular “why laws affecting their bodies, safety and futures are still debated in rooms dominated by men”.

Mahtani has made similar observations: “We are seeing younger women more engaged in having a voice for their future. They want an education, a career and to marry a man from the same religion who they genuinely agree to marry or choose for themselves.”

Says McArdle, “What is especially powerful about younger women today is their willingness to act even when they don’t have all the answers. They are less constrained by traditional hierarchies and more comfortable admitting uncertainty while still stepping forward. They understand that change rarely begins with expertise; it begins with care, courage and attention.” 

Turning awareness into action is how we start to close gaps and make a real difference for women and girls.

“Do something of consequence with the time and talent you have,” is McArdle’s advice. “ You do not need to fix everything. You just need to start.” 

NOW READ

From rage to radical empathy: activist and astronaut Amanda Nguyen’s lessons on fighting for change

International Women’s Day 2026 is a test: will the world defend women’s rights or watch them be taken away?

Inside the global network quietly reshaping modern philanthropy