DRF Cyber Harassment Helpline (Pakistan, 2016–ongoing)

In late 2016 the Digital Rights Foundation (DRF) launched Pakistan's first dedicated toll-free cyber-harassment helpline — a free, gender-sensitive, confidential national service for victims of online harassment, technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV), and (since 2023) generative-AI-mediated gendered abuse. The helpline went live on 1 December 2016 on the toll-free 0800-39393 phone line, funded by the €100,000 Human Rights Tulip prize money DRF founder Nighat Dad had been awarded by the Dutch government earlier that year and had pledged within weeks of receipt to the launch of the country's first cyber-harassment service. Across the helpline's first seven years of operation DRF received 16,849 cumulative complaints from across Pakistan; the annual report cycle running from 2017 (the first bi-annual report) through 2024 (the seventh annual report, covering 2023) has become the principal published Pakistani civil-society evidence base on online harassment, TFGBV, and — from the 2023 caseload onwards — AI-mediated gendered abuse.

Origins and the December 2016 launch

DRF's helpline emerged from a sequence of three connected events in 2016. Through the year Dad had been one of the named Pakistani civil-society voices contesting the country's Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act 2015 (PECA) and its successive amendments, and DRF's research-and-advocacy register had consolidated around online-harassment-of-women, women-journalists-and-activists targeting, and the absence of any dedicated national victim-support service. In October 2016 Dad was awarded the Dutch government's Human Rights Tulip — a €100,000 prize awarded annually by the Netherlands' Ministry of Foreign Affairs to a human-rights defender working under restrictive conditions — and announced at the prize-giving ceremony that the prize money would be used to launch the country's first dedicated cyber-harassment helpline. At the "Hamara Internet — Ending Online Violence Against Women" conference in Islamabad in late November 2016 DRF publicly unveiled the helpline programme, and on 1 December 2016 the helpline went live on the 0800-39393 toll-free line — Pakistan's first dedicated service of its kind. The original service offer — legal advice, digital-security support, psychological counselling, and referral to law enforcement and other support agencies — was held together inside a single victim-facing entry point on the working theory that Pakistani women, girls, and non-binary people facing online harassment needed legal, technical, and psychological registers to be available in one place rather than dispersed across separate institutions.

Service architecture

The helpline's working architecture has been consistent across its operational life. Service hours are Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on the toll-free 0800-39393 phone line and the helpdesk@digitalrightsfoundation.pk email channel; the service is free of charge to victims at any point in Pakistan. The four-track service offer combines (i) legal advice — including initial legal counselling, guidance on whether to file an FIA complaint under PECA's relevant provisions, and where appropriate referral to pro-bono legal-aid partners for representation in PECA proceedings; (ii) digital-security support — including practical digital-security guidance for victims facing ongoing harassment, account-recovery support, two-factor-authentication setup, doxxing-response, and platform-reporting guidance; (iii) psychological counselling — provided by the helpline's in-house counsellors and qualified referral partners, recognising the mental-health register of sustained online abuse; and (iv) a referral system — into the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) Cyber Crime Wing for cases warranting criminal-procedural action, into legal-aid partners, into mental-health services, and into DRF's wider Hamara Internet and other capacity-building programmes for survivors. The helpline's working commitment to a "judgment-free, private and gender-sensitive environment" is held together with the operational rule of not storing personally identifiable information of victims — a confidentiality-floor design that DRF has framed as the precondition for women, girls, and gender minorities facing online abuse to use the service at all, particularly in conservative-area settings.

Year-on-year caseload trajectory and the annual report cycle

The helpline publishes a sustained year-on-year evidence base — the principal published Pakistani civil-society dataset on online harassment and TFGBV. The annual report cycle began with a first bi-annual report covering December 2016 to May 2017, and after the second year became annual; the 2021 five-year report — released in May 2022 to mark the helpline's first half-decade — and the subsequent annual reports for 2022 and 2023 form the consolidated multi-year evidence base.

The five-year report covering 2021 recorded a cumulative 11,681 cases received over the helpline's first five years and a single-year 4,441 cases in 2021 — an average of 370 cases per month and the helpline's heaviest single-year caseload to date, driven by the COVID-19 pandemic surge in online gender-based violence reporting. The 2021 caller composition was 68% women, 30% men, and 1% gender minorities, with 893 cases of blackmail and 727 cases of non-consensual use of images as the year's two heaviest complaint categories. The 2022 annual report, released in May 2023, recorded 2,695 new cases in 2022 (an average of 224 per month), women's 58.6% share of complainants, a cumulative six-year total of 14,376 cases, and a named year-on-year rise in financial fraud, scam attempts, and orchestrated online smear campaigns against transgender activists, with Punjab (1,712 cases) the heaviest origin province, followed by Sindh (354), Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (144), and a small but recurring international share (106).

The 2023 inflection point: generative-AI-mediated abuse

The seventh annual report covering 2023, published in April 2024, is the helpline's first published evidence base on AI-mediated gendered abuse as a distinct complaint pattern. The 2023 figures: 2,473 new complaints (an average of 206 per month), 16,849 cumulative cases across the helpline's seven years of operation, women representing 58.5% of complainants, and women aged 18-30 the most-represented single demographic at 1,371 complaints. The 2023 complaint-category mix was led by financial fraud (742 complaints, predominantly male complainants at 506 vs. 227 women), blackmail (460 complaints, 86% filed by women), and non-consensual image use (334 complaints, 279 filed by women). Of the 2,224 cases of cyber harassment received in 2023, 1,278 (57.5%) were eventually referred to the Federal Investigation Agency because legal action was assessed as in the long-term interest of the survivors. Most consequential for the make-AI-good corpus: in her framing of the 2023 caseload Executive Director Nighat Dad named "a significant rise of complaints relating to technology-facilitated gender-based violence" involving generative-AI models being used to create deepfakes targeting women journalists and public figures, particularly during election periods — the first year on the helpline's published record in which AI-synthesised non-consensual imagery and AI-mediated gendered disinformation appeared as a distinct, named complaint pattern in the year's caseload. The 2023 caseload is the empirical hinge on which DRF's subsequent AI-and-gender research line — the Disinformation in Warfare in the Age of AI and Synthetic Media (2026), EOBI Disinformation on YouTube: The Role of Generative AI in Monetizing Misinformation in Pakistan (2025), Digital Battlegrounds: Gendered Disinformation, TFGBV, and Hate Speech in the Indo-Pak Escalations (2025), and Gendered Disinformation During Elections in Pakistan (2025) reports — sits.

Casework team and operating culture

The helpline is operated by a women-led in-house casework team based at DRF's Lahore office. The Friday Times' May 2022 profile of the team named the gender-composition of the casework staff and the operating culture: a deliberately women-led team chosen for its capacity to provide the gender-sensitive intake and counselling environment the helpline's confidentiality floor requires, working under conditions DRF has framed as government-indifference to the underlying TFGBV problem. The team's working method combines initial intake on the phone line, structured assessment of the case (immediate digital-safety needs, ongoing-harassment risk, eligibility for FIA referral, psychological-support needs), allocation across the four service tracks, and case-follow-up over the duration of the survivor's contact with the helpline. The Lahore-based intake structure produces a recurring tension with the FIA's procedural-criminal track: the FIA Cyber Crime Wing's physical office network is concentrated in major cities and its online complaint portal is widely described by DRF's helpline as practically inaccessible for geographically dispersed complainants, with the result that the helpline's referrals into the FIA produce a significant logistical burden on survivors who must travel to FIA offices in person to pursue cases. DRF's policy-advocacy line on FIA accessibility, PECA's procedural deficiencies, and the FIA Cyber Crime Wing's operational shortfalls is grounded in the helpline's casework experience of this referral track.

Coalition position and the wider DRF programme

The helpline sits at the centre of DRF's institutional architecture as the organisation's grassroots floor — the working surface against which the wider research portfolio, the Hamara Internet women's-digital-rights capacity-building campaign, the Digital 50.50 feminist e-magazine, and the policy-advocacy line on PECA, FIA procedures, and successive draft national AI policies are calibrated. The helpline's caseload data is the empirical base that DRF's Measuring Pakistani Women's Experience of Online Violence (2017), Addressing Online Attacks On Women Journalists In Pakistan (2020), Gendered Online Hate in Pakistan: Right-Wing Religious Campaigns Against Women Journalists (2024), and the 2025-2026 generative-AI-and-disinformation research cycle rest on. DRF's Hamara Internet Urdu-language digital-safety capacity-building programme is the helpline's distribution layer — converting the helpline's casework knowledge into the in-person workshops, peer-to-peer training (the Tech Sahelis programme), and Urdu-language educational materials that organisers, journalists, and women-rights defenders in conservative-area Pakistan use day-to-day. International civil-society engagement around the helpline is anchored on DRF's membership in the #KeepItOn coalition convened by Access Now, through which the Pakistani register of internet-shutdowns and platform-driven online abuse is brought into the wider international civil-society response, and DRF's helpline framing was recognised as a 2021 World Justice Challenge entry by the World Justice Project, which named the helpline as one of the field's principal grassroots-civil-society responses to online violence against women and gender minorities.

Place in the make-AI-good movement

The helpline matters to the wider make-AI-good corpus on three connected counts. First, it is the corpus's first Pakistani campaign anchor and the first South-Asian campaign anchor on technology-facilitated gender-based violence — the South-Asian feminist-civil-society counterpart to the corpus's existing Indian biometric-surveillance and litigation anchor at the Internet Freedom Foundation's Project Panoptic campaign, with which it shares a regional civil-society field but not a campaign architecture (Project Panoptic is a public-tracker-and-petition campaign on state biometric surveillance, the DRF helpline is a victim-support service on individual online abuse). Second, its 2023 caseload — the first published Pakistani civil-society evidence base on generative-AI-mediated deepfaked harassment of women journalists and public figures — is the operative empirical hinge on which DRF's wider AI-and-gender research-and-advocacy line stands; the helpline's casework is, in that sense, the principal Pakistani civil-society dataset on AI-mediated gendered harm in present-day Pakistan. Third, the helpline's working architecture — a free, toll-free, gender-sensitive, confidential national service combining legal, digital-security, psychological, and referral tracks inside a single victim-facing entry point, with strict confidentiality and an operational rule against storing victim PII — is the field's principal South-Asian template for grassroots-civil-society victim-support infrastructure on TFGBV and AI-mediated abuse, structurally distinct from the strategic-litigation, public-tracker, and policy-advocacy templates the other South-Asian civil-society organisations have built around. The DRF helpline is the corpus's clearest documented Pakistani anchor on AI-mediated gendered abuse, and its annual report cycle is the operative published evidence base the corpus's wider Pakistani and South-Asian shape now sits on.