DRF's Cyber Harassment Helpline Report 2023

DRF's Cyber Harassment Helpline Report 2023 is the seventh annual report of the Pakistani Digital Rights Foundation's Cyber Harassment Helpline, published in April 2024 and covering case-year 2023 — the helpline's first published evidence base on generative-AI-mediated gendered abuse as a distinct, named complaint pattern in the Pakistani national caseload. The report records 2,473 new complaints received in 2023 (an average of 206 per month) and a cumulative seven-year total of 16,849 cases received since the helpline's 1 December 2016 launch. It is the corpus's first Pakistani publication anchor, the first South Asian publication anchor on technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV), and the principal civil-society-evidence-base artefact of the DRF Cyber Harassment Helpline (Pakistan, 2016–ongoing) campaign.

Series and method

The 2023 report is the seventh in DRF's annual report cycle — a publishing line that began with a first bi-annual report covering December 2016 to May 2017, became annual from the second year onwards, and includes the 2021 five-year retrospective released in May 2022, the 2022 annual report released in May 2023, and the 2023 annual report released in April 2024. The methodology is consistent across the cycle: cases are intaken through the helpline's three operational channels (the toll-free 0800-39393 phone line, the helpdesk@digitalrightsfoundation.pk email channel, and DRF's social media), categorised by complaint type, gender of complainant, age group, geographic origin, and platform involved, and aggregated into the report's headline statistics; the 2023 report records that the helpline phone line was the primary channel of intake with 2,198 of the 2,473 callers reaching the service that way, with February the busiest month of the year. The case-intake architecture is built on the helpline's standing operational rule of not storing personally identifiable information of victims and its working commitment to a "judgment-free, private and gender-sensitive environment" — preconditions DRF treats as load-bearing for women, girls, and gender minorities in conservative-area Pakistan being willing to use the service at all.

2023 caseload: figures and demographic breakdown

The report records 2,473 new complaints received in 2023, an average of 206 per month, and a cumulative seven-year figure of 16,849 cases received since the helpline's 1 December 2016 launch. The figure represents a continuing reduction from the 2021 single-year peak of 4,441 cases (the COVID-19 surge year) and the 2,695 cases received in 2022, and the report frames the trajectory as a return-to-trend caseload pattern combined with a substantive shift in the complaint mix toward newer technology-mediated abuse categories. Women constitute 58.5% of complainants; women aged 18-30 are the most-represented single demographic at 1,371 complaints; and the report further documents transgender complainants as a small but recurring category targeted by orchestrated online smear campaigns (a category the 2022 report had named for the first time and the 2023 figures carry forward). Geographically the caseload is concentrated in Punjab (1,724 cases), followed by Sindh (261), Islamabad (118), and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (112), with a small recurring international share of 58 cases from outside Pakistan.

Complaint-category mix

The 2023 complaint mix is led by financial fraud (742 complaints) — predominantly male complainants at 506 vs. 227 women — followed by blackmail (460 complaints, 86% filed by women) and non-consensual use of images and information (334 complaints, 279 filed by women). The report names hacking, threats, and unsolicited contact as the most common cross-gender grievance categories alongside the headline three. Of the 2,224 cases the report classifies as cyber harassment proper, 1,278 (57.5%) were referred to the Federal Investigation Agency's Cyber Crime Wing because legal action was assessed as in the long-term interest of the survivors — a referral share consistent with the helpline's standing posture that PECA-track criminal-procedural action is appropriate for a substantial share of cases despite the FIA office network's logistical inaccessibility for geographically dispersed complainants. The report also discloses 177 platform escalations made by the helpline directly to the major social-media platforms on behalf of complainants: Meta-owned platforms received the most escalations at 124, but TikTok had the highest resolution rate at 77.8%, with Facebook and Instagram showing a combined rejection rate above 22% — the field's clearest 2023-year Pakistani-civil-society dataset on platform-side responsiveness to TFGBV escalation requests.

The generative-AI inflection point

The report's distinctive substantive contribution — and the reason it is the corpus's first Pakistani publication anchor on AI-mediated harm — is its identification of generative-AI-mediated gendered abuse as a distinct, named complaint pattern emerging in the 2023 caseload. In the report's framing as quoted in Dawn and The Friday Times, DRF Executive Director Nighat Dad named "the use of content created by generative artificial intelligence models to exacerbate violence against women in the public sphere, particularly women journalists" as the year's emergent pattern — specifically tied by the report to Pakistan's general-election period, during which deepfake images and videos of women politicians and journalists were spread online. Helpline manager Hyra Basit's named on-record framing in Dawn complements Dad's: "rising complaints of incredible privacy violations of women via unregulated apps and the use of modern editing and generative AI to produce non-consensual intimate images". The 2023 caseload is the helpline's first published year in which AI-synthesised non-consensual imagery, AI-mediated gendered disinformation around an electoral period, and the deepfaked harassment of women journalists and public figures appear as a distinct named complaint pattern — separable in DRF's intake architecture from the helpline's pre-existing blackmail and non-consensual image-use categories. The report frames the inflection as evidence of the speed at which AI-mediated abuse is being added to the Pakistani TFGBV register and is the empirical hinge on which DRF's subsequent AI-and-gender research line — Gendered Disinformation During Elections in Pakistan (2025), Case Study: Viral Misogyny and the Killing of Sana Yousaf (2025), Digital Battlegrounds: Gendered Disinformation, TFGBV, and Hate Speech in the Indo-Pak Escalations (2025), EOBI Disinformation on YouTube: The Role of Generative AI in Monetizing Misinformation in Pakistan (2025), and Disinformation in Warfare in the Age of AI and Synthetic Media (2026) — sits.

Cyber paranoia and the wider mental-health register

The report names a second 2023-emergent pattern that complements the AI-mediated abuse register: a sharpening mental-health dimension to ongoing online-abuse exposure, which the report terms "cyber paranoia". The 2023 caseload includes 21 calls in which complainants presented with delusions or fears specifically related to information-technology infrastructure — fears of being monitored through mobile devices, of personal information being secretly accessed, and of unrealistic-but-internally-coherent narratives of persecution via digital systems. The report frames the pattern as the predictable mental-health consequence of sustained exposure to credible online-abuse risk in an environment where the proliferation of generative-AI tools makes the boundary between paranoid speculation and realistic risk-assessment harder to draw. The named cyber-paranoia pattern is the report's clearest evidence that the helpline's psychological-counselling track — already one of the helpline's four standing service tracks alongside legal advice, digital-security support, and the FIA-and-referral track — is becoming a more substantively-loaded part of the helpline's offer as AI-mediated abuse extends the threat-surface of online harassment.

Posture within the corpus

Within the corpus, DRF's Cyber Harassment Helpline Report 2023 is the first Pakistani publication anchor, the first South Asian publication anchor on technology-facilitated gender-based violence, and the principal civil-society-evidence-base artefact of the DRF Cyber Harassment Helpline (Pakistan, 2016–ongoing) campaign. The publications slate previously carried South Asian coverage only through the Internet Freedom Foundation-led "No Internet Means No Work, No Pay, No Food" (India / shutdowns / livelihood-effects register); the DRF helpline report installs the Pakistani national anchor and the first South Asian register on AI-mediated gendered harm, structurally distinct from the IFF strategic-litigation register and complementary to the LatAm feminist-tech evidence-base register anchored by Coding Rights's Oppressive A.I. and the WANA register anchored by 7amleh's Attacks on Palestinian Digital Rights. Where the Coding Rights anthology is a curated essay collection by Global-South feminist researchers and the 7amleh report is a documentary-evidence artefact of a single conflict-period documentation surge, the DRF report is a sustained-helpline-caseload annual report — a different structural shape of civil-society evidence base, in which the cumulative seven-year intake figure (16,849) carries the long-running operational dataset that the year's headline figures sit on.

The report's distinctive substantive contribution to the corpus's make-AI-good frame is that it installs, from a Pakistani national grassroots-helpline base, the first published evidence base on the speed at which generative-AI-mediated abuse has been added to a Global-South TFGBV register — and ties that evidence to a named electoral period (the 2024 Pakistani general election) during which deepfaked imagery of women politicians and journalists circulated online and entered the helpline's caseload. The report is referenced from the DRF Cyber Harassment Helpline (Pakistan, 2016–ongoing) campaign body's Year-on-year caseload trajectory and the annual report cycle and 2023 inflection point: generative-AI-mediated abuse sections, where the report's figures and Nighat Dad's framing are the principal cited evidence base; from the Digital Rights Foundation org body's Cyber Harassment Helpline section as the most recent named annual report in the cycle; and from the Nighat Dad Voice entry as the published artefact behind her UN AI Advisory Body and Meta Oversight Board registers' Pakistani-national evidentiary base. The 2023 caseload, in DRF's framing, is "the data on which Pakistan's AI-and-gender policy conversation has to start" — and the report is the corpus's principal civil-society anchor on that proposition.