When Harassment in Parliament Looks Like Harassment Everywhere Else
When US Representative for Colorado Yara Zokaie stood on the House floor speaking about the cost of living crisis, she didn't know someone was photographing her without consent. Zokaie didn't know that photo would be circulated in a private legislative chat where her colleagues would compare her appearance to strippers and prostitutes. She didn't know it would leak, generating online harassment including doxxing threats that named her children's school.
But anyone working in gender-based violence prevention recognised the pattern immediately.
Republican Representative Ryan Armagost, who initiated the exchange, resigned rather than face censure. The others apologised. Work continued. It echoes what happened in Australia to Julia Banks, Sarah Hanson-Young, and every woman who's entered our own Parliament House since the Jenkins Review. And women everywhere learned the lesson again: do your job, get judged on your appearance.
The tactics are identical to what happens in homes, workplaces, and online spaces every day. In homes we call it coercive control. On online platforms we call it harassment. In parliament, it gets dismissed as banter. But the mechanics and the outcome are the same: women are diminished, humiliated, and driven from spaces where their voices should matter.
Technology-Facilitated Abuse Has a Playbook
What happened to Zokaie follows a well-established pattern:
A photo or message is captured without consent. It circulates in "private" spaces where perpetrators feel insulated from accountability. The content leaks or escalates. Wider networks coordinate harassment. Doxxing and threats follow. Finally, minimal accountability arrives: apologies are issued, perhaps someone resigns to avoid formal consequences, but the infrastructure enabling the abuse remains unchanged.
The domestic violence survivor whose ex-partner shares intimate photos in men's forums experiences this. The young woman whose image circulates on school social media with degrading commentary experiences this. The professional whose appearance becomes the subject of colleague group chats experiences this. The underlying mechanics are the same.
Encrypted messaging platforms designed for privacy also shield coordination of abuse. Screenshot culture makes any image permanent and portable. Platform design prioritises engagement over safety, meaning harassing content spreads faster than protective responses. Private-turned-public leaks happen constantly, but accountability mechanisms assume face-to-face harm rather than digital coordination.
It’s Never Just Banter
Research on intimate partner violence shows that coercive control—verbal degradation, humiliation, and isolation—predicts escalation to physical harm. The same dynamics apply in public contexts. When powerful men face no consequences for harassing women—whether through deliberate coordination or by exploiting systems that enable abuse—they learn those tactics work.
Every woman watching learns too. Try to govern, expect sexualised attacks. Enter public debate, expect your children's safety to become leverage. Challenge power, expect coordinated campaigns to drive you out.
The impact isn't just on individual targets. It's on every woman deciding whether public life is worth the cost, every young woman watching how female leaders are treated, every survivor seeing familiar tactics dismissed as politics as usual.
What Real Accountability Requires
Real accountability for technology-facilitated harassment requires tools and protocols most institutions don't have: Clear frameworks treating coordinated efforts to diminish and silence as serious misconduct, not poor judgment. Response mechanisms that work as fast as abuse spreads. Consequences that create actual deterrence rather than token gestures. Platform accountability that addresses the networks enabling private coordination of public harassment. Cultural change grounded in systems that make accountability real.
The Colorado legislature had none of this. No protocols for when private chats become harassment coordination. No process for addressing harm that crosses digital and physical spaces. No framework treating coordinated diminishment as serious misconduct.
The result was predictable: individual resignation, general apology, unchanged structures, outraged women.
The Pattern Will Repeat
Zokaie’s experience isn't exceptional. It's a clear example of dynamics that play out consistently in less visible contexts.
Every day, women enter public spaces knowing they'll be evaluated not on their contributions but on their looks. Parliaments, boardrooms, online forums—it doesn't matter. Every day, technology designed for connection gets weaponised for coordination of abuse. Every day, institutions choose token accountability over structural change.
The question is whether we're willing to treat technology-facilitated efforts to silence and harm women as the serious harm they represent. Not with education alone, but with accountability mechanisms that work. Not with apologies, but with consequences that matter. Not with individual responses, but with systems change.
Otherwise the pattern repeats: women doing the work, men coordinating to undermine them, and accountability theatre that changes nothing.
The Colorado incident shows us exactly how gender-based violence operates in 2025—coordinated, digital, and protected by institutions that move too slowly to respond. Until we build the infrastructure that matches the speed and scale of digital harassment, and holds perpetrators of abuse truly accountable, women will keep learning the same lesson: speaking up means becoming a target, and silence is the price of safety.
