A/HRC/38/47 forms. Furthermore, States have established positive obligations to ensure that fundamental human rights are protected, respected and fulfilled. 18. Protecting women’s human rights and eliminating violence against women and girls in public and private life in the “real world” remains a global challenge that has now spread to the digital space of social media, such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube and Tumblr, and in other mobile telephone communications technology, micro-blogging sites and messaging applications (such as WhatsApp, Snapchat, Messenger, Weibo and Line), which are now a part of everyday life for many people around the world. 19. This new global digital space has great potential for ensuring the faster and fuller promotion and enjoyment of all human rights, including women’s rights. The power to use this potential for protecting women’s human rights and achieving gender equality does not, however, reside only in the technologies themselves; much also depends on the ways that people access and use those new technologies. 13 There is a significant risk that the use of ICT without a human rights-based approach and the prohibition of online gender-based violence could broaden sexual and gender-based discrimination and violence against women and girls in society even further. 20. Owing to the easy accessibility and dissemination of contents within in the digital world, the social, economic, cultural and political structures and related forms of gender discrimination and patriarchal patterns that result in gender-based violence offline are reproduced, and sometimes amplified and redefined, in ICT, while new forms of violence emerge. New forms of online violence are committed in a continuum and/or interaction between online or digital space; it is often difficult to distinguish the consequences of actions that are initiated in digital environments from offline realities, and vice versa. At this stage of development in ICT, it is essential that the different forms of online violence against women and girls be addressed through legislative and any other measures necessary to combat and prevent such violence, while upholding the right to freedom of expression, including access to information, the right to privacy and data protection, as well as the rights of women that are protected under the international human rights framework. 21. The aim of the present thematic report is to start the process of understanding how to effectively apply a human rights-based approach to prevent and combat online and ICTfacilitated violence against women as human rights violations, which shares its root causes with other forms of violence against women and should be dealt with in the broader context of the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women. B. Definition, harm and manifestations of online and information and communications technology-facilitated violence against women and girls 1. Definition 22. Violence against women is a form of discrimination against women and a human rights violation falling under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination and other international and regional instruments, according to which violence against women includes gender-based violence against women, that is, violence directed against a woman because she is a woman and/or that affects women disproportionately. 14 Article 1 of the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women further specifies that violence against women is any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life. 13 14 6 See Thomas L. Friedman, “How Mark Zuckerberg Can Save Facebook – and Us”, New York Times, 27 March 2018. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women general recommendations No. 19 (1992) on violence against women and No. 35 (2017) on gender-based violence against women, updating general recommendation No. 19.