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2026 Virtual Forum
About the Learning Network 2026 Virtual Forum
Have your say on AI & GBV!
Share your insights on how AI is showing up across GBV prevention, response, and service delivery, including your awareness or experience addressing AI-enabled forms of GBV. Your insights will help inform the LN Virtual Forum and guide future learning and dialogue.
Learn more and access the surveyThe Learning Network’s 2026 Virtual Forum (LN Virtual Forum) will bring together practitioners, researchers, and advocates to examine how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is both contributing to gender-based violence (GBV) and reshaping practice across the GBV and allied sectors.
The LN Virtual Forum aims to create an evidence-informed, Trauma- and Violence-Informed (TVI), and survivor-centered space for exploring AI-enabled forms of GBV and the implications for practice, prevention and response across the GBV and allied sectors.
Learning Objectives
By attending this LN Virtual Forum, participants will:
- Enhance understanding and awareness of how AI is being used as a form of GBV and its intersecting impacts.
- Increase awareness of how AI is shaping GBV practice, prevention and response.
- Apply a TVI lens to discuss implications of AI for survivors, persons causing harm, practitioners, and communities.
- Build shared “AI literacy” across the GBV sector, supporting informed conversations about ethics, sector concerns and responsible use.
- Support calls for equitable, accountable community- and survivor-centered approaches to navigating and responding to AI.
Registration Now Open
February 3 & 4, 2026 | 1:00 – 4:30 PM ET
Registration for the Learning Network’s 2026 Virtual Forum is now open.
About the Forum Theme
The following section provides additional information about the LN Virtual Forum focus and themes.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping the systems that influence how we live, work, and connect. AI is increasingly embedded in communication, education, health, justice, and social service infrastructures, including the work of those preventing and responding to GBV.
AI is further enabling gender-based violence (GBV). It is being weaponized through digital surveillance, deepfakes, misinformation, and online harassment, tools that extend coercive control and reinforce social inequities. In some contexts, chatbots and virtual assistants may offer validation and information for survivors, yet these same technologies can also reinforce control, reproduce discrimination, fuel polarization and contribute to violent radicalization.
AI’s rapid expansion relies on extractive patterns, including the extraction of data, natural resources, and human experience, mirroring power imbalances the GBV movement and sector seeks to disrupt. This extractive logic extends to human knowledge and experience, including the lived expertise of survivors and professional expertise of service providers in the GBV sector itself. Such practices risk misuse and erosion of the professional and relational judgement that is central to TVI practice.
Researchers and advocates emphasize that AI systems are built within existing hierarchies of race, gender, and power, prompting ongoing calls for accountability and equity in their design and use. Strengthening AI literacy across the GBV sector can help practitioners, organizations, researchers, and advocates understand how AI tools work, identify potential biases, and make informed decisions about whether, when, and how to engage with them.
This Learning Network Virtual Forum will bring together practitioners, researchers, and advocates to critically examine how AI is emerging in GBV-related practice and knowledge. The Forum aims to explore what this means for survivor safety and healing, accountability, and GBV sector roles and responsibility. The aim is not to champion or reject AI, but to create space for evidence-informed, TVI, and survivor-centered discussions and reflection on its implications for the GBV sector.
