Conceptualising a justice-oriented framework for addressing technology-facilitated gender-based violence in digital assessment systems within African school contexts

This paper examines how a justice-oriented conceptual framework can address technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) embedded within digital assessment systems in African schooling contexts. It aims to theorise the structural, institutional, and algorithmic mechanisms through which online examinations, remote proctoring, learning management systems, and AI-supported grading generate gender-differentiated vulnerabilities, and to develop a normative framework for addressing them. Adopting critical normative inquiry grounded in feminist theory, data justice scholarship, and African relational philosophy, the paper synthesises interdisciplinary literature to construct and apply a four-dimensional justice framework. The findings revealed four structural mechanisms, including intimate space intrusion, biometric data extraction, reputational data permanence, and asymmetrical algorithmic accountability, that produce gender-differentiated harm within assessment infrastructures. These harms are not incidental but embedded in governance arrangements that prioritise efficiency and integrity over dignity, equity, and relational responsibility. The paper develops a four-dimensional justice framework comprising: educational equity, drawing on Fraser’s redistribution–recognition–representation triad, data justice, centered on minimisation, sovereignty, and algorithmic transparency, institutional accountability, grounded in substantive equality theory, and community-based ethics informed by Ubuntu philosophy. The framework calls for gender-responsive assessment design, transparent algorithmic governance, participatory policy formation, and restorative institutional processes. Concretely, institutions should conduct gender impact assessments before deployment, establish TFGBV risk registers that include technology-mediated harms, and build equity criteria into procurement requirements. The paper contributes a Global South perspective to debates on digital safety and offers a normative blueprint for ethically defensible assessment practice in technology-intensive African schooling environments.