Stalking and cyberstalking are not legal grey areas in Nigeria. Both are already criminal offences under existing law. Yet most women who report being followed, monitored, or harassed, online or offline, still do not get meaningful protection. The problem is not primarily a missing law. It is how those laws are applied, how many people know they exist, and how narrowly some of them are now written.
Stalking is defined and criminalised under Section 17 of the Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act, 2015 (the VAPP Act). It covers repeatedly watching or loitering near a person’s home, workplace or school, and following, pursuing or accosting someone in a way that causes fear or anxiety. A person convicted of stalking faces up to two years in prison, a fine of up to 500,000 naira, or both. Attempting to stalk someone carries a penalty of up to one year in prison or a 200,000 naira fine, and helping or encouraging another person to stalk is treated the same way.
Cyberstalking and online harassment are separately criminalised under Section 24 of the Cybercrimes (Prohibition, Prevention, etc.) Act, 2015, as amended in 2024. Under the amended law, a person convicted of cyberstalking can be sentenced to up to three years in prison or fined up to 7 million naira. Courts can also issue a protective or restraining order against a convicted offender, barring further contact with the victim. Breaching that order is a separate offence, punishable by up to three years in prison or a fine of up to 10 million naira.
On paper, this looks like meaningful protection. In practice, two structural problems limit how much of it reaches women who need it.
The first is that the VAPP Act only applies automatically in the Federal Capital Territory. Every state has to separately adopt, or domesticate, the Act before its courts can apply it locally. As of mid-2026, Nigeria’s Ministry of Women Affairs and Social Development says the Act has been adopted in 35 of the country’s 36 states, up from roughly 18 states five years earlier. That is real progress, but domestication is not the same as enforcement. Legal researchers who have studied the VAPP Act’s rollout report that awareness of the stalking provision remains low among both the public and law enforcement, and that reported prosecutions for stalking specifically remain rare, even in states where the law has been in force for years.
The second problem concerns the cyberstalking provision itself. Its original, broader wording, covering messages that caused “annoyance” or were “grossly offensive,” was challenged at the ECOWAS Court of Justice, which found that it could be used to punish legitimate speech and violated freedom of expression. Nigeria’s 2024 amendment narrowed the definition, largely limiting it to conduct that amounts to a credible threat to life or to public order. That change protects against the law being misused against journalists, critics or ordinary social media users. But legal analysts warn it may also leave lower-grade but still damaging harassment, such as repeated sexual comments, non-consensual sharing of intimate images, or coordinated harassment campaigns, without a clear path to prosecution unless it escalates into an explicit threat.
The scale of the problem is well documented, even if Nigeria-specific data is limited. A Plan International survey of 14,000 girls and young women aged 15 to 25 across 22 countries, including Nigeria, found that 58 percent had experienced online harassment or abuse. Citing global estimates, the United Nations’ Resident Coordinator in Nigeria has said that between 16 and 58 percent of women report some form of digital abuse worldwide, and that 90 to 95 percent of deepfake content produced globally targets women. Organisations tracking technology-facilitated gender-based violence in Nigeria say the most common forms include cyberstalking, doxxing, sextortion and the non-consensual sharing of images, and note that the resulting pressure has pushed some women journalists, politicians, students and activists to self-censor or leave online platforms altogether.
Reporting rates make the gap clearer. Legal researchers who study the VAPP Act’s stalking provision have found that many women do not know stalking is a crime at all, and that police officers and even some magistrates are often unfamiliar with the relevant sections. Broader surveys on gender-based violence in Nigeria consistently find that only a small share of women who experience abuse ever approach the police, citing distrust of law enforcement, fear of stigma, or past experiences of officers declining to act. Researchers examining prosecutions of technology-facilitated violence against women also point to evidentiary hurdles: digital evidence can be deleted or altered quickly, offenders often hide behind anonymous accounts or platforms based outside Nigeria, and specialised digital-forensics capacity within the police remains limited.
There have been some recent institutional steps. In September 2026, Nigeria’s National Human Rights Commission and the Nigerian Bar Association’s Women Forum announced a partnership focused specifically on digital violence against women in the legal profession. Earlier in the year, the International Federation of Women Lawyers trained hundreds of female university students in Benue State on cybercrime law and digital safety. But rights groups argue that closing the protection gap fully will require faster domestication of the VAPP Act in the remaining state, clearer legal provisions covering non-consensual image sharing and other harassment that currently falls into a grey area, dedicated training for police and judicial officers, and more Sexual Assault Referral Centres. According to a recent tracking effort by rights groups, Nigeria currently has only around 32 such centres, spread across about 17 states.
Until those gaps close, the laws that are meant to protect women from stalking and cyberstalking will keep existing mostly on paper.
