Tech Abuse and Coercive Control

Reference: Woodlock, D., McKenzie, M., Western, D., & Harris, B., with WESNET (2020). Second National Survey of Technology Abuse and Domestic Violence in Australia. WESNET, funded by Telstra; conducted with researchers from Curtin University. https://wesnet.org.au/about/research/2ndnatsurvey/ (full report: https://wesnet.org.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/11/Wesnet-2020-2nd-National-Survey-Report-72pp-A4-FINAL.pdf). Synthesised here with the eSafety Commissioner’s work on tech-based coercive control and NNEDV’s Safety Net Project.

Summary

WESNET’s Second National Survey (2020) repeated and expanded a 2015 study, asking 442 domestic and family violence practitioners across every Australian state and territory what abuse tactics they were seeing in day-to-day work with survivors. The headline finding is that technology abuse is now near-universal in this caseload: 99.3% of respondents reported having assisted clients who experienced technology-facilitated abuse. The gendered shape of the problem was stark — practitioners reported that 96% of perpetrators were male and 93% of victims were female — situating tech abuse firmly within Gender-Based Violence and Intimate Partner Violence rather than as a neutral “online safety” issue.

The survey reframes technology not as a new category of harm but as an amplifier of Coercive Control: GPS and Location Tracking Abuse, account monitoring, harassment, and surveillance let an abuser extend control across distance and after separation. This aligns with Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, whose research on attitudes that normalise tech-based coercive control (2024) found such monitoring is too often treated as ordinary relationship behaviour, and with NNEDV’s finding that the large majority of US domestic violence programs report abusers using technology to stalk, harass, and control. Together these sources document tech abuse as a structural, gendered, and escalating feature of Domestic Violence — and a direct argument for Survivor-Centered Design over Techno-Solutionism.

Key ideas

Technology abuse is effectively ubiquitous in frontline DV practice (99.3% of workers had assisted affected clients), not an edge case.
It is sharply gendered (96% male perpetrators / 93% female victims), confirming it as a vector of Gender-Based Violence.
Technology amplifies existing Coercive Control rather than creating a separate harm; location tracking and surveillance extend control across distance and post-separation.
Attitudes that “normalise” partner monitoring (eSafety, 2024) make tech-based coercive control harder to name and respond to.
Prevalence is increasing over time (2020 vs 2015), and responses — legal, technical, service — struggle to keep pace.

Connections

Sources

Tags: #research #coercive-control #tech-abuse #wesnet #gender-based-violence

Backlinks

Linked Pages

datafication-of-metoo

The Datafication of #MeToo

Reference: Kathryn Henne, Renee Shelby & Jenna Harb (2021). “The Datafication of #MeToo: Whiteness, Racial Capitalism, and Anti-Violence Technologies.” Big Data & Society, 8(2). DOI 10.1177/20539517211055898.

Summary

A critical study of Reporting Apps — software platforms and AI chatbots that offer users emergency assistance, education, and a way to report and build evidence against perpetrators of Gender-Based Violence. Through an in-depth analysis of two reporting apps, Henne, Shelby and Harb argue that these tools construct data to fit institutionally legible narratives of violence, and in doing so reproduce racial capitalism: they extract information from users, reinforce property relations built on data ownership and accumulation, commodify “diversity and inclusion,” and often sustain problematic ties to the criminal legal system.

Its value to this vault is as a counterweight to celebratory framings of safety tech. It foregrounds the racialised dimensions of the data capital these apps generate, and warns that the design choice to “build evidence” is never neutral — it shapes whose stories become legible and who benefits from the resulting data. The authors note these dynamics are not unique to anti-violence apps but are constitutive of digital platforms generally.

Key ideas

Anti-violence reporting apps are datafication engines as much as support tools — the data they generate is itself capital.
“Institutionally legible” evidence privileges some narratives (and some survivors) over others.
Entanglement with the Criminal Legal System is a design feature, not an accident, and carries racialised risks.
Extraction, financial partnerships, and commodified inclusion recur across platforms, not just safety apps.

Connections

StudiesReporting Apps
StudiesEvidence Documentation
CritiquesPrivacy and Safety
- Reframes “data collection” as extraction and accumulation.
ExaminesRacial Capitalism
AddressesGender-Based Violence
Related toCriminal Legal System

Sources

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20539517211055898

the-safest-woman-alive

“The Safest Woman Alive”

Reference: Linnea Öhlund & Angelika Strohmayer (2025). “‘The Safest Woman Alive’: A Reflection on Interpersonal Safety Technologies for Gendered Violence Protection.” CHI EA ’25: Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Article 651, pp. 1–11. DOI 10.1145/3706599.3716240. (alt.chi)

Summary

A critical, feminist reflection on how HCI designs against gendered violence (GV). The paper opens with a satirical prologue — a woman dressing for a walk who straps on a body sensor, a “smart girl security system” belt, smart-foot devices, multiple panic wristbands, a tazer-watch, a filming ring, pepper-spray GPS sticks, and a dozen “safe route” / panic-button / evidence-recording apps — each one drawn from a real published HCI safety project. The absurd accumulation makes the argument: HCI over-engages with interpersonal safety technologies, loading the burden of protection onto potential victim-survivors and treating a socio-political problem as a personal, gadget-shaped one.

To reframe the field, the authors apply Patricia Hill Collins’ Four Domains of Power (structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, interpersonal) and show that almost every device in their prologue addresses only the interpersonal domain — and mostly the hyper-visible case of stranger street harassment — when the most common GV is intimate-partner and hidden. They warn that such designs are techno-solutionist and can be victim-blaming, demand normative bodies and “correct” use, and rest on unreliable tech (facial/emotion recognition). They call for HCI to design across all four domains — including for perpetrators and structural change — in allyship with support services, and offer a reflective framework spanning a trajectory “from gadgets to critique.”

Key ideas

The burden of GV prevention is wrongly placed on women and gender-nonconforming people, not the institutions and perpetrators upholding violence.
The Four Domains of Power is a usable reflective tool: map which level your intervention actually addresses.
Most safety tech targets the visible interpersonal domain (stranger danger), missing the structural, disciplinary, and hegemonic domains.
“Safe route” routing encodes whose safety counts (ACLU backlash to Microsoft’s version); emotion/face recognition is unreliable and non-inclusive.
Reporting/mapping platforms (Harassmap, Hollaback / Right To Be, Protibadi) gain power from activist use, not data collection alone.
Uses “gendered violence” rather than “violence against women and girls” to include queer and gender-nonconforming people.

Connections

CritiquesPersonal Safety Apps
CritiquesTechno-Solutionism
IntroducesFour Domains of Power
AddressesGender-Based Violence
DiscussesReporting Apps
Informed byFeminist HCI
Related toTrauma-Informed Design
Related toDatafication of MeToo
- Companion critique: both read anti-violence tech through power and political economy.

Sources

https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3706599.3716240

coercive-control

Coercive Control

Coercive control is a pattern of domination — isolation, intimidation, monitoring, and financial and emotional control — that defines much Intimate Partner Violence and Domestic Violence, and which physical assault alone fails to capture. It is the dynamic that makes Tech-Enabled Abuse so potent: surveillance and information-control are not incidental to the abuse, they are the abuse. Tools designed for stranger danger often miss it; survivor-centred resources such as My Safety Kit are built around it.

In this vault

Subtype ofGender-Based Violence
Manifests inTech-Enabled Abuse
Related toStalking

tech-enabled-abuse

Tech-Enabled Abuse

Tech-enabled abuse (also called technology-facilitated abuse) is the use of everyday digital tools — phones, accounts, smart-home devices, trackers, social media — to monitor, control, intimidate, or harm a partner, ex-partner, or family member. It is rarely a separate “online” problem: surveillance and harassment through devices typically operate as one channel of a broader pattern of Coercive Control, and they frequently overlap with offline Stalking and physical violence. NNEDV’s Safety Net Project notes that abusers are “often very determined to maintain control,” and technology is one of many tools they use; the abuse “does not always remain online and could escalate to other forms of violence.” Australia’s eSafety Commissioner frames it as conduct including monitoring and surveillance, cyberstalking with tracking, impersonation, hacking, and harassment, deployed within Intimate Partner Violence and Domestic Family and Sexualised Violence.

The category spans covert spyware (Stalkerware), GPS and Bluetooth Location Tracking Abuse, account takeover, and the weaponising of shared devices and family plans. Because the same features that protect a Victim-Survivor — Location Sharing, cloud backups, “find my device” — can be turned against them, tech-enabled abuse sits in permanent tension with Privacy and Safety and is the threat model any Personal Safety Apps design must take seriously through Discreet Access, minimal data retention, and Trauma-Informed Design.

In this vault

Sources

gender-based-violence

Gender-Based Violence

Gender-based violence (GBV) is violence directed at a person because of their gender, or that affects one gender disproportionately. It is the umbrella over Domestic Violence, Intimate Partner Violence, Sexual Violence, Stalking and Coercive Control — the harms the tools and resources in this vault aim to prevent, interrupt, document or respond to.

In this vault

IncludesIntimate Partner Violence
IncludesSexual Violence
IncludesCoercive Control
IncludesDomestic Family and Sexualised Violence

techno-solutionism

Techno-Solutionism

Techno-solutionism is the assumption that complex social and political problems can be fixed with technology. In anti-violence tech it shows up as the belief that the right gadget or app can “prevent sexual assault” or “ensure the safety of women” — a framing critiqued at length in The Safest Woman Alive and Datafication of MeToo. The danger is twofold: it shifts the burden of prevention onto victim-survivors (who must buy, learn, and correctly use devices), and it draws attention and funding away from structural change addressed by the other Four Domains of Power.

This is the central tension running through the vault: tools can genuinely help in a crisis, but should be weighed against Trauma-Informed Design, feminist critique, and the limits of what design alone can do.

In this vault

Critiqued byFour Domains of Power
Tension withPersonal Safety Apps

survivor-centered-design

Survivor-Centered Design

Survivor-centered design places the rights, needs, safety, and stated preferences of people who have experienced violence at the center of every design decision, rather than treating them as a population to be managed. A survivor-centered approach prioritises a survivor’s safety, agency, and wellbeing, and insists that survivors be involved at every stage of design and implementation — not consulted once and then designed around. In service and product terms it translates into the trauma-informed commitments of safety, choice, consent, collaboration, trustworthiness, and empowerment, and into reframing the operative question from “why isn’t this survivor ready?” to “what does this survivor need right now to feel safe?”. It treats lived experience as expertise and resists building tools for survivors without building them with survivors.

The approach is closely tied to Trauma-Informed Design (its principles overlap heavily) and is the practical lens through which a vault tool is judged to genuinely centre the Victim-Survivor. It is informed by Feminist HCI and design-justice thinking, which name whose voices design usually erases. Survivor-centered design also sets a critical boundary against Techno-Solutionism: a flashy feature that increases a survivor’s exposure, or that an abuser can repurpose, fails the test no matter how clever, which is why these projects weigh Privacy and Safety and the realities of Coercive Control before shipping.

In this vault

Related toTrauma-Informed Design
CentresVictim-Survivor
Informed byFeminist HCI
Tension withTechno-Solutionism

Sources

https://www.spotlightinitiative.org/design-survivor-centred-programme
https://wscadv.org/projects/domestic-violence-housing-first/toolkit/survivor-driven-trauma-informed-mobile-advocacy/

Tags: #concept #design #survivor-centered

domestic-violence

Domestic Violence

Domestic violence (often used interchangeably with domestic abuse) is a pattern of abusive behaviour used by one person to gain or maintain power and control over another within a domestic setting — a current or former spouse, partner, or family member. It encompasses physical, sexual, psychological and economic harm, and in practice is rarely a single incident: the abuse that matters most is the sustained pattern of Coercive Control — isolation, intimidation, surveillance and restriction — that physical-injury counts alone fail to capture. While it overlaps heavily with Intimate Partner Violence, “domestic violence” is the broader frame, also covering abuse by relatives and other household members.

Globally it is one of the most common forms of Gender-Based Violence. WHO estimates that roughly 25.8% of ever-partnered women aged 15–49 have experienced physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner at least once in their lifetime, and that about 31.6% of women worldwide (around 840 million) have experienced physical/sexual partner violence or non-partner sexual violence. The lethal edge is stark: in 2023 an estimated 140 women and girls were killed every day by an intimate partner or family member. Tools and resources in this vault aim to prevent, interrupt, document or respond to these harms, increasingly mindful that abusers also weaponise technology — see Tech-Enabled Abuse.

In this vault

Subtype ofGender-Based Violence
Characterised byCoercive Control
Related toIntimate Partner Violence
Manifests inTech-Enabled Abuse

Sources

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/violence-against-women
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK499891/

Tags: #concept #violence

location-tracking-abuse

Location Tracking Abuse

Location tracking abuse is the covert or coercive use of a person’s geolocation against them — through GPS apps, “find my” services, shared family-plan settings, vehicle telematics in smart cars, or cheap Bluetooth trackers slipped into a bag or car. It is the dark inversion of Location Sharing: the very mechanism that lets a Panic Button say “come and get me, here” becomes, in an abuser’s hands, a way to know where a Victim-Survivor is at all times. NNEDV’s Safety Net Project warns that in some tragic cases GPS devices and apps have aided an offender in locating a victim to commit murder, or were enabled without the victim’s knowledge. It is a core tactic of Coercive Control and a primary engine of Stalking.

The tracking can be installed directly via Stalkerware, surfaced through accounts the abuser still controls, or carried out with commodity hardware never designed for surveillance — a problem severe enough that Bluetooth trackers like AirTags prompted dedicated anti-stalking detection features and Congressional attention. Because removing a tracker can signal to an abuser that they have “lost control” and trigger escalation, technology safety planning treats discovery and removal as something to do carefully with an advocate, not impulsively. This is why location features in Personal Safety Apps such as Círculo encrypt position data and send it only to a Trusted Network, rather than logging or exposing it.

In this vault

Sources

intimate-partner-violence

Intimate Partner Violence

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is defined by the WHO as behaviour by an intimate partner or ex-partner that causes physical, sexual or psychological harm — including physical aggression, sexual coercion, psychological abuse and controlling behaviours. It is the most common form of Domestic Violence and is best understood not as isolated assaults but as an ongoing pattern of domination; the surveillance, isolation and monitoring of Coercive Control are often the core of the abuse rather than incidental to it. This is also why Tech-Enabled Abuse is so potent in IPV: an abuser with shared accounts, devices and location data has ready-made tools for control.

IPV is strikingly prevalent. WHO estimates that about 25.8% of ever-partnered women aged 15–49 have experienced physical and/or sexual IPV at least once in their lifetime, making it the most widespread form of Gender-Based Violence against women. The Lancet’s 2018 global analysis similarly found roughly one in four ever-partnered women affected over their lifetime, with around 13% reporting partner violence in the past year. IPV is also a leading context for femicide: a large share of women killed worldwide die at the hands of an intimate partner.

In this vault

Subtype ofGender-Based Violence
Related toCoercive Control
Related toDomestic Violence
Manifests inTech-Enabled Abuse

Sources

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/violence-against-women
https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(21)02664-7/fulltext

Tags: #concept #violence