I Feel Like We’re Really Behind the Game’: Perspectives of the United Kingdom’s Intimate Partner Violence Support Sector on the Rise of Technology-Facilitated Abuse

Technology-Based Responses to Technology-Facilitated Domestic and Family Violence: An Overview of the Limits and Possibilities of Tech-Based “Solutions”

“…Ideally, this type of tool would be widely distributed to domestic and family violence support workers (and perhaps law enforcement) to allow many victim-survivors across multiple jurisdictions to have access to viable “spyware detection.” They would need to be user-friendly enough that they do not rely on a small cohort of highly skilled workers to deploy and implement, but they should be sufficiently easy to use such that the larger cohort of advocates within DFV organizations could realistically operate the tools without requiring significant burdensome training or up-skilling. As yet, however, it is unclear whether there are realistic prospects of these types of tools having wide uptake from users in the DFV sector, who are already struggling with the technical skills needed to understand and respond to TFA in general (Freed et al, 2017; Tanczer et al, 2021). In principle, work could be done to improve the usability of these tools with a significant investment of resources and, similarly, a cohort of professionals within the DFV sector could be adequately skilled to deploy them; however it remains to be seen whether these tools could be deployed at the wide-scale at which they are needed.…”

“…Criminal justice responses to TFA are not progressing adequately, with an Australian study suggesting that some victim-survivors of TFA are still “not taken seriously” by police (Harris & Woodlock, 2019, p. 531). Furthermore, support workers in DFV advocacy organizations around the world are similarly struggling to respond to TFA (Freed et al, 2017; Lopez-Neira et al, 2019; Tanczer et al, 2021). TFA can often outstrip the technical knowledge of those who work in the DFV advocacy sector, with many in the sector not having the skills or abilities to diagnose and suitably respond to various forms of TFA.…”