How tech became the next frontier in domestic violence

When Steve Jobs launched the iPhone on January 9, 2007, he could not possibly have known the unintended consequences of this small black rectangle that was a phone and a camera and a computer and many other things we did not know we needed.

It would take time, but now, in 2024, the smartphone is a new weapon in the arsenal of domestic violence perpetrators. Thousands of Australian men are using it to menace and control their current or former domestic partners.

Today – in addition to being subjected to traditional forms of violence, which are still there, every day of every week – many women experience 24/7 monitoring and control of their movements and bank accounts, as well as other forms of non-physical abuse or threat, often as part of a broader pattern of coercive control.

One particularly insidious example of technology-facilitated abuse (TFA) is cyberstalking. It is changing both the ways in which domestic violence is perpetrated and how police, women’s safety experts and policymakers try to respond.

In 2021-22, according to the Personal Safety Survey (PSS) conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), 641,500 Australian women had their movements tracked by an ex-partner. Just five years earlier, according to the 2016 PSS, that number was 455,100.

That figure records only former partners. Women in current relationships are also subjected to having their every movement monitored: 56,700 in 2016 and 66,500 in 2021-22.

Physical violence is still happening, tragically, but it is declining relative to other forms of abuse. Tracking, however, is the one that’s growing fastest.

“What we define as gendered crime, and in particular family violence, will only continue to grow as the recognition of coercive control spreads across Australia,” the assistant commissioner of Victoria Police’s Family Violence Command, Lauren Callaway, told a conference in Hobart last year. “What is certain is that we will never go back to a traditional understanding of violence.”

What is astounding about this is not just how rapidly this form of abuse is growing, or that it is in many cases displacing physical violence as the primary means of abuse, at least to begin with. It is the array of abuse perpetuated.

While technology-facilitated abuse in a family and domestic violence context is often low-tech, it has also become so sophisticated and difficult to detect that many victims are unaware they have even been targeted.

A few years ago such abuse was mostly limited to making endless phone calls or sending annoying or threatening texts. Today, anyone can get hold of spyware technology that once would have been only available to industry experts, and would have had restricted sales and been very expensive.

Just Google “How to spy on your wife” and hundreds of options will be offered, usually with free advice on how to install the software so the target is unaware it is on her phone.

A basic annual plan offered by mSpy, one of the most popular apps used in Australia, costs just $12.76 a month. It allows the user to track the location of his target, to monitor all her texts and calls and internet browsing.

If, for instance, she is trying to contact a women’s refuge, he will know about it.

FlexiSPY, another popular spyware product, also offers an app that is undetectable on the owner’s phone and gives access to her messages and phone calls.

The most common form of technology-facilitated abuse is cyberstalking.

According to eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, who has responsibility for technology-facilitated abuse at the federal level, four in five Australian women have experienced or are “experiencing some form of technology-facilitated abuse”.

Assistant Commissioner Callaway says stalking was “once a crime somewhat reserved for those with a mental illness and often described as unsuccessful suitors” but was “coming to our notice more often as we see all types of motivations driving conduct that instils fear, is highly controlling and can achieve new depths of surveillance from afar (including interstate and overseas)”.

Cat Gander is the chief executive of DV West, whose four refuges supported more than 2000 women and children in Western Sydney last financial year. Describing cyberstalking, she says, “There isn’t a woman who comes through our door who isn’t affected by it.”

In 2020 the second national survey of technology abuse and domestic violence in Australia was conducted by WESNET, the national peak body for specialist women’s domestic and family violence services. It surveyed 442 Australian frontline workers and found 99.3 per cent of them had clients who were experiencing tech abuse enabled by GPS tracking apps on smartphones. There was also a huge increase in seeing GPS tracking apps “all the time” on their clients’ smartphones, from 7.1 per cent in 2015 to 16.2 per cent in 2020.

Gander says they’ve known about stalking technology for about 15 years, but it is becoming much harder to detect.

When refuges were first established 50 years ago, it was a pretty straightforward process when a woman presented asking for help. She was welcomed, invited to tell her story but not compelled to if she was not ready, and given food, shelter and counsel.

Today, the intake is necessarily more professional but also often includes using cyber-safety protocols – if the refuge has access to them. Phones, cars and toys are checked for tracking devices, cameras and other stalking implements. It is not uncommon for tracking devices to be found in children’s toys or attached to a woman’s car. There are reports of men even microchipping the family pets so they can be tracked.

The technology has become so sophisticated it now requires even more high-tech tools to detect it – and most refuges simply do not have them. “We are always learning,” says Gander, “but there is a lack of resources to access when a perpetrator is using TFA beyond the technical skill of our staff.”

To call in experts costs as much as $700 plus travel time, money a refuge simply does not have – except in “extreme cases”.

Even after the sweeps are done, location-finding disabled, passwords changed and every precautionary measure taken, there is still the need for continual vigilance. Do mothers allow their kids to take their mobile phones when they go off to McDonald’s for their mandated visits with their father? Kids meet with their dad, says Gander, and come back with a new teddy, which turns out to have a camera for an eye.

TFA can take different forms as perpetrators become more cunning and devise ways to harass or terrorise their current or former partners without risking arrest. Police are traditionally trained to respond to single-incident alleged domestic crimes. Their whole approach needs to be rethought if they are to have any chance of catching men using TFA, whose harassment, while abusive, may not be criminal.

Victoria Police are monitoring the use of TFA, along with other forms of domestic and family violence, and trying to discern patterns. The police say TFAs are more instrumental or situational than inherent to the platform. This implies the method of technology-facilitated abuse might change – but that is because the perpetrator at present may not have the option to perpetrate abuse “in person” .

In other words, as Cat Gander observes of the women who seek safety in the refuges she administers, “TFA is usually entangled and integrated into a range of tactics and behaviours towards the victim-survivor. TFA strengthens the threat of violence and control because it is difficult to know if or how you are being monitored.”

In August 2019 an alert Commonwealth Bank employee noticed disturbing messages to a customer whose account had been red-flagged as someone experiencing domestic and family violence. As a result, the bank investigated 11 million transactions and found more than 8000 accounts where customers had received low-value deposits, often less than $1, with “potentially abusive messages in the transaction descriptions”, according to Designed to Disrupt, a 2022 discussion paper by Catherine Fitzpatrick on improving financial safety, published by the Centre for Women’s Economic Safety.

They found some customers were receiving daily as many as several hundred “low value, high frequency” deposits containing “really serious” threats and intimidations. Fitzpatrick, who instigated the analysis while at Commonwealth Bank, says she herself read 900 messages sent with one cent payments, with notes such as “I’m standing out the front” or “I’m going to kill you”.

By late 2022, the four major banks had blocked more than 500,000 such messages from 300,000 unique customer accounts. As a result, more than 3000 customers were issued warning letters, had their online banking suspended or their accounts cancelled.

Within the past four years all the banks have taken steps to address this abuse, blocking offensive messages. Some now use artificial intelligence to search for inappropriate language in the transfers. The Commonwealth Bank’s automatic filter has blocked a million offensive messages since 2020 and its model detects 1500 high-risk cases annually, Fitzpatrick said.

The Australian banks, led by the Australian Banking Association, have been global leaders in attempting to disrupt technology-facilitated abuse through payment descriptions and the weaponisation of other products for financial abuse. The industry has now changed its terms and conditions to include financial abuse, thus enabling banks to act against offenders.

So far only 14 of Australia’s 97 banks have signed on to these new terms, although individual banks offer support for victims, ranging from enabling them to open new accounts without the traditional documentation and often providing a starting deposit of as much as $5000 to get them on their feet.

Anna Bligh, the former Queensland premier and now chief executive of the Australian Banking Association, worked in a refuge before she went into politics. She is horrified by what is happening with technology-facilitated abuse. “Technology,” she says, “is taking abuse to places it’s never been before.”

According to a report by Deloitte Access Economics for the Commonwealth Bank, citing the Personal Safety Survey 2016, 380,000 women and 240,000 men reported being subjected to financial abuse. Among the most insidious forms of such abuse are those that prevent women from working, or from retaining their earnings if they are employed.

According to the same report, 70,300 women were prevented from working in 2016 and 86,300 had their income withheld or controlled. Other forms of financial abuse can include refusing to contribute to household expenses or making a partner liable for a joint debt, often without her knowledge. This kind of abuse is commonly adopted by perpetrators after separation – for example, refusing to pay the mortgage so the woman risks losing her home – but has expanded to taking out loans or credit cards in a woman’s name and running up huge debts of which she is unaware but is legally responsible.

Back in March 1974, when we opened Elsie, the first modern women’s refuge in Australia, we were aware of only one major form of violence and that was what we used to call “wife-bashing”.

In the early days of Elsie, and at the other shelters that fast followed in her footsteps, we observed the horror and the banality, given their frequency, of black eyes or broken bones – the result of husbands or partners attacking the women who sought our help. Back then we could not imagine any other form of domestic violence.

The beating of women, especially on a Friday night after a drunk husband returned from the pub, was so common it was scarcely talked about. It certainly wasn’t an issue the media thought worth covering.

On the first day of Elsie, an ABC reporter asked me to agree that “nagging wives” often brought this on themselves. The police called them “domestics” and only interfered if things looked like they might get “out of hand”.

Rape in marriage did not begin to be criminalised in Australia until the mid-1970s and, as young feminists trying to make domestic violence a political issue, we did not initially include sexual abuse as part of our definition. That soon changed as we learnt, principally from the testimonies of survivor-victims, that a physical beating was all too often followed by a sexual attack.

Over the ensuing decades, we have learnt about emotional abuse and the various techniques of controlling a partner’s movements that we now call coercive control. Perpetrators were getting canny, realising leaving physical evidence in the form of bruises or broken bones might see them arrested. Still, we are now a long way from where we were in 1974.

Increasingly, the perpetrators’ access to technology is used to disrupt women’s performances at work, to jeopardise or even prompt termination of her employment for unprofessionalism or unreliability.

One woman, a client of a DV West shelter and whose details have been de-identified, has been subjected to a horrendous amount of technology-facilitated abuse, including her former partner posting denigrating comments about the woman’s character, parenting and professional practice onto her work’s Facebook page.

Other women suffer similarly vicious and career-threatening abuse. Imagine spending weeks on a crucial work presentation only to discover you’ve missed the appointed time because your partner got into your phone’s calendar and rescheduled all your appointments.

These men have been found using surveillance drones to shatter the illusion that their former partners have safely escaped. They have kept current partners in a state of terror by remotely activating loud music in their homes, locking the doors remotely so they cannot escape the onslaught. This sensory bombardment is a form of torture, banned by the United Nations Convention against Torture, and is being practised on suburban streets in Australia.

Spyware is “a particularly acute threat in the context of domestic and family violence”, according to research on the use of smartphones for this purpose by Deakin University academics Dr Adam Molnar and Dr Diarmaid Harkin. According to their research, there are “multiple spyware companies encouraging and promoting the use of spyware against intimate partners. Children are also commonly suggested as a target for spyware.”

All this activity is protected in Australia by the Privacy Act 1988. This legislation is currently under review and there is considerable pressure on the government to provide remedies to prosecute technology that can be used to track women and children and could, ultimately, lead to their being in harm’s way.

There is also the need for the tech industry to adopt preventive measures, but there is not much evidence the makers are serious about stopping TFA.

We are in a world that is becoming more dangerous for women. Perpetrators are changing their behaviour, becoming more cunning and creative while seemingly embarking on a path to even greater violence than we have seen before.

How do we cope with such a situation? What advice do we give women? How can we keep them safe?

We need to do some serious rethinking about our old assumptions of what violence is and what we need to do to stop it.

“For the first time in our 20 years of data collection, ex-partners are now a bigger cohort of DV perpetrators than current partners,” Assistant Commissioner Lauren Callaway told a conference last year. “Which changes the idea of leaving someone [being] the end of the violence – it’s just the beginning. It also stops in its tracks the question ‘why doesn’t she just leave?’ ”

Victoria Police believe this increase is in part due to an increased willingness of women to report abuse, to leave abusive relationships and for families to disclose previously concealed long-term patterns of violence.

We have known for a long time that a disruptive action, such as a separation, can trigger physical and other forms of violence from a man who had previously shown no such behaviour. We have not known, however, the scale of this onset of post-separation violence.

Victoria Police data suggests it could be increasing. It seems technology facilitates this. An embittered ex, whose threat was previously mitigated by removal from the family home, is newly empowered by technology and able to exercise his vengeance and seek to regain control of his former partner remotely.

It is frightening to think that leaving actually increases the level of domestic violence, but that seems to be what is happening.

Some might be tempted to conclude TFA is a more benign form of abuse or harassment than physical violence. It might be psychologically damaging and leave a victim in a state of terror but it doesn’t break your bones or kill you. There is significant evidence, however, that TFA is not a substitute for physical violence but a precursor.

As Julie Inman Grant noted in her speech to the 2021 Women’s Safety Summit, “We now recognise that technology-facilitated abuse is an indicator of future physical violence.”

It might also be an indicator of future femicide, as it was in the case of Hannah Clarke, who along with her three children was burnt to death by her husband in 2020. He had previously used recording devices to monitor her conversations.

We must make it a priority to learn why the femicide rate, which had been trending sharply downwards since the 1990s, has suddenly, in the past two years, shown a marked increase.

We need to track these patterns but, sadly, we do not have the data tools to do so. We urgently need a federal longitudinal study of domestic violence. Such a study would follow the same men and women over the course of many years. It would provide powerful insights about how they change over time and their life trajectories.

Longitudinal data could tell us the circumstances and backgrounds of women and perpetrators before the domestic violence began; how long women endure domestic violence; the different forms and pathways of domestic violence and abuse, including, for example, whether domestic violence escalates; and the impacts of domestic violence on women’s lives.

A longitudinal study would also tell us how women fare after they leave violent relationships. We know about 50 per cent end up in the poverty created by dependency on government payments, but we don’t know how long that situation lasts or what proportion of these women are able to find decent employment and financial security and perhaps avoid the risk of future dependency on a violent man.

Without such a study we are not in a position to know, to give another example, if violence is perpetrated by a relatively small number of men who engage in repeat behaviour with a series of women or whether there are more violent offenders in the population than we realise. The police deal with a large numbers of recidivists, but less than 25 per cent of women who experience domestic violence report it to the police, so they are seeing a very limited pool.

There are three characteristic pathways of prior behaviour before lethal violence and only one of these occurs mostly with separated couples. We know this from the work of Hayley Boxall and her former colleagues at the Australian Institute of Criminology.

Their analysis of 199 murders of women by men between July 1, 2007, and June 30, 2018, shows 59 of the victims were killed by what was labelled a “fixated threat” offender. This kind of offender accounted for 33 per cent of all of the murderers and was described as “highly functional in many public-facing domains in their life”.

The research found they were likely to have a respectable job or their own business. They would exhibit low-level signs of drug or alcohol abuse. They would almost always be described as well-respected within their communities.

“However, within their relationship with the victim they were characterised as highly controlling and jealous,” the research said, noting fixated threat offenders’ controlling behaviours “tend to escalate in the context of their perceived loss of control over the victim, typically because the victim decided to end the relationship”.

Sixty-one per cent of victims had separated from their partner. In each case, this was at the instigation of the woman. Chillingly, the authors note, fixated threat offenders become increasingly focused and determined to reconcile, and also to harm the victim’s reputation and social relationships. This period, they say, “often co-occurred with the onset or increase in monitoring and stalking behaviours, including online”.

The murders analysed in the report occurred before the kind of cyberstalking described in this article had become as sophisticated and accessible as it is today. It was also conducted before ex-partners became a larger cohort of perpetrators than current partners. If the patterns identified in the report are still true, however, this is a shocking red flag for women who want to leave violent relationships.

It is easy to see there is a pattern here: a perverted logic insists a man be able always to control his partner, using whatever methods seem right for the moment, be it a phone or a fist or a lethal weapon.

We have to realise that domestic violence is best understood as a group of behaviours, with physical violence being just one part of the repertoire and with many perpetrators employing what might be called a sliding scale of abuse in order to control their current or former partner.

They may start off with menacing texts and social media posts, graduate to stalking via spyware, and then to explicit threats and the decision to use physical force. On such a trajectory, the next step could well be lethal.

This is why it is so important we understand these “new” technology-facilitated forms of abuse are part of the domestic violence repertoire, not less dangerous because they do not involve physical contact.

The horrifying fact is they appear to be just a step in the trajectory towards physical abuse. What we have long understood to be a national crisis of domestic violence has just become a whole lot worse. 

Anne Summers wishes to thank her colleagues Mary-Ann O’Loughlin and Thomas Shortridge for their assistance with research and fact-checking.

Cases of technology-facilitated abuse

Amira’s husband has become increasingly abusive and controlling, limiting her access to the family finances, only giving her money for essential items. He also controls her access to technology, limiting her contact with family and friends. English is not Amira’s first language, which makes it even more difficult for her to seek help and support.

Her husband has installed a kill switch in the family car to prevent her from going any further than the local school or shops. He has also threatened to share intimate images of Amira with her family overseas if she doesn’t do as she is told – images captured without her knowledge or consent.

Angela’s ex-husband has pressured their children into making secret recordings of her and her new partner. On several occasions, Angela has found a mobile phone under her pillow, set to record. The children’s father has been asking the kids to airdrop the recorded conversations to him.

The kids feel deeply uncomfortable about this, but their father tells them they are being disloyal if they don’t follow through.

Gina’s former partner is now in prison. She has started over in a new town with her young son but fears being tracked down by her former partner once he is released. This fear is warranted because her ex-partner’s mother has been crowdsourcing information from Gina’s friends and family on Facebook about her new identity – trying to find out where she might be living and working.

Facebook won’t remove the posts about Gina because technically it doesn’t violate their terms of service, but her family violence caseworker believes Gina and her young son are in dire physical danger.

Jodie and her daughter live in a refuge, in a location kept secret from her ex-partner. At a recent custody changeover, Jodie’s ex-partner insisted she take a doll he says their daughter loves and cannot sleep without. Jodie became suspicious when her daughter showed absolutely no interest in the doll.

Within days of the meeting, Jodie’s ex started texting her photos he had taken in the suburb she is living in and even the street where the refuge is located. Gripped by fear, she decided to take a closer look at the doll and found a small GPS tracking device hidden inside. 

Source: eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant. Names have been changed.

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