Policing technology-facilitated abuse

ABSTRACT

Technology-facilitated abuse (TFA) is a growing problem with serious harms and implications, yet laws and legal responses often fail to keep pace. The policing of TFA poses unique operational challenges, such as resourcing and cross-jurisdictional difficulties. But it is further challenged by a fixed belief that physical abuse is more harmful than digital forms of abuse, with reports that police do not treat TFA seriously. This article explores problems with the policing of TFA drawing on a three-stage study examining the extent, forms and impacts of TFA in Australia. The study findings are informed by a survey of workers from support and service sectors (n = 242), including domestic violence, sexual assault, health, behaviour change, legal and specialist diversity services; qualitative interviews with adult victim/survivors (n = 20) and perpetrators (n = 10) of TFA; and a subset of respondents (n = 2,325) from a nationally representative general population survey of victimisation and perpetration (n = 4,562). The study found a reluctance to report TFA to police, or in circumstances where a report was made, overwhelmingly negative experiences from doing so. It also found low levels of confidence in the policing of TFA. We argue that additional police training and resources are needed on how to recognise and understand the harms of TFA, which laws apply to TFA, and importantly, how to respond to disclosures and provide a supportive environment for the diversity of victim/survivors who experience TFA.

KEYWORDS:

• Technology-facilitated abuse
• victimisation
• policing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We acknowledge that an alternative approach to analysis would have been to group the 21 transgender, non-binary, intersex and/or another gender identity respondents with the LGBQA+ participants to create an LGBTQIA+ group. However, this would have had the effect of conflating respondents' self-described gender with sexuality throughout the analysis, in a context in which researchers are increasingly seeking to recognise the important distinctions between sex, gender and sexuality (Ollin and Vencill 2021). It also would have erased the experiences of gender-diverse respondents in a different way, by obscuring their data within the much larger sample of experiences of sexuality-diverse respondents. For these reasons, and with the advice of our Project Advisory Group, we retained the distinction of the 21 transgender, non-binary, intersex and/or another gender identity respondents and report on these in another publication (Powell et al. 2022).

2 Small sample sizes prevented reliable separate analyses for some sexuality identities. Therefore, bisexual, gay, lesbian, queer, asexual and other preferred sexuality descriptors have been analysed as one group (LGBQA+).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by funding from Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety and the Department of Social Services, Australian Government for the project, Technology-facilitated abuse: Extent, nature and responses in the Australian community