Gender, Technology and Violence

Marie Segrave, Laura Vitis, Marie Segrave, Laura Vitis

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315441146
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Criminal Law
• Index: Law

Technological developments move at lightening pace and can bring with them new possibilities for social harm. This book brings together original empirical and theoretical work examining how digital technologies both create and sustain various forms of gendered violence and provide platforms for resistance and criminal justice intervention.

This edited collection is organised around two key themes of facilitation and resistance, with an emphasis through the whole collection on the development of a gendered interrogation of contemporary practices of technologically-enabled or enhanced practices of violence.

Addressing a broad range of criminological issues such as intimate partner violence, rape and sexual assault, online sexual harassment, gendered political violence, online culture, cyberbullying, and human trafficking, and including a critical examination of the broader issue of feminist 'digilantism' and resistance to online sexual harassment, this book examines the ways in which new and emerging technologies facilitate new platforms for gendered violence as well as offering both formal and informal opportunities to prevent and/or respond to gendered violence.

1 New forms of gendered surveillance? Intersections of technology and family violence

JaneMaree Maher, Jude McCulloch and Kate Fitz-Gibbon¹

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries saw considerable shifts in discourses addressing and relating to family violence. Feminist challenges to the previous invisibility, acceptability and privatisation of such violence have driven social change: responsibility to respond to, and prevent, family or domestic violence, most particularly violence against women and children, is increasingly accepted across developed and developing nations as both a national and an international obligation. The desired outcomes of these obligations are as yet unrealised; the scope and scale of family violence, of which the most prevalent form is intimate (ex)partner violence by men against women, are still emerging (Garcia-Moreno et al. 2006; Hoeffler and Fearon 2015). The work of preventing such violence and enhancing security for women and children has begun but is far from complete. In this period of increased recognition and policy reform, the emergence of new digital technologies has fundamentally changed social interactions, presenting new forms of visibility, communication and connection. Access to knowledge is made easier, even as forms and repositories of knowledge proliferate and create new types of risk and new opportunities for crime (Grabosky 2016). In this chapter, we examine the meaning and impacts of these new technologies in the terrain of family violence. Our interest here is in how such technologies interact with changing social and political responses to family violence. What new forms of responsibility are engendered by technologies that both create and respond to risk? How might enduring myths about family violence and responses to family violence that create stigma and risk for women be reinvigorated by digital technologies?

While recognising the opportunities for enhanced security from family violence and the positive social change that are enabled by new technologies, we examine the simultaneous potential for harms from these same technologies. Using Judith Butler’s account of the profound interconnections of vulnerability and violence in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004), we argue that these technologies may reinvigorate critical normative aspects of family violence discourses that have proved difficult to shift. Men’s capacity to perpetrate violence against intimate partners is facilitated by new digital technologies that significantly expand opportunities for surveillance and harassment. Discourses that continue to assume that women are responsible for securing their own safety from family violence are extended; the use of digital communication is at once seen as an obligation in escaping violence while also creating significant new risks. Rethinking notions of privacy and security has been central to challenging norms around the meaning and acceptability of family violence, and privacy and security are also central to social responses to the rise of new digital technologies. Yet the meanings and implications of such terms in the context of family violence are complex. ‘Privacy is complex and does not have a universal definition… . Privacy is negotiated in response to circumstances, rather than an enforcement of rules’ (Dimond, Fiesler and Bruckman 2011, p. 415). How we understand and respond to the differing and shifting implications of privacy in technology-facilitated family violence abuse, as well as how we understand and assign responsibility in relation to this type of violence, will have significant impacts on the safety of women and children. We argue that these technologies may work to create new forms of surveillance of women’s activities and responsibilities in terms of family violence, such that women are once again held responsible for securing their own safety and encouraged to stay silent (this time online) as part of this responsibility.

In this chapter, we look first at how new digital technologies facilitate violence against women, with a particular focus on how technological surveillance creates new possibilities for the commission of family violence. We then review the opportunities for enhanced security and safety that are created by these same new technologies and consider how discourses about women’s responsibility to secure their own safety operate in this context. We argue that these technologies have the potential to reprivatise family violence and reinvigorate notions of women’s, rather than social or community, responsibility to respond to and prevent such violence.

This chapter draws from our recent research examining risk assessment and management practices in Victoria, Australia (see McCulloch et al. 2016). Here we draw specifically on the victim-survivor interview and focus group data collected as part of that research, as it relates to technology-facilitated family violence, and how these technologies form part of the family violence some women experience. Interviews and focus groups were conducted with 24 victim-survivors. All participants were in contact with and were recruited through a Victorian family violence support service. The interviews focused on women’s experiences of risk assessments and service responses across Victorian metropolitan and regional areas. Around half of the women participants had left the abusive relationship more than five years prior, while 12 of the women had left the abusive relationship within the 18 months prior to the interview/focus group (for further details, see McCulloch et al. 2016). To ensure participant confidentiality, all victim-survivors are referred to throughout this chapter by a pseudonym accompanied by a brief descriptor to assist in contextualising their experience.

Butler (2004) suggests that we are connected by shared vulnerabilities and shared complicity in violence. Such connections need to be carefully considered in light of the way in which digital technology presents both a promise and a threat in the realm of women’s security and family violence. In particular, the opportunities offered by technologies cannot be assumed to make women more responsible for securing their own safety. We take up Butler’s argument that concepts of autonomy are necessary to achieve ‘legal protections and entitlements’ (2004, p. 25) but insufficient to address our ‘collective responsibility’ (2004, p. 44) to each other. It is critical that digital technologies in the realm of family violence are considered with attention to shared social and political obligations to combat and prevent violence against women and children.

Chancy connections: intimacy, technologies and surveillance

The technology is new to many advocates and victims, necessitating that advocates learn about and address these high-tech tactics, but always in the larger context of a victim’s stalking experience. The rapid expansion and availability of new information technologies poses new threats to both victims and domestic violence service providers.

(Southworth et al. 2007, p. 843)

As Levy (2014) has observed, the rise of communication technologies and social media platforms has profoundly influenced the life course of intimate relationships. Apps may inaugurate relationships, but even if they do not, social media presence now forms part of the relational information that people gather about each other. A wide range of communication technologies, most notably mobile phones, operate as key relationship tools (Burke et al. 2011). The amount of data available online about each person has expanded exponentially, as have points of connection to digital data:

From women’s bodies and cycles to their whereabouts, communications, and activities, services from Glow to Wife Spy to Girls Around Me expose women especially to data collection, invasive monitoring, and increased visibility. Intimate surveillance gives us a sense of control over a fundamentally uncontrollable dimension of personal life: we can only control that which we can track and measure.

(Levy 2014, p. 688)

Levy (2014) argues that such changes have altered the contemporary boundaries and limits of ‘intimate surveillance’; concepts of privacy and what are deemed appropriate forms of contact and visibility in relationships are developed in relation to these new expectations of visibility and access. Social media presence means that intimate relationships are developed through knowledge that is proffered by the person and simultaneously gleaned through online platforms. Henry and Powell (2015, p. 114) argue that this change has been significant in how practices of intimacy and relationships are understood: as a consequence of these technological developments, ‘the boundaries of acceptable “romantic” behaviours and gender-based violence have also broadened and overlapped – particularly in relation to online harassment and stalking behaviours’. Burke et al. (2011) similarly suggest that the lines of ‘appropriate and intrusive’ communication and contact in relationships are now blurred and uncertain: multiple text messages at the beginning of a relationship may be romantic but threatening and improper as it ends.

In the last two decades, there has been increasing recognition of the ways in which digital technologies and the forms of social exchange they facilitate are being used in what Woodlock (2015) identifies as ‘technology-facilitated violence’. Henry and Powell (2016) use the term ‘technology-facilitated sexual violence’ to capture many of the same practices of technological abuse carried out by partners and ex-partners (as well as the use of technology in a range of other forms of violence). Southworth et al. (2007) prefer to use the term ‘stalking with technology’ (2007, p. 844) to reinforce the point that new technologies extend the reach and nature of pre-existing forms of violent abuse against women.

Technology enables many practices that constitute forms of family violence. These practices include:

• threatening or abusive phone calls
• repetitive threatening or abusive text messages and emails
• checking or hacking email accounts
• monitoring internet use
• ‘revenge porn’, whereby a person distributes or posts false, humiliating, intimate or sexualised videos or photos without the other person’s consent
• harassing or threatening the victim or the victim’s friends and family on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, or dating, chat and games sites
• tracking the victim’s location through apps and ‘find my phone’ services
• smartphone spyware. (DVRCV 2015, p. 127)

There has been considerable discussion about whether these forms of abuse are best regarded as new forms of family violence or whether they should be understood as extensions of stalking (Mason and Magnet 2011; Southworth et al. 2007; Yar 2013, pp. 128–36). Stalking, a term that first came to prominence in the 1980s, describes ‘persistent harassment in which one person repeatedly imposes on another unwanted communications and/or contacts’ (Mullen, Pathé and Purcell 2001, p. 9). Mason and Magnet consider that ‘stalking is not a new phenomenon. And yet, new technologies complicate how women experience violence as well as how they are able to protect themselves’ (2011, p. 107). Whatever decision is made about the best framework to understand and interpret this form of family violence, it is clear that the reach and impacts of technology-facilitated family violence are profound.

Recent research in the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom has begun to reveal the scope and nature of ‘technologically facilitated abuse’, although Henry and Powell (2016) argue that there is still very limited research on this type of abuse when perpetrated against adult women rather than adolescents or young adults. While robust empirical data is still emerging about the extent and prevalence of this type of family violence, existing research indicates that such abuse is rapidly increasing (George and Harris 2014; Henry and Powell 2016; McKee 2006; Woodlock 2016). The studies and reports that have emerged indicate that the use of abusive text messaging is prevalent (Cavezza and McEwan 2014; DVRCV 2015; Royal Commission into Family Violence [RCFV] 2016; Woodlock 2016) – frequency, persistence and threatening content all operate to damage the recipient’s sense of safety and security and to create a sense of constant surveillance (Woodlock 2015). As Woodlock (2016) further identifies, perpetrators may use coded messages or patterns of delivery that are targeted particularly at their victims but may not be readily understood by others as threatening or damaging. Women victims may be reluctant to reveal this type of abuse, fearing that such revelation may lead to escalation (Dimond, Fiesler and Bruckman 2011) or be seen as trivial. A police officer in our recent study described an incident in which a woman indicated to him that her ex-partner was breaching an intervention order by texting her ‘a few times’: when police obtained the phone records, there were more than 350 texts in a period of two months. Even when text messages are clearly threatening and in breach of intervention orders, research suggests that it may be difficult to attract any police attention or response (Cavezza and McEwan 2014; Dimond, Fiesler and Bruckman 2011). As one victim explained:

I have got like 50 messages from him that are breaches, saying I’ve got mates looking for the boys [her children] and everything, which can’t be classed as breach because he was never served.

(Sarah, left her relationship, with her young sons)

Importantly, digital technology can extend the reach and impact of family violence beyond the home.

I was abused while pregnant and it was a very early stage and I was very sick as well. I was coming to work and I was getting abused at work … via social media and text messages and it still stressed me out.

(Mina, left her relationship, with her one-year-old child )

The converse of this intrusion through technologies is the denial of access to such technologies and the opportunities they enable for communication (see also George and Harris 2014; McKee 2006). This emerged as a critical issue for several of the women who participated in our study, as described by two women:

I was isolated without even being aware that that’s what was happening. But then it really became clear… . He dominated – he had access to my phone, which I wasn’t aware of. Everything. Pretty much was hiding messages I was getting from family and friends, which I only found out after I fled.

(Maria, left her relationship after seven years, with her two daughters)

[I didn’t know he was] being manipulative because I was a working woman and independent. When I came here I lost my income and being independent goes with it. I can’t access – I don’t have a phone. I can’t access [the internet]. If he’s – it depends on his mood. If I said to him can I call my [son in South-East Asia?] and then he said it depends on my mood, [you have to wait], you know.

(Tina, left her relationship after three years)

Some research has emphasised other technological platforms that facilitate surveillance and abuse. As Levy (2014) observes, ‘a huge number of partner “spy” apps exist, with names like Flexispy, Wife Spy, Girlfriend Spy, Spyera, and ePhoneTracker’ (2014, p. 686). Such apps facilitate constant monitoring and surveillance, providing information about women’s movements and activities to perpetrators. Beyond these obviously troubling products, other online interactions and more ‘neutral’ apps such as GPS, Find my iPhone, hidden surveillance cameras and ATM alerts offered by banks can be used as tools to monitor and perpetrate abuse against women. Such abuse is being consistently and increasingly found in contemporary studies of family violence (Burke et al. 2011; Dimond, Fiesler and Bruckman 2011; Mason and Magnet 2011; RCFV 2016; Woodlock 2016). Women’s security can be compromised in many different ways by these forms of technological surveillance. Facebook, for example, allows Google Maps to track locations (Mason and Magnet 2011); and other similar common applications may aggregate data from a range of platforms and include geographic location (Dimond, Fiesler and Bruckman 2011). One of our research participants ruefully described the negative financial outcomes of her partner’s access to their shared computer and all associated information:

The only downfall was [the police] were like, ‘Well, let him take the computer and the PlayStation because then he’ll have something to do and he’ll leave you alone’. I’m like yep, fine. I don’t care. If he’s out of the house, he can take what he wants as long as I have the frigging house. But then he took his name off the mortgage. I can’t afford the mortgage so the house – the bank goes, ‘Well, we’re going to have to repossess’. I go, ‘Well *#*, what do I do?’ So I was essentially going to be left homeless. I couldn’t get a rental because he had destroyed both of our names.

(Matty, left her relationship after five years, with two children)

Another outlined the confusion that arose as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 New forms of gendered surveillance? Intersections of technology and family violence
• 2 Gendered exploitation in the digital border crossing? An analysis of the human trafficking and information technology nexus
• 3 Feminist flight and fight responses to gendered cyberhate
• 4 Internet intermediaries and online gender-based violence
• 5 Anti-rape narratives and masculinity in online space: A case study of two young men’s responses to the Steubenville rape case
• 6 The role of information and communication technologies in facilitating and resisting gendered forms of political violence
• Conclusion
• Index