Dr Leonie Tanczer, who leads UCL’s “Gender and IoT” research team, reflects on the release of the draft Domestic Abuse Bill and points out that in its current form, it misses emphasis on emerging forms of technology-facilitated abuse.
On the 21st of January, the UK Government published its long-awaited Domestic Abuse Bill. The 196-page long document focuses on a wide range of issues from providing a first statutory definition of domestic abuse to the recognition of economic abuse as well as controlling and coercive non-physical behaviour. In recent years, abuse facilitated through information and communication technologies (ICT) has been growing. Efforts to mitigate these forms of abuse (e.g. social media abuse or cyberstalking) are already underway, but we expect new forms of “technology-facilitated abuse” (“tech abuse”) to become more commonplace amongst abusive perpetrators.
We are currently seeing an explosion in the number of Internet-connected devices on the market, from gadgets like Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Home hub, to “smart” home heating, lighting, and security systems as well as wearable devices such as smartwatches. What these products have in common is their networked capability, and many also include features such as remote, video, and voice control as well as GPS location tracking. While these capabilities are intended to make modern life easier, they also create new means to facilitate psychological, physical, sexual, economic, and emotional abuse as well as controlling and manipulating behaviour.
Although so-called “Internet of Things” (IoT) usage is not yet widespread (there were 7.5 billion total connections worldwide in 2017), GSMA expects there to be 25 billion devices globally by 2025. Sadly, we have already started to see examples of these technologies being misused. An investigation last year by the New York Times showed how perpetrators of domestic abuse could use apps on their smartphones to remotely control household appliances like air conditioning or digital locks in order to monitor and frighten their victims. In 2018, we saw a husband convicted of stalking after spying on his estranged wife by hacking into their wall-mounted iPad.
The risk of being a victim of tech abuse falls predominantly on women and especially migrant women. This is a result of men still being primarily in charge of the purchase and maintenance of technical systems as well as women and girls being over-proportionally affected by domestic abuse.
The absence of ‘tech abuse’ in the draft bill
While the four objectives of the draft Bill (promote awareness, protect and support, transform the justice process, improve performance) are to be welcomed, the absence of sufficient reference to the growing rise of tech abuse is a significant omission and missed opportunity.