A new study reveals the pervasive role of technology in domestic and family violence – and the concerning lack of support available to victims navigating digital abuse.
A UNSW study has found that support and resources for Technology-Facilitated Abuse (TFA) are not keeping pace with how common it is.
As part of the study, Dr Rahat Masood and her team crawled 306 government, non-government, and relevant commercial domains and collected 52,605 unique web pages that contained content related to domestic and family violence, online safety, or digital abuse.
Dr Masood, from the UNSW Institute for Cyber Security (IFCyber) and School of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), said the findings showed there was a stark mismatch when it came to support.
Technology-facilitated behaviours are increasingly embedded within intimate partner violence and coercive control. Australian data shows that 51% of adults have experienced at least one form of technology-facilitated abuse, while 54% of women who experienced stalking by an intimate partner reported electronic stalking during the first incident.
Dr Masood's study found content relating to abuse such as harassment and sexual abuse dominates support resources – contributing to about 70% of all abuse-labelled web pages reviewed in the study. Less than 1% of pages address TFA such as covert surveillance, economic abuse or long-term controlling behaviours.
Dr Masood, along with CSE colleagues Dipankar Srirag, Xiaolin Cen and Aditya Joshi, presented the findings at the Australasian Conference on Information Security and Privacy in Perth in July.
"There’s a large body of research out there, but governments and organisations don’t know how to translate that research into legal support and practical resources," Dr Masood said.
"There is a substantial gap between the two. There are things covered in the literature that NGOs, service providers, and government websites should be addressing.
"People and organisations don’t talk about less common types of abuse much, so we need to make victims aware that there are many forms of abuse beyond visible or physical harm.
"Any form of harassment, or any form of control over someone's device or internet use, is technology-facilitated abuse. Awareness needs to be there."
Abuse beyond the physical
Dr Masood said a key problem associated with technology-facilitated abuse was that victims usually don’t know they’re being abused. Common tools of control – location tracking, WhatsApp web monitoring, browser spyware, shared passwords – frequently go unrecognised as abuse.
Dr Kayleen Manwaring, a fellow IFCyber member and Associate Professor at UNSW Law & Justice, says that's where things get complicated.
"Individual privacy and cyber security is not one that the law deals with particularly well," Dr Manwaring says.
She says much of the TFA hides behind legal arrangements. Phone plans, smart home systems and internet accounts are usually in one person's name – often the abuser's – and owning the technology isn't unlawful.
"There isn't necessarily an obvious legal remedy outside reporting it to the police," Manwaring says. "A lot of the technology is in the abuser's name, which means, from a commercial law perspective, they're not doing anything wrong."
For example, under normal legal principles, either holder of a joint account can usually withdraw the full balance at any time, without the other's consent – and the bank has no obligation to intervene (unless the other has already told the bank that all account holders must approve withdrawals, which is often not feasible where financial abuse is occurring).
"They can legally clean out the account from a commercial law perspective," Dr Manwaring says.
"There's usually very little you can do to get it back ... because it's usually either been spent or hidden."
While banks may be subject to the Banking Code of Practice’s protections on vulnerable consumers, this obligation relies on there being obvious signs of financial abuse or family violence, which may not be the case where the conduct is all online.
What support looks like – and what’s missing
The team investigated the state of web-based resources for people affected by technology-facilitated abuse by analysing institutional domains registered in Australia.
Keen to understand what support is visible and accessible to the public online, Dr Masood said they focused on websites because they are often the first resource victims, families, teachers, clinicians, and frontline workers turn to when searching for help or information.
The analysis of the websites revealed four key findings, highlighting substantial gaps between harms documented in literature and the help that is visible to people relying on institutional websites for support:
- Most web content covers just three types of abuse - hurtful comments, harassment and sexual abuse - leaving many other forms of tech-facilitated abuse barely mentioned.
- When it comes to prevention and spotting abuse early, websites mostly point people toward lawyers or medical professionals, rather than offering practical tools or guidance people can use themselves.
- The support advice on offer tends to be generic – general digital safety tips – rather than guidance tailored to specific situations.
- Harms that get less attention, like financial abuse and privacy violations, are harder to find and harder to understand when people do come across them, making it doubly difficult for those affected to get help.
"We wanted to explore what Australia’s capacity is: what the government and NGOs are doing well, and where they can improve," she said.
"Most detections are clinical – accidental detections.
"You go to a clinic, or you seek technology support, and then someone talks to you and you realise: 'Why are you sharing your password? Why is this plugin in your browser? It looks like it’s spying'.
"Those types of accidental discoveries are more common than any structured way of detecting abuse through a tool."
What is technology-facilitated abuse (TFA)?
Technology-facilitated abuse refers to the use of digital tools and platforms – such as smartphones, apps, social media or spyware – to monitor, control, harass or intimidate another person.
Common behaviours include:
- Location tracking without consent
- Monitoring messages or social media accounts
- Installing spyware or browser tracking tools
- Controlling access to devices or accounts
- Harassing or threatening messages online
The data problem
Dr Masood said police data held the answers – but not everyone can access it.
Police records are unstructured, inconsistently recorded, and largely inaccessible to researchers.
"Tech abuse almost never appears as the primary complaint which makes it nearly impossible to quantify the problem accurately or translate it into policy, detection tools, or legal guidelines," she said.
"So the volume of reports specifically about tech-facilitated abuse is quite low in the data."
Dr Manwaring said legal protection arrived only after abuse had already been reported and formal orders – such as an apprehended violence order or a family law order – were in place.
"The law currently offers very little protection unless and until this sort of thing is reported to police, or in some cases, to the eSafety Commissioner," she said.
Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has identified this gap and is now in its third round of grants focused on education and awareness around technology-facilitated abuse.
The office runs dedicated reporting and takedown schemes that give victims a direct pathway to have abusive content removed.
The Commissioner is also pushing responsibility onto technology companies, requiring them to meet baseline safety standards and do more to prevent harm before it occurs.
Dr Masood’s team is now exploring how technology itself can help intervene earlier. One project investigates browser-based tools that detect potentially abusive or coercive language before it is sent online, encouraging users to reflect before causing harm.
The team is also pursuing grant funding to expand the work with experts in AI, cyber security and online safety, with the aim of developing practical tools to help prevent technology-facilitated abuse before it escalates.
Contact details:
Kyle Mackey-Laws
Email: [email protected]
