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Mobile phones, doorbell cameras and social media are used to harass and stalk, to carry out tech-enabled violence against women, according to researchers from University College London (UCL). Hence a three-day Tech Abuse Conference, by UCL; that heard that UCLโs research found that nearly half of Refuge tech abuse referrals involved monitoring or controlling behaviours. Tech abuse commonly co-occurrs with other abuse, whether physical, emotional or financial, the researchers suggested.
Conference organiser, Dr Leonie Tanczer (UCL Computer Science), said:โTechnology-facilitated abuse is no longer a niche or emerging issue โ it is sadly part of the everyday reality of coercive control. We do not need to keep proving that it exists or that it matters. The urgent question is how we respond, and how we build systems, institutions and technologies that prevent harm rather than simply react to it after the fact.
โThis conference is not a talking shop. It brings together researchers, frontline services, policymakers, industry, civil society and survivor-informed expertise to work through the real challenges each sector faces in recognising and responding to tech abuse. Through hands-on workshops and practical discussions, we want to identify what is already working, where current systems are failing, and where there are concrete opportunities for intervention.
โToo often, victims and survivors are left to manage risks created by technologies, institutions and infrastructures they did not design and cannot control. That has to change. Safety, consent, prevention and perpetrator accountability must be built into products, policies and front line responses from the outset. That is why this conference is about moving from awareness to action, from fragmented responses to shared accountability, and from simply naming the problem to building the conditions for real-world change.โ
The London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khanโs Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) recently recommissioned a pan-London Stalking Support Service with ยฃ2.2m to the stalking and women’s safety charity the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, SherlockAI, Risk Crew, Kulpa and SWGfL. An online safety charity, SWGfL, a part of theย UK Safer Internet Centre, noted that on May 19 the platform compliance provisions of the United States’ Take It Down Act (TIDA) came into force which the charity described as a significant milestone in global response towards non-consensual intimate image (NCII) abuse. The charity sees similar momentum in the UK through the Online Safety Act and regulator Ofcomโs emerging expectations around content removal.
The Suzy Lamplugh Trust calls on tech companies to adopt a ‘safety by design’ approach to mitigate potential harm from their platforms and products before they reach the market, through to monitoring and remedying any harmful features or functionalities of products through the lifecycle. London Victimsโ Commissioner, Andrea Simon has called for ‘a whole-system response that can keep pace with rapidly evolving technology’. The UK police meanwhile state that for adults who pose a sexual risk to children – estimated up to 840,000 in the UK – platforms give industrial-scale access to victims.
Speakers
Among the speakers at the conference were Sir Sadiq Khan, Labour’s Special Envoy on Women and Girls Baroness Harriet Harman, and Domestic Abuse Commissioner Dame Nicole Jacbos โ besides workshops from Google and SWGfL, TikTok and Kaspersky. Meanwhile in March, New York was the venue for an annual NCII Global Summit, hosted with Google.
